A ‘piping hot portion of salmonella’ sends another MasterChef contestant packing (2024)

With Lourdes’s nifty way with a barbecue having rendered her immune to elimination, she gets to stand above and gloat at the peons below, fighting desperately to keep the flickering foodie flame alive.

The black-aproned amateurs enter the kitchen to find an array of one-inch cubes, such as you might see in a dystopian sci-fi film depicting a world in which the digestive process has been rendered much more efficient. There are 100 cubes, and the cooks must taste them blindfolded, which is sort of dystopian in itself. The first six to incorrectly identify a cube will go into the second-round elimination cook.

The tension is high as blindfolds are applied, final words are drafted, amateurs are asked whether they’d like a cigarette etc. Lily begins by correctly identifying a cube of banana. Sumeet follows by saying “potato” when it’s actually pumpkin and honestly that’s a bit embarrassing, right? A string of amateurs easily guess their cubes, until Stephen steps up and says “potato” when it’s actually beetroot. How easily these people forget the first rule of MasterChef: never say potato.

The challenge has now lasted more than three days, and the amateurs have still had nothing but cubes to eat.

The next failure is Mimi, who guesses flour when the answer is oat, which seems a bit unfair. I mean, oat? Seriously? OAT? Supposed to be MasterChef, not MasterHorse. We come back to the beginning and things start to get harder. Alex doesn’t know what grain she’s chewing on. She thinks for several hours about it. Finally, after a series of threats, she agrees to say something. She says rice. She’s right. We’ll never get that time back. The great wheel of cubes turns on, until Juan says grapefruit when he should’ve said lemon, oh my god can you imagine? Straight away, American Josh joins him when he misidentifies tasty cheese as
parmesan – bit harsh, as he did at least guess that it was cheese.

The cubes get harder – I mean, more difficult – and the skills on display are impressive. David identifies tuna sashimi by listening to it. The challenge has now lasted more than three days, and the amateurs have still had nothing but cubes to eat. Finally, everyone’s pain is ended when Lily bites eggplant and says cucumber and becomes the sixth entrant to elimination.

And so, with everyone physically and emotionally drained, the elimination cook begins. All six begin on an equal footing, even though four of them are there for failing a difficult challenge while Sumeet and Stephen are there for uncontrollably blurting out potato all over the place.

Elsewhere, Stephen is preparing “Stevo’s take on ravioli”, the surprise twist being that uses beetroot instead of pasta in order to maximise its disgustingness. He explains his plan to Poh and Andy, who seek counselling for the trauma this causes. “Get a back-up plan,” Andy advises Stephen, who enrols in an accounting course at TAFE just in case.

As the cooks sweat, Jean-Christophe and Sofia feed each other cubes and guess what they are. Sofia puckishly grabs a crayfish and puts it in Jean-Christophe’s hands, which in some cultures means they are now married.

Mimi is putting pork belly in porridge, proving that sanity has officially abandoned the MasterChef kitchen. “I love your attitude,” says Poh, which isn’t what she said when she heard about Stevo’s ravioli. Is beetroot ravioli inherently more inadvisable than pork porridge? Both of them sound like nauseating euphemisms, so it feels like favouritism.

Meanwhile, Lily has no idea whether her chicken is cooked or not, but at least if she doesn’t make a good dish she will kill someone with it. Andy tells her she needs to kick it up a notch. She puts cream cheese in her mushroom sauce. It ruins the sauce. Andy chuckles darkly, his sinister plan coming to fruition. He gets to work on Phase Two, visiting Stephen to further undermine his confidence.

With time always up, Sumeet has an idea, terrifyingly enough. She decides to paint her plate, as if she doesn’t have enough to do. But paint was not one of the cubes in the taste test, so she has to paint it with soup. In other words, she puts food on a plate. Amazing creativity. Meanwhile, Lily claims her mushroom sauce is delicious, and her chicken is 74, which seems a bit old, but you work with what you’ve got.

Tasting time arrives. The judges gird their loins. Stephen’s face is grim as he realises what he’s done and is crushed by guilt. Mimi serves first. Her pork porridge is good despite the obvious. “It’s like a hug,” says Andy, who grew up with some extremely moist, meaty hugs. Lily serves her chicken Maryland, which may not be cooked properly. “It’s right on the border,” says Andy, which makes it chicken Delaware, a much less satisfying dish. The chicken is undercooked and the leek is raw, which means big trouble for Lily: if only she’d called it chicken tartare she’d have got away with it.

Sumeet serves beetroot and pumpkin soup with butter-fried prawns and the judges like it for reasons unknown. American Josh serves prawn and lobster bisque. As a nasty surprise, he has a leek in his soup, but the judges overlook this faux pas and award him top marks.

Juan slings his asado Argentino, which is meat and potatoes in strange and exciting shapes. Poh reveals his secret past as a pop star. “I cannot wait to google you,” says Sofia: another euphemism. Anyway, the food is not very good. “I wish there was coriander,” says Andy, the first person in history to ever say this sentence.

Stephen serves his beetroot ravioli, which looks dreadful but in a twist that would be surprising if it didn’t happen every single episode, is wonderful. It is the second dish in this elimination that will now be used in the propaganda campaign to convince the public that beetroot is edible.

There is no surprise in the final judging, as Lily is deemed to have erred in plating up a piping hot portion of salmonella, and thus must go home. “Sometimes playing it safe is playing with fire,” says Sofia, though ironically, if Lily had played with fire her chicken might’ve been cooked. “I’m not sad,” sobs Lily miserably, and then goes home to ponder the ineffable connection between heat and nutrition.

Tune in Wednesday night, when someone will probably make something out of beetroot again. Catch up on Ben Pobjie’s previousMasterChefrecaps here.

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