Masterchef Recap: Cabbage: The Silent Killer

Free the ducks

It’s hard to believe it’s already the end of Around The World Week. We’ve gone to so many wonderful places this week, including:

Melbourne!

Today is a Pressure Test, which means that yesterday’s most egregious failures will attempt to redeem themselves, while knowing deep down inside that nothing can remove the stain from their souls. It’s Jackie versus Miin versus Lucy versus Vinnie, and they enter the kitchen smiling, incorrectly.

“The black apron carries weight for a reason,” Poh tells them, and that reason is that the black aprons have lead weights sewn into the lining. This will make cooking today all the harder.

We move on to today’s guest chef, who is apparently reinventing modern Asian cuisine. She sounds awful, based on that. Her name is Rosheen Kaul and we are promised that she is very famous honestly. Rosheen enters the kitchen and tells everyone how great she is, before revealing the dish that the cooks will have to make: a wet green lump.

One we prepared earlier.

Everyone gasps in amazement at just how wet and green and lumpy the dish is. Rosheen cuts into it and it is shown that inside the wet green lump is zucchini, cabbage, rice, spinach, tofu, and an egg. Wrap it all in a cabbage leaf and you have something genuinely nasty. The dish is called a Chou Farci, assuming that I asked the right question to Google. The amateurs have three hours to make it, but they get to work from a recipe so it’s actually extremely easy. The worst cook will have to decide between being sent home or being forced to eat an entire Chou Farci.

Jackie must decide whether to do the cook or use her immunity pin to escape elimination. To everyone’s shock, and in defiance of years of Masterchef tradition, Jackie does something genuinely intelligent, and plays her pin. This, combined with the time she ignored the people on the balcony, reinforces the growing impression that Jackie is the best and smartest contestant this show has ever had.

The cooks begin reading the recipe. They are revolted by what they see there. “I would not want to make this in a challenge myself,” chuckles Rosheen darkly, revelling in the pain she causes innocent people.

Lucy gets to making a charred vegetable stock, something you do by taking some vegetables and charring them and making them a stock. Rosheen had emphasised that there was no way they could over-char their vegetables, so Lucy splashes the vegetables with petrol and sets them alight.

Vinnie notes that he is “no stranger to high-pressure situations”, because he is a nurse, and can’t count the number of times when he had to deal with a patient brought into the ER in urgent need of a charred vegetable stock. Vinnie is therefore in a better position than Miin, who immediately admits that he is bad at reading recipes and has already accidentally baked a Cornish game hen through carelessness.

Poh tells Rosheen and Sofia that cooking on Masterchef is a lot like being chased by a lion and climbing a tree. Rosheen and Sofia have no idea what she’s talking about, but nod and agree, mesmerised by Poh’s cleavage.

Rosheen and Sofia move on from the cleavage to Miin’s bench, finding that just twenty minutes into the cook, he is already two hours behind schedule. He weighs out his shiitake mushrooms, with which he must make something called a “duck cell” - a traditional Asian cookery technique wherein a chef builds a cage out of fungi, in which a duck can be imprisoned. Miin can’t make his duck cell though, because he doesn’t have enough shiitake. He has put some of his shiitakes in his stock and now there aren’t enough for a duck cell and he doesn’t know what to do and Rosheen has come over again to be incredibly smug at him and everything is fucking horrible. He decides that he has to just go with his instincts, and runs out of the building screaming.

Perfectly prepared.

Up on the balcony, the spectators are cheering and clapping, and although it seems like they’re doing it for no reason, they’re actually doing it because they are not cooking today. Down on the floor, Vinnie is loving himself sick, as he discovers that his stock is delicious, his mushrooms are beautiful, and Rosheen is gazing at him with an expression of pure lust. But it’s still early days: there are another eight hundred pages of this recipe to go. On the balcony Grace yells at him to “come on”, which is just what he needed.

While Grace is telling Vinnie to come on, Luke and Hannah are telling Lucy to come on, demonstrating the brutal schism that has emerged in the Masterchef population. Lucy does need to come on, too: Rosheen pops over to tell her that she is way behind and she should have already got her zucchinis on, you idiot.

Lucy gets her zucchinis in a pot. Vinnie also has his zucchinis in a pot. Miin puts his zucchinis in a FRYPAN. “Aha, the game is afoot!” cries Petro, who notes that a frypan will caramelise zucchinis faster, and if you’re the kind of pervert who wants caramelised zucchinis, this would be a good thing. Has Miin blown this contest right open? No, probably not.

Luke is stressed out watching Lucy and her zucchinis, because she is going too slowly, pausing to etch detailed carvings of prehistoric hunting scenes into each piece of zucchini before she cooks it. The spectators urge her to get a move on, but Lucy is an artist and knows that genius can’t be rushed. Andy comes by to tell her that in fact, genius can be rushed and she better start rushing it because otherwise she is unbelievably screwed. She’s going so slow that Miin is ahead of her, for god’s sake. Lucy finally decides she can’t keep cooking her zucchinis and moves on to making a thing called a mousseline, which is like mousse but less important. Jean-Christophe comes by to tell her she should already have made her mousseline, as if that could possibly be helpful in any way. All of the judges gather at the front of the room to have a good laugh about how well they’re sabotaging Lucy by forcing her to pause every twenty seconds to listen to them tell her she has to speed up.

“The mousseline is tasting really good,” says Lucy, not noticing that everyone else went home hours ago. “I am so determined I am not going to go home today,” she continues, long after the cook has finished. Luckily, someone on the balcony tells her to keep pushing, so she’s fine. Meanwhile Vinnie has moved on to steaming his cabbage, which is the hardest part of the recipe because of the inner feeling of desolation it causes from knowing that this is an essentially immoral act.

Miin is baffled by how he’s supposed to fit eight cabbage leaves on his tray. Jean-Christophe gives him a handy tip: read the recipe. Miin reads it and realises he is supposed to use two trays. Jesus Christ, this guy is going to end up making a lamb roast the way he reads.

Vinnie tucks a cabbage leaf into a metal ring and fills it with egg and slime and various moist goops. “It’s looking pretty good!” he lies. Refusing to let the fundamental futility of the task get to him, he wraps it in plastic and puts it in the oven, serial killer-style.

Miin has also got his thingummy in the oven, but he has kept it in its metal ring, which might be a smart move, as Vinnie’s might lose its shape without it, but then again who knows really, it’s not like this is real food. Meanwhile Lucy is still assembling, with undercooked cabbage leaves, runny mousseline, and a general lack of self-esteem. “I think it will cook in time,” she says unconvincingly. The judges have a fun conversation about how badly the cooks are suffering and how awful it is for them and how awesome it is to be a judge who doesn’t have to do anything but stand around criticising.

To make a chou farci, it’s not enough to wrap a bunch of garbage in a cabbage leaf: you also have to make a kind of swamp for it to sit in. The traditional way to make this substance is to entice a demon to enter the body of a child and wait for them to vomit, but they don’t have time for that, so they use vegetables instead.

Lucy has taken her chou farci out of the oven and is overjoyed because it looks almost exactly like a cabbage leaf wrapped around some other things. But Vinnie is basting his with butter and Lucy isn’t and Luke is having an embolism. Meanwhile Miin can’t even find the butter and has forgotten how to unwrap plastic. At the very last second, he gets his dish on the plate, though it does have the appearance of having suffered a serious wound.

Miin plates up

Finally it is time for the judges to sit down and talk a lot of wank. Vinnie brings his chou farci in first and presents it, swamp sauce and all. He admits to the judges that this cook was a lot harder than saving lives in emergency, because this is something he really cares about.

The judges are impressed with Vinnie’s dish, which is almost identical to Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors, just as it should be. Cutting it open, Rosheen notices that Vinnie has squashed the layers a little bit, which has made her go right off him. They eat. “I think I’m satisfied,” says Jean-Christophe, but he can’t be sure. Rosheen thinks it’s too salty. Andy thinks it’s too salty. Poh is too emotional to speak. Sofia is asleep. “This is a really tough one,” says Andy, biting into a strip of leather.

Vinnie plates up

Second to serve is Lucy, who the judges note is still smiling despite the objective misery of her situation. “You look proud,” says Andy, failing to see why. Lucy’s chou farci looks pretty good, and has some appetising streaks of fresh blood in the sauce. They eat, loudly and obnoxiously. Jean-Christophe is pleased with the presentation and thinks Lucy has proven beyond doubt that she can cook an egg. However, he thinks it’s a bit wet, which I thought was the point but whatever. Rosheen notes that the cabbage is crunchy, which is bad, and is cabbage, which is worse. Andy is disappointed. Sofia hasn’t woken up.

Lucy plates up

Miin brings in his dish and sadly laments the loss of control in his life. Andy tells him to suck it up. Miin pours his green slop and drizzles his blood, and the judges observe the eruption of gore from the viscera of his dish. However, on the inside it looks better, as so many seriously wounded things do. “It’s actually pretty delicious",” says Rosheen. “I don’t know what he did,” says Poh. “He cooked, I think,” snarks Rosheen, putting Poh right in her place. His egg is cooked perfectly, his mousseline is tasty, and his duck has been impregnably confined. By some miracle, Miin has made something good, which just goes to show that if you want to make a great dish, never read the recipe.

The judges are torn. Lucy’s dish was badly cooked, but Vinnie’s had a level of salt just barely below a lethal dose. It’s a shame they can’t both be sent home, but contractually they can only crush one spirit per day.

Judging time. “Rosheen, how do you think they went?” Andy asks. Rosheen replies that it was incredible that they got everything on the plate, conspicuously not saying that what was on the plate was good in any way.

Poh tells Miin his dish looked like crap but tasted like slightly better crap, so he’s safe. She tells Vinnie that maybe he could try restricting himself to only six or seven kilos of salt next time. She tells Lucy that apart from forgetting to cook it, her dish was great.

In the end, the judges have decided that a crucial part of today’s cook was cooking, and as Lucy didn’t do that, she has to leave. So that’s where determination gets you, kids. Annabel is in torrents of tears because Lucy was her best friend and she knows that legally once someone leaves the kitchen none of the other contestants are allowed to contact them ever again.

And so another story ends, and yet again we are left wondering if our inability to feel anything at these moments speaks to our essential brokenness as human beings.

Tune in next week when, I dunno, someone gets burnt or something maybe.