Culture

‘MasterChef Australia’ Recap: ABC’s, Callum’s Strategy Hat And Laura Getting “Her Turn” To Win

Sorry but, Poh making a whole ass sauce out of octopus > some seafood cooked in butter.

by Michelle Rennex  24 June 2020
masterchef recap immunity

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As we get to the pointy end of the competition, the challenges are getting more and more difficult.

We saw this with the iconic cube challenge on Sunday night, which sadly took our Dumpling King Brendan out, and again on Monday night with the cheeky two-dish Mystery Box.

Finally forcing the contestants to use everything in their Mystery Box instead of just one thing, the judges made the top seven cook both a savoury and sweet dish utilising all their ingredients in just 75 minutes.

After being presented with beef ribeye, milk, wattleseed, prickly pear, parsnip, thyme and caulilini, almost all the cooks ended up whipping up some form of boring ass steak, which really does feel like a bit of a cop out this far in the competition…

Anyway, after Tessa totally blanked and got teary over forgetting to put her parsnip on the plate, Sweat King Callum, Pasta Lover Laura and Chaotic Poh all advanced to last night’s cook, which thwarted Vegan Reece’s plans to take immunity out for the third week in a row with what would probably be another tart, tbh.

Before the top three had even made their way inside, Pasta Lover Laura was already feeling the pressure of being up against “MasterChef royalty” in Poh and Callum. After walking into the kitchen, this pressure mounted as the top three saw 26 cloches labelled from A to Z.

Back with yet another guessing game, Poh, Callum and Laura had to take turns guessing each ingredient without tasting, in order to add that item to their pantry for the day. Once they each guessed seven times, they were be given 60 minutes to make their immunity-worthy dishes with only the items they named correctly and their usual under-bench staples.

Deciding to making the guessing order alphabetical too, Sweat King Callum kicked off the selections strategically with the letter Q. Confident he was going to get quail — which made sense considering it’s been featured in every damn episode so far — Andy instead revealed a gloopy mayo-like substance that totally floored Callum. But lucky for him, Poh forgot all about the game and just blurted out quark, so Callum got to keep it the fancy cream cheese.

Next Laura selected M and got herself some Morton bay bugs, while Poh went for P and got her most-hated cooking item, persimmon. Looping back, Callum tossed his strategy out and picked out S in the hopes of strawberries. Instead, he was naturally gifted with some saw tooth coriander instead.

Following along, Laura nabbed some flaxseed, longan fruit, Jerusalem artichokes, halva, amaranth and watercress after getting all her guesses correct. Similarly, Callum added gochujang to his pantry along with some kangaroo fillet, rabbit, eggplant and nashi pear.

Unfortunately for Poh, she quickly inherited Callum’s unlucky streak and just kept guessing incorrectly. After losing out on barberry and caraway, however, Poh finally got her luck back as her wishes for any form of protein came true with duck. To round out her now-five item pantry, Poh left with the seemingly-impossible-to-combine ingredients of persimmon, duck, tarragon, octopus and yuzu.

With all three chefs actually magically happy with the balance in their panty, they got stuck into cooking their dishes right away.

Despite having two less ingredients than Sweat King Callum and Pasta Lover Laura, Poh was actually in a good headspace and even decided to pack the chaoticness away for the day. In a shock to Andy, Jock, and the rest of Australia, Poh even decided to calmly write a to-do list in preparation for her cook.

Aiming to use all her ingredients, Poh started to whip up her dish of smoked duck with roasted persimmon and a smokey blended hibachi octopus emulsion, which honestly sounded pretty feral to me. So naturally, Andy and Jock absolutely foamed at the mouth over the sound of it.

Meanwhile sticking to a little more of a normal vibe, Sweat King Callum decided to use six of his ingredients to make kangaroo served with a rabbit sauce, gochujang eggplant, herb oil and pickled nashi pears.

Similarly, not having very many crazy flavours in her ABC pantry, Laura chose to keep her dish very, very, veeeeery simple on her quest to win immunity for the first time ever. Did you know that Laura has never won immunity? Just wondering in case you didn’t hear it the 53 times it was mentioned throughout the episode.

Anyway, going with a brown butter poached bugs served with Jerusalem artichoke, shellfish oil and a watercress emulsion, Jock immediately questioned Laura’s decision to not use her longan at all.

Then, despite, literally just saying that she had been feeling down and hadn’t had a good cook recently, Bench Demon Jock decided to rub salt in the wound by telling her she’s “also been at the bottom of the pack a fair few times lately” too. Like damn, Jock talk about kicking a girl while she’s already down.

In the end, sticking to her guns, Laura packed away her longan in a big fuck you to Jock and just continued with her originally planned dish.

With 15 minutes down, Calm Poh pulled her burnt balls charred persimmon from the hibachi and started peeling away its outside layers. Methodically and peacefully moving through her elements — which was still a shock to everyone including herself — Poh decided to get mad inventive and smoke her duck using flour and sugar as she lacked her usual spices.

Working away on her funky lil’ octopus sauce emulsion thing, Poh started cooking down her octopus slush before it became “foamy” enough for her to re-blitz. Yummy. After tasting her creation, Calm Poh was beaming ear-to-ear, but because it cannot be a day in the MasterChef kitchen without at least a little chaotic energy from the queen herself, it all started to go very wrong.

Placing her emulsion into a muslin cloth to sieve, Poh realised that her mixture was really grainy and that the only thing travelling through the cloth was oil because the mixture was way too thick. To fix it, Poh decided to just add some water to the mix and it sorted itself right away. Who would’ve thought that a splash of water was literally all it would take to stop a whole breakdown? Standard Poh things, honestly.

Callum in the meantime, shared his dish idea with conjoined twins Jock and Andy as they visited his bench. Putting back on his not-always-useful Strategy Hat™️, Callum made the decision to tell the judges that he was going to pull back the cook time of his kangaroo and serve rare meat instead of his preferred medium-rare, which looked to excite Jock and Andy.

But after grilling the shit out of the kangaroo one a side for far too long, Callum started to worry that his meat wouldn’t be as rare as he initially hoped. To combat this, he decided to undercook the other side and hope it balanced out in the end, which I’m sure is not how cooking meat works, but sure.

With five minutes to go, Calm Poh actually managed to leave herself ample time to plate her dish. Proving that she had outgrown the title of Last-Minute Poh, our new calm and collected queen carefully placed all her elements on her plate with more than 10 seconds to spare. And that’s what you call growth, baby.

Meanwhile, Laura used her final minutes to poach her bug tails and was ecstatic with her efforts, and Sweat King Callum was just busy plating up his meat-heavy concoction.

Bringing her dish in first to be tasted, the judges absolutely loved Poh’s new calm energy, very ~modern plating~ and just general out-of-the-box creation. With no negative comments, the judges particularly frothed the octopus emulsion and simply couldn’t fathom the things Poh was able to create with only five ingredients.

Up next, Callum presented his meat plate dish, where the judges immediately noticed the uneven cooking on each side of the kangaroo — we can thank the trusty strategy hat’s service for that one, I guess. Anyway, beyond the poorly cooked well-done meat, the judges felt the dish was a “step back” for Callum because he tried to do too much.

On the opposite side of too much, Laura’s basic bug dish was a smash-hit — as we all knew was going to be the case thanks to the hero edit she got all episode. Desperate for an immunity win, the judges felt Laura’s dish was visually stunning and Mel said that it was “cooked by someone who is happy and centred”, which is easily the strangest and most irrelevant food critique we’ve heard yet.

And with that — even though Poh literally created a whole fucking sauce out of blended, foamy hibachi octopus!!!! — Laura nabbed the win for immunity. But as the contestants left, the judges made sure to try and compliment Poh on her (quietly, superior) dish with an extra little pep talk, but Calm Poh really wasn’t having a bar of it as she already knew she plated up perfection. Queen.

On the next episode of MasterChef: Back To Win, the bottom six compete in a two-round cook focused on classic meals and dishes the judges have never seen before.

MasterChef: Back To Win returns on Sunday at 7.30pm on Channel Ten. 

Michelle Rennex is a Senior Writer at Junkee who can’t cook, but enjoys judging people like she can. You can follow her on Twitter at @michellerennex.