This season’s MasterChef, on Monday and Tuesday nights on Fox, features two local heroes: Jennie Kelley, a singer with Polyphonic Spree, and travel writer Ben Starr. Intrepid intern Harrison Smith is all over the show like hot on fries. Each week he will file his take on the show. Last week is here. This week is below:
Before I get to the recap of the shows, I want to summarize the “scandal” surrounding the introductory montage to MasterChef. One of the shot, taken from the video, intended to show a huge crowd standing in line to audition while a dramatic voice over booms something along the lines of “Thousands across the country tried out for the chance to compete…” Someone on the internet with a keen eye pointed out that the crowd in the shot only looks like thousands and wondered if the people at Fox used video manipulation. If you look closely, you will notice a person in an orange parka waving beside a dozen people. Look even closer and you’ll see that the person is either a victim of a digital doubling or part of a Guinness World Record-breaking group of doppelgangers. The picture
Jump for the picture and the rest of the show.
A couple other pieces of Fox crowd-altering are circled by the author of the image, which was anonymously posted to Imgur on June 22, linked on Reddit, and picked up by Agence France-Presse journalist Alex Ogle and Andy Dehnart’s Reality Blurred within a few hours.
Reveille Productions, the co-producers of the show along with Shine TV, issued an apology to Entertainment Weekly, and the doctored shot will be cut from future episodes.
And now, on to the show.
Monday night’s episode of MasterChef was full of over-dramatized-culinary-reality-TV-show excitement (the best kind of excitement, really). Host Gordon Ramsay went off on a rant about crepes tasting like skin grafts. At one point Dallas’ own Jennie Kelley had her head on the chopping block. And contestant Christian Collins gave the best on-air impersonation of Gordon I’ve ever heard. Oh happy day.
Jennie, however, managed to keep her head and her place on the show. Like last week’s Monday night episode, contestants were given mystery box and elimination challenges. As usual, each chef was required to make something using only the “mystery box” ingredients of a rack of New Zealand lamb, peaches, Romanesco cauliflower, feta, fava beans, white rice, Thai chile peppers, tarragon, crème fraiche, pie crust, heavy cream, and eggs. The chef with the best dish would receive “a hugeeeee advantage,” in Ramsay-speak.
Adrien from California won the challenge with his “farmers market lamb” with cauliflower purée. Hometown heroes Jennie and Ben didn’t get any screen time on this challenge. As his hugeeeee advantage Adrien got to choose the ingredient he would cook with for the next, dessert-themed elimination challenge. The aspiring chef chose nuts, and was also allowed to choose the ingredient his competitors had to use. He gave them coffee.
After five minutes of “pantry time” contestants were given 90 minutes to create their desserts. Adrien squandered his advantage with a chocolate nut torte topped with just about every nut on the planet. The judges felt he used too many nuts. Hmm. This show is full of nuts.
Meanwhile, Max, an 18-year-old college student from New York, stacked 15 crepes on top of each other to make a “torte de crepes.” In his finest moment on the show, Gordon said: “It’s like I’ve just gone to the doctor’s for a skin graft on my butt…and stuck it in caramel.” Reality TV poetry.
Jennie and Alvin, a cooking chemist from Houston with a passion for molecular gastronomy, landed in the bottom three along with Max. Jennie made a coffee infused tart with orange blossom cream, but the tart was severely undercooked. “If you had any sense you’d stage a trip-up and smash the plate on your way up here,” said Gordon. Alvin made coffee-filled beignets with coffee chicory pudding, and though he described his cooking process as involving things like a “calcium chloride bath” the beignets ended up tasting “like a coffee blood clot.” Or so Gordon tells me.
Needless to say, Alvin and his calcium chloride bath were eliminated. Jennie stayed on and Esther and Tracy were named team captains for Tuesday night’s elimination challenge.
On Tuesday the remaining fourteen contestants were split into two teams by Esther and Tracy. The teams were given 90 minutes to prepare sausage sandwiches for 101 motorcyclists at Point Magu on California’s Pacific Coast Highway. Both Ben and Jennie were chosen by Esther, and the team decided to serve up a beer-soaked pork sausage with drunken onion and pepper relish.
My experience with bikers is pretty limited, but I imagine that after a long ride on a hog I’d want something spicy, not something sweet like Tracy’s version of Italian pork sausage with caramelized onions and molasses. “I’m from Texas, I have biker friends, I know exactly what those guys like to eat,” said Ben. Ultimately, however, he and his big Texas boast, along with the rest of his team, lost out to Tracy’s team.
The losing team was then faced with an elimination challenge after their biker defeat. Esther was asked to choose the two weakest members of the team, and the two chosen—Max and Christine—were faced with the challenge of cooking a fillet three ways: rare, medium, and well-done. Max failed to consistently cook his fillets at the appropriate temperatures and was booted off. Christine, tearful and angry through most of the second half of the show, was just happy to catch a break.
There are now 13 amateur chefs left in the competition. Two of those are from Dallas. Hopefully Jennie or Ben can bring home the MasterChef title, but if worst comes to worst, hey, at least we’ve still got this.
