MasterChef Australia has been delving week-after-week into different themed rounds- but this week, the theme is actually based around one very special guest- Heston Blumenthal!
The contestants walk into the kitchen where a lot of colourful scientific equipment such as beakers and flasks are sitting on a bench. This is indicative of Blumenthal’s wacky cooking style. It doesn’t take a genius to work that one out.
Today the challenge is a pressure test. They will be cooking a Heston dish in teams. Heston brings out nine flasks. Behind the judges on the apparatus are beakers filled with liquid. The contestants have to, one at a time, choose a beaker and add the liquid to the liquid in the flasks- changing its colour and determining the teams.
Here they are:
YELLOW – Rishi, Christina, Daniel
BLUE – Lucy, Noelene, Emma
RED – Kelty, Samira, Lynton
The dish is a ‘classic trifle’. But it’s not so classic. In fact, it was prepared for the queen last year for her jubilee. There’s a lot of liquid nitrogen that’s gone into it. There are frozen rose petals and nuggets of ice cream in the form of fruits.
They will have two hours to complete their version of the dish. The winners will get to compete for one of three available immunity pins tomorrow.
Rishi all of a sudden takes on a leadership role which seems to rile Christina.
With 90 minutes to go, Heston tells the contestants that they’re nowhere near urgent enough right now. True, the contestants don’t seem to be struggling much…yet! But the contestants don’t seem to get the message. They plod on as if they have days to make this!
To the freezing of the rose petals, Daniel isn’t really getting it right. It could be the first blunder of the night!
Noelene and Rishi are cooking their compote. The recipe tells them to take it off the boil after 20 minutes but both teams notice that it’s still very runny. Rishi notices that the recipe allows for it to be reduced until desired, but Noelene doesn’t read this. Clearly, this will be a problem later on! However, with Rishi’s compote, even when it has been reduced he is very worried he’s ruined it. So who knows!
Meanwhile, Kelty has a lot to do. He’s not a details man and finds it hard to stick to the recipe well.
As the contestants begin playing around with liquid nitrogen, the red team find out their oven hasn’t been turned on and a number of their components haven’t been cooked. But the blue team are also suffering from these problems with Emma’s shortbread risking being undercooked.
All teams now begin assembling their trifle. The red team’s compote ends up holding, but will Noelene’s? It does seem OK.
Time is soon up and the teams plate up their efforts. But before all that, Kelty realises his frozen jubes of jelly are melting. He doesn’t understand why.
The blue team are first for tasting. The judges are wowed. We see that there is a bit of custard bleeding into the compote. Noelene suggests putting gelatine in the compote recipe which the judges jokingly tell Heston to put on his recipe. The compote is like soup however, and they are not impressed. At least the flavour is good. Everything else on the trifle is good, except for the biscuit parts.
The red team are next. The layers have set well but the jellies are a problem. We find out it’s because Kelty didn’t put enough gelatine in them. Other than that, they’ve done well!
The yellow team are last. Their trifle is nice and firm and their compote seems to have set the best of the three. The only problem lies with the very messy rose petals.
So, easily, the yellow team won today sending them into tomorrow’s immunity pin bonanza.
