Tag: Diana

MasterChef finale 2017

Well, here we are again. Seems like only last week we watched in horror as Intense Matt’s egg thingy unglued itself before our eyes, leaving an also deserving Glowing Elena to take out the MasterChef title.
Who would you like to win and who do you think will actually win?

MasterChef finale starts on Ten at 7.30pm and is supposed to finish at 10pm. So if you start watching around 7.50pm you may avoid the faff and flashbacks.
Oh, and vote in the new poll for tonight’s winner.

We start with a flashback to the first day of the Top 24, and of course we get zoom ins on Eloise and Tamara.
We’re reminded the winner gets a monthly column in delicious. mag and $250,000 towards their “food dream”. I’m not even sure what the food dreams of Ben and Diana are, but no doubt we’ll find out tonight.
Ben and Diana (or Di-zey to her fellow contestants) arrive in their crisp chef whites and Ben has a sharp new do, while Dizer’s pontytail is extra swishy. At least George is not wearing a hideous jacket tonight. Matt, however, is dressed for a funeral in one of his long coats in black, with a double breasted black waistcoat and a silver cravat for bling.
There are heartfelt speeches about achieving your dreams, yadda yadda …
Come on – can we just get to the challenge, please! Or at least an ad break; I want to heat up my leftover rhubarb crumble to give me sustenance for this ordeal.

FIRST CHALLENGE
Every mystery box they’ve ever been set is lined up in front of them. They get their pick. Cool idea and it reminds me of how much I’ve forgotten – even the ones made of chocolate. Diana is actually considering Peter Gilmore’s box, with the abalone, which freaked out a lot of contestants.


Ben goes back to the begging and chooses Glowing Elena’s mystery box, which was the first of the season. And Diana – because she is not scared of abalone – picks Gilmore’s box, partially because she gets to use the garden as well (Ben does not). They can’t use the pantry.


Last time Diana cooked from this mystery box I noted in the recap: “Diana’s braised abalone is next and even Gary has to praise her broth.” It bodes well.
Diana is making a green juice from Chinese broccoli and nasturtium leaves – this could be the hot new thing at Boost tomorrow. The judges love it when people do new stuff, a la Ben and his tulip bulbs.
Ben is making lemon myrtle ice cream (bingo!!!) with candied cucumbers and 50 other elements.
Uh oh – he slices his finger deeply and you can tell he’s gutted. It’s so deep he’s actually dripping blood on the floor.

In a nice change, we get a voice over from Benita – perhaps because she is wearing an eye-catching leopard print kaftan.
Ben carries on cooking like the machine he is but the blood starts dripping through the bandage and all over his apron. Poor bugger. He is having trouble getting his shortbread crumb cooked because of the delays – isn’t that what almost cost him a spot the other day? He has to quenelle ice cream without being able to grip the container properly, in case blood starts pouring over his ice cream.

THE JUDGES TASTE
Diana’s dish has that modern cheffy plating and the judges are impressed by its looks, especially when she pours the green juice around the abalone.


Gaz says it’s “absolutely delicious” and the green juice showed confidence. Man, Gaz was such a latecomer to the Dizey train but now he’s all aboard and full steam ahead. They all adore it.


After a bit of ribbing about his slightly flawed quenelle, Matt wants more goat’s cheese mousse but Gary thinks the balance was fine. They like the lemon myrtle flavour and the cucumber and George even polished off his plate.
THE SCORES
Ben: Gary 9, George 9, Matt 8. 26/30
Diana: (She will get stronger scores) And it’s three 10s, amid much whooping from the gantry. 30/30.

ROUND 2
Matt says there are no rules: they can cook whatever they like in 75 minutes, using the pantry and the garden. They must make three plates of food.

Ben is sticking with the pumpkin theme, doing butternut three ways with a Dutch spiced biscuit and coffee and cardamom ice cream.
Dizey is coating prawns in oatmeal – interesting! – with a salad. It’s a dish drawing on her Malaysian heritage.
Uh oh – Ben has tipped coffee granules into his ice cream churner. Karlie is worriedly whispering up on the pantry and I agree with her concern – why didn’t he dissolve them in hot water first? Could make for a weird sandy texture.
Gary pops over to Dizey’s bench to loom over her shoulder as she takes her prawns out of the fryer. Just what she needs. She decides her prawns aren’t crunchy enough – although Gary just gives her one of George’s dead-eyed stares – so she adds Panko breadcrumbs to the oatmeal mix and is happy with the texture.

THE JUDGES TASTE


They love it but want even more sauce. Gaz says it could be a signature dish for her.
Diana is killing it!


George likes the plating (the ice cream has a lovely gloss to it) and they love the balance of flavours. Again, George says he should open an ice cream shop. He lives in Queensland so it could indeed be a goer. And Karlie and I were wrong about the coffee – it worked well.

THE SCORES
Diana: Gary 9, George 9, Matt 9. Running total: 57/60
Ben: Gary 9, Matt is next with 9 so George must give it a 10 – yep. Running total: 54/60.

THE FAMILIES ARRIVE FOR THE FINAL CHALLENGE
And here come the tears. Awww – Ben’s kids sprint to him. Diana is bawling at the sight of the lady I presume is her mum, who she hoped would fly in from Malaysia. On the balconey Pete the crane driver is practically howling. I love it.


Diana hasn’t seen her mum for a year. Ben’s son, Phoenix is adorable and his Oma (Nanna) has also come along. He must have been very young when his daughter was born, as she looks to be in her early teens. I thought he had three kids? Am I miscounting?
Kirsten Tibballs from Savour School – the one who set the mystery box challenge that was a chocolate box – is back with the final challenge. (By the way, that mystery box challenge was won by Weepy Pete when he made the coconut-looking dome.)
The judges reveal the dish they have to recreate and it looks like a still life. At first I worry they have to recreate everything from the pine cones to the display platter, but it’s just the fruit: a mandarin, Granny Smith and a pear.


They are all differently flavoured, with many layers inside. The stalks of the pear and apple are 100 per cent couveture chocolate.
Kirsten tells them the pear is the easiest one. For the apple they have to make their own mould out of sugar starch and won’t know if it’s worked until the end of the process.


I really hope this is not going to be one of those impossible challenges where we see them freaking out for six hours – yes, six hours!! – and serving up misshapen fruit.
I would say Ben has the edge because he’s more of a dessert man but Diana is better at keeping her composure.
It must be impossible to read a recipe properly when everyone is screaming up on the gantry. She obviously gets her focus from her mum. Up on the gantry a bloke (Dizey’s partner, I think?) tries to engage Mum in some producer prompted banter but she shuts her down with a “I’m concentrating”. Good one, Mum.
Ben is freaking out a bit and his Calvados catches fire, which we know is wrong because Diana mentioned it earlier. The producers send Kirsten over straight away to tip him off, as they don’t want to spend six hours filming someone when the audience knows all along their dish is a failure.
Diana mentions how important it is to dissolve the sugar and we see Ben scraping undissolved sugar into his bowl. Kirsten is there again to ask: “Why are you doing that?” Oh dear – chill, Ben! Although, showing you so flustered at the start means you will probably triumph in the end. A pep talk from George and an “I love you” from his son puts Ben back on track.
Diana juices her mandarins by hand; Ben uses the juicer. The edit doesn’t tell us who is right.
Oops – Diana’s liquid centre thingy has failed because she still had undissolved sugar crystals in the pan. A pity Kirsten wasn’t there to alert Diana to the problem as she did with Ben, albeit for a more serious issue.
Diana decides to remake it.
Ben’s liquid centre has also failed – that’s the one he remade twice. Urgh – I hate it when a dish is so hard even talented cooks can’t get them right.
Ben has run out of ingredients so ditches the element and poor Diana’s second attempt has also failed.
MasterChef needs to go back to the finale being people cooking food I’d want to eat in a restaurant, not some kind of Dessert Ninja Warrior designed to break people. Makes me miss Great British Bake Off even more. I really don’t want to watch a talented cook like Diana crying quietly in the corner over sugar gel.
Finally they both get their fruit on the platter but Diana’s pear stem breaks at the last minute.
Time for hugs all round. And tears. Pleaase, can we rehydrate poor Ben and Diana and get them a coffee and a snack. Ben’s comforting of Diana as she crouches weeping behind the oven ends in somewhat hysterical laughter from both of them.


And we still have 20 minutes to go here in SA! Although 10 minutes of that will be ads.

THE JUDGES TASTE
Diana is first. Her mandarin looks pretty good but the apple is a bit squished and the pear overripe looking. Her decision to remake the sugar thingy cost her time to get the perfect presentation, but Matt sticks up for her ballsy move to keep trying.
They have trouble cutting the mandarin due to the thickness of the choc but the other two look pretty impressive inside.
Kirsten says “she’s got the flavours perfect”. Gary misses the liquid centre thingy and the mandarin wasn’t quite citrussy enough. (Is that because she didn’t use the juicer? Hope they tell us.)

Ben’s fruit is more polished looking – not as good as Kirsten’s, but good. George praises him for comforting Diana, when really you’d have to be a heartless bastard not to. The inside of his mandarin looks better than Diana’s and they love the taste. It and his chocolate stems are “outstanding”. Kirsten says his double-dipped pear (caused when the pear slipped out of is grasp into the choc coating) has a too thick coating, which makes it too sweet.

THE SCORES
Ben: Matt 9, Kirsten 9, Gary 8, George 9. Running total: 89
Diana: Gary 8, George 8, Kirsten 8, Matt 9 (and this must be the score where they film the two endings, because that was the deciding vote, giving her 90 points). Matt really should have given her an eight and made them do a tie-breaker challenge – one of those 10-minute cooks. We’ve never seen that in a final. That score was unfair to Ben.

DIANA WINS! Yay! Although they both did a good job, she has been consistent throughout the comp and so organised. She would be an asset in any professional kitchen.
Ben gets $40,000. Karlie gets $10,000. The same prize money as last year.



Facebooktwitterredditmail

MasterChef – Semi final – Sun, July 23

The stakes are high as the three remaining contestants fight it out for the two places in the finale and the chance of winning the coveted prize.
Who will be eliminated tonight? Vote in the new poll.
The finale is tomorrow night at 7.30pm, on Ten.

We start with Ben pretending to drink coffee while wistfully gazing out over Melbourne from the hotel balcony. He plans to use his Dutch heritage in his cooking for the service challenge and we see his Oma (Nan) briefly.
No Nan for Diana and Karlie.
They arrive at the MC kitchen and the eliminated contestants are up on the gantry to be the cheer squad. Ben’s hair is glued into place and Matt is wearing a teal suit with a white and silver cravat.
George is wearing a dreadful checked travel rug as a woollen blazer.

Ben’s dessert has a Dutch theme and is called pumpkin and spices and – fun fact – people in the Netherlands don’t eat pumpkin, they just feed it to livestock.

Karlie is making crayfish with a ginger broth, because as he know she loves Asian flavours.

Diana’s main has nine elements and her dessert seven. She is doing wagyu two ways – good move given her wagyu dish has highly praised at the Heston restaurant service challenge, even after she had trouble with cutting the meat to the correct size. There’s a lot of stuff on her dishes but Diana always keeps a cool head.

And the first ice cream of the night goes to … Ben! Of course! Vanilla and bay leaf. He manages to slosh half the anglaise out of the mixer and gets a calming back pat from Shannon Bennett – awww.
The edit shows Ben falling behind and looking stressed out – so he must triumph in the end. After an hour of prep he has not started on his main dish. Shannon calls the dish “brave” but Ben doesn’t bite and simply says “thank you”.
Karlie is boiling up some massive crayfish and her dessert is orange and sesame something ice cream.

Diana is making lemon verbena sorbet and rice pudding and the gantry freaks out when her pot starts boiling over.
Who knew you could cook with tulip bulbs? Ben is topping his with onion skins that the waiters will set on fire at the table. The judges will be impressed with this.


Diana is making a whey caramel that she learnt in the challenge set by former contestant Kylie – that dessert that looked like a pile of dried-out leaves. The judges like it when contestants show techniques they have learnt on their “journey”.
Karlie is having prawn oil drama so she’s going to ditch it. She is getting very flustered.

Meanwhile, for more info about the Dutch and their tulip bulb-eating habits go here.
I love that Ben and Karlie are freaking and Diana is just methodically working away. Shannon comes over to turn the screws on Ben. He needs to get his beef in the oven now or it won’t have time to rest – no-one wants blood on their plate.
He turns to a pic of his kids to give him strength. Usually this sort of thing irks me but it’s not like it’s the start of competition and they are using it gratuitously.
How annoying must it be to have Shannon yelling “Stop! Stop!” every few minutes to announce how little time they have left. I want Comforting-Pats-On-Back-Shannon back!
Diana is frying up some massive Wagyu scotch fillets – imagine the cost! (This place sells it for 100 a kilo, although commercial prices would be lower. Check out the butchery here.
Diana is calling for waiters to take her plates while Karlie is still cooking. Diana’s dish looks delicious – love the herb dust.
THE JUDGES TASTE


Gary does the “lifting eyes to the heavens” look when he tastes the meat. Matt praises the sauce and says it’s a MasterChef Top Ten dish – big call! Well done, Diana.

Ben has had to do pickled beetroot as he ran out of time to roast, and he’s worried.

]
The judges love the theatre of the flaming onion skin and are overjoyed to taste something they’ve never before tried: tulip bulbs.
George says the bulbs are delicious. I wish they would actually tell us what they taste like. They praise the dish but Gary points out it’s not as “multi-sensory” as Diana’s main. Remember the first half of the comp, when it felt as though Gary never had a kind word to say about her – well, none that made the edit anyway.

Karlie is STILL cooking and tearfully wanders almost out of sight, to be hugged by Diana. When her dishes do go out they look really interesting.


The judges say it was worth the wait.
The girls have it over Ben at this stage. We get the obligatory “it’s going to come down to dessert”.

DESSERT TIME
Diana is using someone interesting ingredients in her lemon verbena dessert, including finger limes and buckwheat. She’s put a lot of thought into the textures.


The judges think it’s really pretty, uses new combinations of flavours and is delicious.
Diana is definitely safe. She is a machine! And, yes, teary Diana, I hope your Mum comes over for the final, too!

Poor Ben is having drama with his pumpkin galettes being too mushy to lift outof the pan. Oh, Ben, this is not looking good! Quick – look at the picture of your kids again!
Karlie’s mandarin and black sesame dessert looks really interesting.


The judges love the look of it and the sponge is light BUT the mandarin sauce is bitter and Gary thinks it detracts from the tasty black sesame ice cream. George quickly jumps in with some superlatives to throw us off the scent.

Ben is at it again with setting things on fire, lighting up some cinnamon quills to be placed in a bowl in the table for aroma. It does not look as pretty as the girls’ desserts but they always praise him for his herby ice creams.


Gary loves it – phew – especially the salty finish on the butterscotch sauce. “It’s like the best pumpkin pie,” says George. It’s a “ripper”.

The three semi-finalists get a group hug with Shannon. I wish they would include him in the judging and give him points to allocate to the best worker in the kitchen.

THE JUDGES’ VERDICT
No surprise – Diana is first through. Yay! She has been a rock throughout the comp (apart from those cocktail-inspired dishes for Heston’s water-themed challenge but let’s not talk about that disappointing Heston Week) but did not make the edit for a long time.
And the other semi-finalist is Ben, because Karlie’s mandarin syrup was too bitter. Poor Karlie says it’s not a surprise after seeing the other two work in the kitchen: “I felt like I was lacking a little bit.” Awww.
I can see her going on to have a successful career helping create new dishes or products, rather than a job as a working chef, or perhaps in food styling. Her plating has always been beautiful and inviting.

TOMORROW NIGHT
It’s Diana versus Ben and, unless Ben plans his dishes very carefully, Diana will just steamroll over him with her attention to detail and time management – and delicious flavours.
As with last year’s Elena versus Matt finale, we have two worthy finalists.



Facebooktwitterredditmail

MasterChef – Thurs, Jul 20 – Curtis & a relay

Three contestants must create a dish worthy of a place in the semi-final. Later, Curtis “Coles” Stone drops by to take part in an invention test relay.

Karlie, Diana and Tamara have 75 minutes to cook whatever dish they like, using an open pantry. Loser is eliminated. They have to pick a flavour, a cuisine and a concept.
Diana goes the seafood route, grabbing crayfish to go in a Thai-style broth.
Tamara is making “campfire brownies”, inspired by her camping desserts which are apparently cooked inside an orange. Hmm, she just made a choc orange dessert the other day. Her cuisine is Chinese. Yeah, because brownies are the new fortune cookie.
Karlie goes Chinese, her specialty, and is creating pork belly with XO sauce, “heroing” chilli.

Diana is getting a worrying amount of air time, talking about childhood memories, and they are showing photos of her family – is she going home?
The edit is making a big deal about Karlie’s sauce being hot, but that’s what XO sauce is meant to be, surely. If she weakens it they are bound to say it’s not authentic.


Tamara’s anglaise has Chinese five spice in it, so that makes it Chinese… right? Why didn’t she just say her cuisine was American? I’m intrigued by the whole cook-in-an-orange concept but it does not seem very Mastercheffy at this stage of the comp. And why has she not wrapped them in foil, as she would when cooking on a campfire? Surely they won’t get hot enough.


Matt announces they are travelling from Broome, to Malaysia to China with their dishes – guess he couldn’t bring himself to say the brownies were Chinese, too.
Ben looks sharp up on the gantry in his dark jacket – it’s not often you see them in anything other than T-shirts. Wardrobe must have got him one with extra big sleeves.
The cook is over and it looks like Tamara knows she’s a goner.

THE JUDGES TASTE


George says the concept is more important than the ingredients or cuisine. What a toss.
Cool, calm and collected Diana is tearing up a little. I hope she has a great cooking career ahead of her. The judges adore the dish – and that she got emotional about her family.


The judges adore the XO sauce – what a beat-up the earlier editing was. Tamara is totally going home; social media is going to explode.


The judges don’t look enthusiastic about tasting Tamara’s dish. They love the sauce and ice cream but the brownie looks like raw cake batter.

THE ELIMINATED CONTESTANT IS …
Tamara. Again. (And the internet goes wild!) She gets the special treatment of the judges revealing a blackboard menu of her past “hits” that she can use if she opens her Broome cafe. She gets lots of cuddles.

Masterclass is next but I’ll watch that at the weekend.



Facebooktwitterredditmail