MasterChef recap: Does a traffic light of dishes let a team drive past elimination?

Can it really be the last day of Beat The Brigade Week? It seems like only yesterday that we were saying, “what the hell is Beat the Brigade Week?”. But it wasn’t yesterday, it was the day before the day before yesterday, and as they say, three days is a long time in MasterChef, particularly when you’re having to compete against people who cook for a living and never cry about food.

Given two out of three amateur teams have so far beaten the brigade, it would be humiliating to lose today and be spoken of in the same breath as (gasp) Jess and (ugh) Tommy. That’s what the team of Justin, Pete, Amir and Sabina are trying to avoid when they stroll along the beachfront to Stokehouse, St Kilda’s leading stoke-themed restaurant. Run by head chef Jason Staudt, who is well known to everyone who knows him, they are famous for their loathing for reality TV contestants and their desire to crush them. Probably.

Since this is the fourth challenge of the week, they’ve run out of meaningful ways to categorise the different courses, so today the teams are “heroing” colours.

In the entree they must hero red, leading to a vicious fight between Justin and Jock over whether his dish is red or orange. “Get me a carrot!” Jock barks ferociously, eyes flashing with rage and a total lack of self-awareness regarding how ridiculous he sounds. Justin backs down and desperately tries to make his sauce more red, because today of all days it is vital to hit the incredibly stupid brief.

Jock heads over to the Stokehouse side of the kitchen, where he points out to Jason that beetroot is purple and not red. Everyone on both teams is starting to get heartily sick of Jock, and of the whole idea that the most important thing about a dish could ever be what colour it is.

The main course has to be yellow, which is why Pete is in charge of it, as he is colouring it with his hair. Sabina is the team captain but is unable to help Pete because she is busy with the prawns. She needs Amir, but Amir is hiding in his special place. She gets Melissa to drag him out so he can deal with the prawns and she can help Pete with his fish and Justin can keep on pouring human blood into his sauce in the hope it’ll stop being orange.

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Service has come up quickly, and the judges sit at their table hoping their meal will be the right colour and not much caring what it tastes like. Stokehouse’s entree is served, and Jock grudgingly admits that it is, technically, red. Andy thinks it could be redder. Melissa liked how it tasted, but that is completely irrelevant. Jock thinks it’s nice but they tried too hard to make it red, thus revealing his treachery. 

The amateurs’ entree is served. It is very very red, so Jock can stuff it. Not only does it look red, but it tastes red, which is both impressive and weird. All the judges love it, and Stokehouse has clearly lost the red round. “It’s a multi-dimensional celebration of red,” says Melissa, with a straight face.

Sabina claims that Pete is looking stressed, though how she can tell is a mystery. There is a dispute over how to poach the fish: to make sure it is as yellow as possible they decide to do it in urine. “I am in charge somehow of cooking all the fish,” says Justin with an air of shock; he still doesn’t quite understand why he’s on this show.

Stokehouse serves its yellow main. It definitely has yellow bits on it. Andy is impressed. “Looking like this, you know it’s come out of a professional kitchen,” he says, although admittedly this might be confirmation bias, as, you know, he already knew it did. Everyone loves the professional fish with yellow stuff. Melissa notes that Stokehouse is all about “letting the fish shine”, which is ironic because the whole idea of today’s task is to make it much harder for anything to shine because it has to be a certain colour.

The amateurs’ main is served, and although it is red emperor, it is yellow – what sorcery is this? “You can see where this dish is heading,” Melissa says, presumably meaning a bucket, because it’s a terrible dish. Jock bitches that it’s not delicious because they tried too hard to make it yellow. The sheer gall of the man. Yelling at people for not making their dishes the right colour, then whining that they tried too hard to make their dishes the right colour. I mean, honestly.

As the amateurs make their green dessert, Jock visits them to let them know their plan for dessert is stupid. Their tea is going to melt their yoghurt, affirming the old aphorism, “don’t mix tea with yoghurt you weirdo”. Sabina hits on the solution: cucumbers! Is there anything they can’t do?

Jason observes that the amateurs look stressed, but it’s easy for him – nobody is threatening to make him go home to his family if he stuffs up today.

The judges receive Stokehouse’s green dessert, a pistachio white chocolate mousse. “It’s green!” Jock gibbers, and indeed it is: if it were any greener it would be nauseating. Andy has a problem with the lime insert, and he’s far from the first man to ever have that complaint. Apart from the lime insert, though, everything seems in order.

The amateurs’ green dessert arrives, being a cucumber sorbet with yoghurt and tea and far too many cucumbers. It is, if anything, even greener than the professionals’ one: it’s so green that Sky News claims it will destroy the economy.

Unfortunately, however, Jock’s prediction that the tea would melt the yoghurt has come true, and though the dish tastes great, as we know, the judges couldn’t care less about such things.

And so, though the amateurs won the entree – earning them a fairly dirty look from Jason – their yellow fish was garbage and their dessert had tea in it for God’s sake. Thus Sabina’s turquoise army fall in battle, and they will face elimination. Meanwhile, Stokehouse retains its reputation as a restaurant staffed by cooks slightly better than amateurs, which should have the punters flooding in. Jock compliments Sabina for her decisive leadership even though clearly many of the things she was decisive about were bad. Still, it’s not easy to be both cute and bossy, but Sabina pulled it off, and it’s not like she had much to work with. I mean … Pete.

Tune in next week, when one more star will be extinguished.