It was a battle between fruit and veggies tonight as the final seven contestants on Junior MasterChef Australia battled it out for a spot in the semi-final. With only one round to impress the judges by featuring either a fruit or a vegetable in their dishes, everything was on the line for these pintsized professionals.
As they arrived in the kitchen, the judges supersized the choice of hero ingredients by ordering in two forklifts bearing enormous crates, one filled with fruit and one with vegetables.
But there was a twist. If a contestant chose a fruit, it had to be featured in a savoury dish, and if they chose a vegetable, it had to be used in a sweet dish.
They had just 75 minutes to create their dishes, and the cooks of the top three dishes would advance to the semi-final, joining Georgia and Dev, while the bottom two would sadly be sent home.
Browsing the fruit and vegetables, all the promising cooks selected a vegetable.
Laura chose to hero fennel and decided to make fennel and green apple sorbet with crème fraîche cream, almond crumb, fennel sherbet and blackberry pearls and coulis.
Filo chose carrots as his hero ingredient and wanted to build on all that he’s learned during the competition by creating a carrot mousse with carrot jelly, a mirror glaze and biscuit. Carter chose beetroot as his hero ingredient, making a beetroot chocolate espresso brownie with candied beetroot and white chocolate and beetroot rocks.
Vienna selected pumpkin and made a spiced pumpkin tart with parsnip and maple syrup ice cream, salted caramel sauce and roasted pecans, and Tiffany decided that today was the day to challenge herself, selecting zucchini to make a zucchini sponge with chantilly cream, zucchini and lime granita and zucchini brunoise.
As the judges tasted, they were excited by Laura’s sophisticated dish and said she nailed the balance of flavours, making it worthy of praise in any normal MasterChef Australia competition, not just Junior MasterChef, and she was safe.
The judges loved both the carrot flavour in Filo’s dish, and the refined presentation, and they also praised Carter’s brownie dish, especially the texture and flavour of the brownie.
On the flipside, as they tasted Tiffany’s dish, they could hardly detect the zucchini flavour, and it wasn’t a successful tasting for Vienna either, as her pastry was undercooked.
The results were in, and Laura, Filo and Carter were deemed safe, joining Georgia and Dev in the semi-final, meaning we bid a sad farewell to muchloved contestants Tiffany and Vienna.
