Masterchef Recap: Hot Beef Injection

Beating the meat

The amateurs enter the kitchen, all dressed in their finest black aprons to represent the secret desires in their hearts, the violent and bloody urges that every day they must fight to suppress. Also it’s an elimination. Except for Annabel, Casper and Petro, who cooked the shit out of their fish yesterday.

It’s still Masters Week, which means another famous and acclaimed guest chef - a Michelin-starred chef, no less. And that guest chef is…

Oh god it’s Curtis Stone again. Jesus Christ does this man never go home? Doesn’t he have a job?

Anyway. Curtis Stone. Here he is again. Sofia asks him why he loves butchering meat so much. He explains that there is nothing more thrilling than hacking a corpse to pieces, and that everything tastes better when you’ve dismembered it yourself. He offers to show everyone just how great butchery can be, with an extremely brutal demonstration. He takes a shoulder of what he claims to be a “steer”, but could be anything really. For all we know it’s a neighbour who wouldn’t prune his trees.

The amateurs watch Curtis going Jack the Ripper on the meat. “I find it very satisfying,” says Grace, with that twinkle in the eye that we know so well from all the other times she’s felt the pull of bloodlust. Curtis shows them how easy it is to cut a piece of meat into smaller pieces of meat, and how after you’ve done this, you have some pieces of meat. He then reveals that from tomorrow, all Coles stores will have pieces of meat in them. Which they always do, but these will be special pieces of meat, in that they will be roughly the same shape as the ones on TV. These are called “flatiron steaks”, because they are flat and they contain iron, I suppose. So it’ll be really exciting to get some from Coles and cook them at home which you probably won’t be able to do because they’ll sell out and none will be left by the time you get there at least that’s what happened last time so I still haven’t tasted Hannah’s cheeseburger pie which really pisses me off anyway back to the cooking.

Everyone has to cook these steaks. Alyona is excited because apparently she often goes out “with the girls” to eat steak. So. There’s an insight into her life. Bella is uncertain because she usually neither cooks steak nor goes out with the girls. She wonders how a steak ice-cream would taste.

Pat cooks steak all the time, which everyone knew the minute they saw his face for the first time. He has raised his daughter on steak from birth, and she’s as meaty as they come. He also has a small turtle which he puts on his bench for good luck. Not a real turtle, an ornamental turtle. Presumably a live turtle is against health regulations.

Vinnie is cooking steak two ways, blatantly copying Casper’s idea from yesterday. Curtis finds this vaguely offensive, but Sofia is impressed by any man who is versatile with his meat. “I really want to showcase how great this cut of meat is,” says Vinnie, but that’s already been done: Curtis showcased how great it is with his big knife. Your job is now to cover it up and make it unrecognisable, like a proper chef.

Hannah seems in a bad mood today. I think she’s sick of the cameras. She tells us about her potatoes but without any kind of enthusiasm. I think she’d rather not discuss her potatoes at all. She’s getting close to that “punching the cameraman” moment we’ve been waiting for since 2009.

Grace is in a great mood though, crying “I LOVE HORSERADISH” like a woman who has truly lost her mind. She’s never cooked flatiron before but is confident because apparently it’s a big lump of meat, and she definitely has experience with those, having dated actively during high school. She crisps up her capers and then…puts her steak in the fridge.

This arouses comment. “Did she just put that in the fridge?” Curtis asks Sofia. “Yes,” says Sofia, not sure what else she can say besides “something wrong with your eyes, megachin?”

Meanwhile Emily is…making a sauce. Pretty exciting. Also a salad. Fantastic. She’s smiling, but it’s through the pain, because she hates having to cook against her friends. It’s a good lesson: never make friends.

Bella is still not confident. Everyone else is so knowledgeable about steak, and she only found out what a cow is this morning. Jean-Christophe and Andy visit to make her feel worse. She’s going to make a Thai chilled noodle soup. The judges stare at her in horror. They don’t want to say it explicitly, but they are pretty sure that this is the worst idea they’ve ever heard in their lives. But then, that’s true of everything Bella cooks, and it’s worked for her so far. They’re dubious about cold soup and cold noodles and cold beef, which they fear might make the dish emotionally unavailable. Bella believes in her vision though, because she’s too young to know how awful the world is. She puts sesame oil in her broth and discovers that it ruins it. She presses on, refusing to let failure get her down.

Pat notes that the worst thing you can do with a steak is overcook it, apparently not having heard about the whole cold noodle soup thing. He places his steak on the Hibachi, which turns it brown. Hard to know what else to say really. It’s steak. He is cooking it. What more do you want?

Jean-Christophe and Andy, having destroyed Bella psychologically, move on to Alyona. Alyona tells them about her salsa verde and they ask her if she’s sure that she wants, on this day of all days, to be an idiot. Alyona thinks maybe she needs something more than just steak and salsa. She runs to the pantry, but the friendly goblin who tells her what to do is not in his usual place. She is lost.

Time ticks away. Aaron has an egg in a bowl. Luke’s tacos are ready to be rolled out. “There’s nothing worse than a big thick tortilla,” he says, because he’s just a kid and nobody ever told him about the Khmer Rouge. Alyona has her salsa, her cauliflower puree, and severe anxiety.

The judges convene to trash-talk Bella and Alyona. Poh thinks Bella combining Thai and Japanese flavours is racist. Curtis is excited about Vinnie in general. Poh thinks some people are overthinking their dish and some are underthinking their dish and nobody is just thinking their dish. Sofia and Curtis agree to address the issue by trying to break Alyona even more. Alyona tells them she’s cooking potatoes. They ask her if she’s cooking potatoes. She says she’s not cooking potatoes. When she said potatoes she meant mushrooms. Sofia finds this very disturbing. “You seem flustered,” she says, gleefully. Alyona admits that she’s flustered and that in all likelihood that’s because every thirty seconds more judges come round to be snooty about her steak.

In sharp contrast to Alyona, Pat is extremely happy with his steak. He cuts into it and declares that it is “like butter” - creamy and yellow, like good beef should be.

Grace is getting her pan hot, ready for the steak which she removes from the fridge. “Did she just get that meat out of the fridge?” Petro asks, having apparently caught Curtis’s eye disease. Annabel is scandalised, saying that everyone knows you don’t put cold meat in the pan. “That’s cooking 101!” she says. Well, maybe Grace doesn’t live by your “rules”, Annabel. Maybe Grace is about INNOVATING, about moving the artform FORWARD rather than being stuck in the PAST. Ever think about that, Annabel? Have you?

Three minutes to go, and there is barely time for the people on the balcony to shout useless incomprehensible noises at everyone. Everyone’s steak looks brown, so that’s good. “I’m feeling quite confident,” says Emily, but adds “there’s a weird feel to the steak”. She cuts the steak open and discovers that it is raw. She tries another piece. It is fine. So that was an anticlimax.

There’s an ad where Andy makes his mother feel old and useless by showing her his magic fridge. It is a very moving piece of social realist cinema.

The cook hasn’t, despite all appearances to the contrary, been going for about a week, when it all ends. Everyone has to stop fiddling with their meat and hug the people they’ve really grown to resent over the weeks.

The first dish they want to taste belongs to Pat. He’s been having the time of his life and presents a steak on cheesy polenta. “You know your way around a steak,” says Sofia with feeling. “I was a bit worried about the polenta,” says Poh, but all her worried were unfounded: Pat killed the polenta thoroughly before serving.

Next dish is Emily’s. It’s a steak with crying tiger sauce which is a thing. It seems that Emily, too, knows her way around a steak. She possibly does not know her way around a salad, though, as hers is disappointing, like all salads.

Next is Alyona, who is by now thoroughly broken. Her dish is steak with mushrooms, cauliflower puree and green sauce. It looks like it has been dug up from under a tree. The judges eat it and are well pleased with their work destroying Alyona’s confidence. The steak is overcooked but the sauce and mushrooms are nice. “When you start to pull apart the elements, that’s when there’s a problem,” says Andy, raising the question: why are you pulling apart the elements then? Alyona is in big trouble but at least she didn’t put her steak in the fridge.

Next up is Vinnie, who is 100% sure that he’s a frigging genius. He’s right. His two dishes are great, everyone loves them, hooray and so forth.

Next is Aaron and some steak which is fine. Next is Hannah who seems to have cheered up. She has steak which is OK. Next is Luke and some steak which is disappointing.

Here comes Grace. She’s made steak with anchovies and cheese and that kind of thing. Her steak is inconsistently cooked, almost as if she put it in the fridge before she cooked it or something. Poh was looking forward to Grace’s dish but feels hideously betrayed by her overloading of seasonings. It’s all been dreadfully depressing.

Speaking of depressing, Bella brings forth her dish, which is the kind of yucky looking cold beef noodle soup. The soup is extremely green, which everyone admires on a visual level. Once placed inside a human mouth, however, it becomes a terrifying nightmare. The sesame is all wrong and Poh is angry that she’s mixed up different parts of Asia. All the judges agree that Bella is better off sticking to sorbet.

Time to ruin a life, but whose? Bella and Alyona have both proven themselves utterly inept, but who is most deserving of public humiliation today? It turns out it’s Bella, because gross green broth is harder to forgive than general chaos. Bella therefore gets the fun of being eliminated from Masterchef twice, which has to build character. She says that her dream of opening a patisserie feels much closer now, but good luck making a success of a patisserie without being able to pull off a cold beef soup.

Tune in tomorrow when the guest chef will be some guy.