Tonight on MKR, Italian sisters Leanne and Milena cooked up a storm and scored 87/110, but it wasn’t enough to knock Sophie and Katherine from the top spot on the leaderboard.
Sophie and Katherine headed straight to the semi-final with a score of 95, while aunt and niece team Rosie and Hayley were eliminated from the competition.
Leanne and Milena’s entrée of Arancini was an instant winner with judges Manu Feildel and Matt Preston. Both cleaned their plates and awarded the sisters a 10s for their entrée.
Manu exclaimed: “It’s exactly what MKR is about – simple home cooking done well. The mistake people make is trying to reinvent the wheel to make us happy but what you’ve done, ladies, is to cook something you’ve cooked and learned from Nona and you haven’t changed anything. What we know about Arancini is one thing, and what we were just presented was another. Ladies, congratulations!”
Elated over the success of their entrée, Leanne and Milena served up their main of Spaghetti with Salsiccia and Rapini.
Matt was impressed the team had made their own pasta and sausage: “Everyone worried about you deciding to make homemade pasta for 12 people. But that was a massive tick. That was absolutely perfect, delicious and wonderful. Thank you. And you made your own sausage; that’s another massive tick.”
Manu was also surprised to see homemade pasta mastered in a competition. “When I saw it was homemade pasta, I thought it was going to be a disaster. They are the quickest pasta to cook, but that fact that you succeeded in cooking them perfectly, I really have to take my hat off to that.”
For their last dish of the night, Leanne and Milena platted up a Woodfired Chocolate Hazelnut Calzone.
Manu said the team overworked the pastry of the Calzone and questioned their decision to add strawberries to the dish: “The pastry was rolled way too thick. Fresh strawberries; Yum. But stewed strawberries without sugar becomes a sloppy undesirable fruit. The flavour of the chocolate and hazelnut and acidic strawberries makes no sense.”
Matt agreed that the addition of the strawberries didn’t work but loved the presentation of the dessert and the ice cream.
