MasterChef recap: An apple-themed elimination shakes the contestants to the core

It’s Elimination Day, which means one thing: fun fun fun! The two teams which were humiliatingly defeated by professional chefs in unfamiliar surroundings enter the kitchen, carrying their shame as Christ did his cross, preparing to fight for the right to continue seeing Melissa’s gorgeous frocks.

The challenge is in two rounds. In the first round, the two losing teams compete against each other: green vs turquoise. In round two, the losing team will compete as individuals, while all wearing black aprons, thus ironically robbing them of their individuality. This is the cruel paradox of MasterChef.

The first round is a team relay, where the teams cook one by one, with a new amateur coming in to take over every 20 minutes. It’s a valuable skill for an aspiring professional chef to have despite resembling in no way anything that ever happens in any actual kitchen in real life. Also, they have to feature a key ingredient, which will only be revealed to the first cook in the relay. Plus, there’s an electrical appliance under the bench, which must be used at some point during the cook, just for the hell of it.

Sabina is the turquoise team’s lead cook, and Jess is the green team’s. And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Melissa removing a sheet and revealing some apples. In the pantry Sabina prepares for the cook by eating some apples so as to find out what they taste like. She is going to make an apple-glazed pork chop: or rather, she’s going to start making an apple-glazed pork chop, following which the rest of the team will bugger it up.

Jess is cooking duck. “This is definitely my style of cooking,” says Jess, who apparently usually cooks for 20 minutes before leaving it for someone else to finish.

20 minutes fly by, but Sabina has managed to set up all her teammates’ work stations with precise instructions for each. Jess has managed to mutilate a duck and sweat a lot. Justin runs in to replace Sabina and Dan runs in to replace Jess. Jess gives her instructions to Dan, who looks utterly bewildered. On the other side, Justin seems to understand that Sabina will gut him like a fish if he stuffs it up. “I heard a lot of words, and I’m trying to remember them,” says Justin, who has that brain disease where you forget everything you hear seven seconds after hearing it. He decides that the best way to find a solution is to stand perfectly still for several minutes, and then run to the pantry. Sabina did not tell him to run to the pantry, and is even now fantasising about the bits she is going to sever from Justin’s body. Meanwhile Dan is unhappy with his puree, but decides it’s not his problem.

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Melissa asks Justin what Sabina said to him. He says she said “apples”. “Apple slaw,” Sabina snarls from the viewing room. She cannot believe the dross she has to work with. Justin starts chopping up chilli, causing Sabina to throw a chair through a wall. Suddenly the turquoise team gets a lucky break: Justin’s time is up and he is replaced by Amir. At the same time Tommy replaces Dan. Dan tells Justin to fix his terrible puree. Justin tells Amir they’re making an apple slaw, despite having completely forgotten about the slaw previously. Amir has no idea what Justin is going on about. “If you’ve got an idea of the final dish, you’re a better man than me,” says Andy, and to be honest, he might be right regardless of the dish.

Suddenly Tommy stops, having lost all sense of what he is doing. The apple chips are burnt and Tommy himself isn’t looking too fresh. “Just use your brain,” says Jess, but Tommy can’t hear her and so continues to use some other organ. His apple puree tastes too much like parsnip, which would be OK if there were any parsnip in it, but it’s just a total mystery. The situation is so tense that the watchers on the balcony are trying really hard to look they care.

In the viewing room, Sabina questions Justin on just what the hell he thought he was playing at. After her very specific simple instructions, Justin has passed on to Amir a total mess. The fact that pork is involved is about as far as Amir has been able to get.

Tommy is about to hand over to “Scott”, with no idea what to tell him. He’s still tasting parsnip. The possibility that tasting parsnip is a symptom of stroke must now be considered. Amir thinks he’s got his head around the dish, which is handy given he’s about to leave. He begins to make a dressing, causing Sabina and Justin to cheer long and loud, like people whose sense of reality is so distorted that a dressing can cause euphoria.

The changeover happens. Amir tells Pete that the dish is pork with various apple things. Tommy tells “Scott” “I don’t know what we’re going to do”, for which “Scott” thanks him sincerely. With one cook having a vague idea that he needs to combine pork and apple, and another knowing only that his predecessor had a nervous breakdown, it should be a fun final twenty.

“Scott” puts more parsnip into the puree just as a sort of ironic commentary. By some bizarre miracle, Pete has come up with a dish looking like what Sabina imagined at the start. By an even bigger miracle “Scott” has come up with…a dish.

In the end, just as in nature ducks are often devoured by hungry pigs, the turquoise team’s pork beats the green team’s duck, and so Sabina’s reign of terror is vindicated. Tune in tomorrow, when…

Oh wait, there’s another round, isn’t there. Good god this is going on forever.

The losing team – Jess, Tommy, Dan and “Scott” – must now each cook another dish with apples. But this time, because they did a savoury dish the first time, they must do a sweet one. Tommy immediately panics: possibly because he doesn’t like making sweet dishes, or possibly because panicking has just become his default mode today.

As the losers get cracking, Jess reflects on the cakes her grandmother used to make. We get a photo of the grandma, and a flashback to Jess’s partner and kids at home. This could be very good or very bad for Jess: emotional manipulation usually only happens for the very best and the very worst competitors in a challenge.

“Apple and spice and everything nice!” shouts Melissa, who has never heard the poem. She goes to Tommy’s bench to ask what he’s making. He talks nonsense until she goes away and he can relax. “Strussel, pie or crumble, let’s get ready to rumble!” shouts Jock, doing his famous impression of the most annoying man on earth.

Jess is stressed because she’s not sure she’ll have enough time to bake her cake, and she has accurately discerned that a cake, if not baked, can be quite unsatisfying. She cranks up the temperature on the oven and strives to ensure that apple is prominent in the dish. She makes apple chips and begins smearing her body with apple juice, so there can be no doubt.

Tommy gets an emotional speech about his son and how he’s doing MasterChef for him: so it’s between Jess and Tommy to go home. Meanwhile “Scott”, being a fictional character, has no moving backstory, but he does have Chantilly cream, which for all we know is a good thing.

Jess’s cake needs more time: it’s got a big decision to make. Meanwhile Dan is also there. With seconds left, Jess takes her cake out of the oven and in scenes reminiscent of the climax of The Mighty Ducks, it is pretty much an okay cake.

Time is up. Tommy is in tears, thinking that if he goes home today, his little boy might grow up to not appreciate the importance of perseverance. Or maybe he’ll just be happy to see his dad again, who knows.

Dan’s apple sorbet is fine, obviously, given his lack of screen time. “Scott’s” cheesecake is fine too, as we suspected. Someone with an emotional backstory is going home. And that someone is…

Jess. “I just want cake and ice-cream!” Andy wails, but Jess had to go complicating everything with chips and cubes and all sorts of superfluous falderols. Somewhere, Jess’s grandma shakes her head sadly as she goes home to weep and curse and boycott apples forever. The other amateurs are shattered that Jess has gone and “Scott” hasn’t.

Tune in tomorrow, when some weird concept for the week will be introduced.