‘MasterChef Australia’ Recap: Are You Seriously Telling Me Cabbage Beats Steak?
It’s Grand Finale Week on MasterChef Australia, which means from here on out we’ll be crushing food dreams with reckless abandon.
In last night’s episode, Nicole, Tessa, Simon and Prince Harry go head to head in a series of 60-minute one-on-one culinary duels.
The winners of the first two duels will join Larissa on the gantry, while the losers will cook against each other to stay in the competition.
There are three pantries for the three rounds: An Asian pantry, a sweet pantry and a farmhouse pantry. Having won second and third place in the Press Club challenge, Tessa and Prince Harry’s advantage is that they get to choose which pantries they and their opponent will have to work with in the first round.
Tessa predictably chooses the Asian pantry for her match up with Nicole, as Asian flavours are her jam, while Prince Harry and smokehouse Simon will compete using the farmhouse pantry.
Tessa launches into the cook with a clear vision, immediately grabbing a blue swimmer crab for her second chilli crab of the competition.
Last time she cooked this dish it turned Gary’s scalp into a tiny fountain, so Tessa decides to exercise a bit more restraint regarding the chilli this time. To further differentiate it from her previous dish, she’s also adding sticky coconut rice, and lotus chips for both crunch and #aesthetic.
Tessa is entirely in her element. “I’m gonna out-Asian Nicole for sure.”
Nicole is much more confused. Unsure what to do at first, she eventually grabs a salmon to make a curry. However, at 45 minutes to go, Nicole is having difficulty filleting her fish. I’m sure MasterChef doesn’t provide its contestants with blunt blades, but it looks as though she’s trying to cut the salmon with a letter opener.
The resultant fillet is severely messed up. It looks as though it’s been rubbed up on a cheese grater, or dragged behind a bus. There’s no way Nicole can serve this fish, and certainly not at this point in the competition, so she starts again, eating up precious time.
As such, Nicole is still filleting at the midway point of the cook, while her curry sauce still isn’t done. She, therefore, decides to give up on sous viding her salmon, opting for a quicker pan fry. It may not be what she envisioned, but at least it will be cooked. Probably.
Raiding the farmhouse pantry, Prince Harry has grabbed the largest rib-eye steak in the known world. Having learnt a valuable lesson about not putting everything in the pantry on his plate, he’s aiming to keep it simple, serving his steak with just a parsnip puree and salsa verde.
It seems fairly straightforward. However, because MasterChef wouldn’t be MasterChef without a little unnecessary risk, HRH decides to literally play with fire by cooking his steak on a hibachi grill.
Gary warns Prince Harry that a hibachi grill can be difficult to control. Further, there’s a real possibility that his continent of meat may not cook in time. However, the last time HRH cooked steak on a hibachi grill he won an Immunity Pin, so he powers on in spite of professional advice.
Prince Harry’s opponent Simon selects a more modest cut of pork for his dish, despite having messed up his pork in the last episode. He’s planning on serving it with cabbage and a Jerusalem artichoke cream, which pleases Gary.
“There couldn’t be anything more on-trend right now than cabbage,” says Gary. Apparently, my television is a portal into a parallel universe.
Despite the pork, vegetables’ biggest fan Simon considers cabbage the hero of his dish. In fact, he eventually decides the cabbage is such a hero that he doesn’t actually need pork at all. He’s just going to serve up a wedge of fried cabbage as a whole complete meal that he expects people to eat. I emphatically don’t want it.
While the judges enjoy the acidity of the curry sauce on Nicole’s crispy salmon with noodles, her salmon is overcooked. She thus falls to Tessa’s blue swimmer crab and chilli sambal with coconut rice, and is sent teary-eyed into round two.
Prince Harry’s Farmhouse Steak isn’t underdone as Gary feared – in fact, it’s closer to medium than the medium-rare he was aiming for. Though generous and visually appealing, it unfortunately loses to Simon’s fried cabbage with Jerusalem artichoke and leek cream.
“On a Monday, people want to eat vegetarian dishes. If you got that on Monday, you’d feel like it’s Friday night,” says George, which is certainly a sequence of words.
I just want to take a moment here to reiterate that an albeit unevenly cooked steak lost to a wedge of cabbage. Just so we’re all clear. I don’t know how Simon keeps getting away with this — he didn’t even have a sauce this time.
With Simon and Tessa going into the MasterChef semi-final, Nicole and Prince Harry go into round two of the elimination. This time they have to cook with the leftover dessert pantry.
Nicole launches into a passionfruit sorbet and chocolate parfait, juicing as many passionfruit as there are stars in the sky. Doing two frozen elements in 60 minutes seems like a poor life choice to me. Nevertheless, Nicole believes her lack of confidence was what went wrong in her first cook, so she decides to have confidence in her questionable decisions now.
Unfortunately, with 15 minutes to go, her parfait is nowhere near set, and she’s beginning to get flustered. “Do you think I can just pipe the parfait?” Nicole asks the gantry, searching for salvation in every direction. She still likes the flavour of her runny parfait, so she decides to serve it as a mousse. She also adds some figs, but the situation looks pretty dire.
Meanwhile, Prince Harry is making Earl Grey poached pears, despite knowing full well that Gary does not like poached pears. Still, it’s better than trying two frozen elements in 60 minutes. He still opts for at least one though, working quickly to get an orange and cardamom ice cream churning.
While waiting anxiously for his pears to soften, Prince Harry decides to add an orange and pistachio biscuit, as well as make a pistachio, raisin and date stuffing for the pears. Then, when his pears are still hard at 15 minutes to go, he makes a pistachio praline.
It feels a lot like anxiety cooking, with HRH adding element after element in a futile bid for control as his pears slowly poach. Fortunately, Prince Harry’s ice cream finally sets with only a few minutes to go, and he somehow manages to get his pears stuffed as well.
Prince Harry’s Earl Grey poached pears with cardamom and orange ice cream looks beautiful with all his anxiety elements added, and it reminds the judges of Christmas. Even if it didn’t have the ice cream, the pear by itself would still be delicious, and Gary concedes that it’s a good dish.
Sadly, Nicole is disappointed with her Figs, Feuilletine, Tuile with passionfruit sorbet and chocolate mousse. “I love the flavours on this plate,” she says. “But this isn’t the dish that I wanted to present.”
The judges like Nicole’s flavours too, but the parfait-turned-cremeux and the late addition of figs are low notes. It isn’t a bad dish, but it doesn’t need to be at this point in the competition. “It’s an incredible effort,” says George, which is what people say when they’re trying to be diplomatic about failure.
Nicole thus stumbles just metres from the finish line, leaving the competition in fifth place and making it easier to differentiate the remaining contestants from a distance.
Amanda Yeo is a Sydney-based writer, lawyer and MasterChef enthusiast who still thinks Reynold should have gotten an immunity pin for his 30/30 dessert in season seven. Follow her on Twitter: @amandamyeo.