MasterChef Australia - S13E16 - Pasta Team Challenge

 A new week at MasterChef Australia.

Someone takes a leaf from Arsene Wenger’s book and congratulates everyone else for making it to the “Top 18” as if this is some sort of achievement.  

Jock explains the concept of this week – it will be people who have honed their skill at one thing over many, many years. They are calling this “Masters Week” – and presumably next week will be called “Chefs week”  

The first guest for the week is introduced by Mel who actually does a decent job of not giving away who the chef is in the first 4 words. Today they are joined by the owner of Tipo 00 and Osteria Illaria – Andreas Papadakis.

From the stupid grin Elise has on her face, and the even stupider grin Conor has on his face, I guess he is a big deal.   

Mel asks Andreas what he will show the contestants today - and to everyone’s shock he says he will make pasta.

He has barely started talking and Teachers Pet Elise is already gushing about ….not how great a cook he is, but what a great teacher he is. 

Today’s team challenge is all about pasta. There will be 6 teams of 3 and the bottom team will go into the pressure test tomorrow. Brent and his glorious beard will be in the pressure test anyway since he missed the last week – so best utilitarian strategy is to take his team down with him and ensure there are only 3 people and not 4 in this week’s pressure test.    

For some reason, they have stuck to these super weird colours for the aprons, while the unfair assault on regular primary colours continues. 

The teams have to cook a three course meal – two pasta based entrees and one dessert that has nothing to do with pasta because poor dessert cooks can’t be inconvenienced with cooking savoury stuff, while savoury cooks will be thrown into tomorrow’s pressure test no doubt set by some Dessert Chef.

Dan is super happy that this is a pasta challenge – he says he loves eating and cooking pasta. He is super confident he will do well in this challenge – and that, of course, tells us that he sure to screw this up monumentally. 

The Red team has Elise who immediately takes charge of the pasta – they will make only one dough – as she explains loudly to everyone in the pantry 10 seconds after saying that they need to be strategic and using her Italian-ness to their competitive advantage. 

The Pink team has Justin who is stoked for some reason about Fusion Dan being in his team for a pasta challenge.

The Green Team has Linda who has taken control of this team of children - Eric and Tom. They are doing a beef ragu for their main, Eric is working on the entrée and Tom is chilling with dessert.

In the Brown team we have Jess, Pete, and Amir. They are making tortellini for their entrée, osso bucco ragu for their main and some dessert no one has bothered to ask about because no one cares in this episode.

The general theme of this episode will be to completely ignore the dessert cooks – why not have 3 people make 3 pasta dishes or 3 people make 2 pasta dishes?  Or just have an individual pasta challenge?

Anyway, coming back to the Brown team, Andy is concerned about osso bucco being cooked in time. Pete says he is ten minutes behind in putting the osso bucco in the pressure cooker. Andy helpfully nags him about this to the point Pete literally says “Yes, I know it has to go in mate, why don’t you fuck off”. Okay he didn’t say the last bit, but surely he was thinking it.

Back with the Red team, Elise is putting stress on herself because she is the only Italian contestant and she is expected to cook good pasta. She clearly considers Andreas to be a bigger deal than Jock because she’s like “yeah I can impress Jock, but this guy REALLY knows what he’s talking about”

Three teams seem to be making ragu – pasta gawds Andreas and Jock both think this is a stupid idea and regret not giving more time for this challenge as now they will have to eat bad, unreduced sauces. 

Now Jock is going around telling everyone they can’t make their dish in time and they should give up and prepare for elimination, or better still, go home now itself. 

In the pink team, Dan-the-pasta-lover is making pasta while Justin fruitlessly works on the lamb ragu that is sure to not be cooked in time.

In the Grey team, they have decided that since both the cooks are Asian, the best thing to do is to keep it simple and rely on the idiots making ragu to fuck things up.

Jock needs two takes to yell there are 30 mins to go.

Finally we come to the Blue team where Andreas superfan Conor (who for some reason has not interacted even one word with his idol) is doing an unpronounceable dish - Salmoriglio with Hilopites. Sabina is excited to finally get a decent team that doesn’t carry her into an elimination and she takes on the all-important job to interacting with the judges while the others go about with their cooks.  Depinder is making dessert so she as good as doesn’t exist in the kitchen today.

You know the Green team is in trouble because Andy has had to go over and remind them to roll out their pasta in this pasta challenge. Linda helpfully explains to viewers who are confused with this staggeringly difficult concept - that if they don’t start rolling their pasta, they will not have pasta to serve. 

The Grey team’s strategy is working and Tommy and Kishwar both seem on top of their pasta.

Mel finally remembers that the whole point of getting these big name chefs to have them interact with the contestants and that she has not said any weird things to Conor all day, and goes over to the blue team. Sabina does her job of distracting Mel from the main cooking action by giving a super long rehearsed answer about their dish.

Dan-the-pasta-lover is in charge of the pasta. He rolls out his pasta perfectly. He cannot bear doing one thing right so he hands this over to Justin and now he goes over to linguine to fuck it up.  For some reason he is hand-cutting the linguine when there are plastic rulers easily available to measure this stuff.

Pete now takes his osso buco out of the pressure cooker – the meat is cooked but now he needs to reduce his sauce. Poor guy is delusional and actually believes he can do ghanta to the sauce with 3 mins to go.

Back over at the Pink team, the lamb comes out of the pressure cooker and is perfectly cooked. Justin is showing off to Andy instead of working on his elements.

Tommy wants Scott to taste his pasta and drops hot pasta from the pan directly onto Scott’s hand. This is clearly a way to ensure that one of them will be injured in case they go to pressure test tomorrow. Sneaky bugger.

Dan-the-pasta-lover now says he is “not a pasta person” and washes his hands off the impending disaster of his pasta making.

The Tasting

The Blue Team put up 3 amazing dishes – everyone loves them. The judges try to turn poor Sabina into a joke by asking her to introduce their dishes knowing she struggled to pronounce pangrattato earlier. She does a commendable and smartly Conor steps in to pronounce the impossible to pronounce dish he has made. All 3 dishes were delicious (including Depinder’s sorbet) – they are surely safe

The Grey team’s strategy works and they too are safe – all their pastas were made well and had clean flavours. 

For the Green team, Eric’s burnt butter is too heavy. The ragu is rushed and there is no reduction (as expected). The only redeeming feature is Tom’s dessert. 

The Brown team comes up. Pete says we all bit off more than we can chew for he knows his ragu is not good.  Andreas says he liked the pasta for the entrée but the filling was weird. The main was bad as the ragu was not reduced enough. The dessert was a nice basil ice cream that got 4 seconds of coverage in this entire cook.

The resident Italian Red Team also puts up 3 great dishes. Andreas commends the native Italian Elise for putting up authentic Italian dishes. Mel can’t think of what to say so she calls the menu rustic some 14 times and says a few things that add nothing to what the other judges have said.

Now the Pink team comes up. Dan-the-pasta-lover-who-is-not-a-pasta-person says he “feels responsible” for the pasta dishes. No mate, you ARE responsible for the pasta dishes because you insisted on making them.

The linguine is so roughly cut that even Andy has noticed it is uneven and not quite a linguine.  Jock and Andreas also explain how bad the pasta is.  All judges say they should have put more attention to detail on the actual pasta.

On top of all that, the ragu sauce is not reduced and there is no depth of flavour – so all of Justin’s showing off to Andy was totally pointless and kinda embarrassing at this point. 

Therese, who everyone has forgotten about so far, has made a tasty dessert but the ice cream was melting so it is not perfect.

Jock says 3 out of 6 garbage menus was a great way to kick off Masters Week and he can’t wait for more disasters in the kitchen.  

Results are not very surprising. Blue, Grey and Red teams are safe because all their dishes were good. 

Of the other 3 bad ragu dishes – amazingly the Green team is saved because of Tom’s restaurant quality dessert. Whodathunk the desserts would come into play?!

Now to choose which of the other two teams had the worst menu. This is a hard decision for the judges because both menus sucked. But they decide the best way to break the tie is go with the better working of the pasta – and in that sense clearly Pink was worse off.

So tomorrow – we have the Pink team – Dan-the-now-pasta-hater, Therese and Justin will go to the elimination along with Brent who will join them as compensation for last week’s missed test.

The ending section has given a potentially massive spoiler about what is going to happen in Kristin Tibballs’ Pressure test tomorrow – let’s see how much of that is drama, and how much is real.