It’s Nat versus Pezza cooking up a 113-step dessert storm in the MasterChef grand final. Who fluffs things up and who gets to hold up the big shiny plate?
So here we are. After months of blood, sweat, tears and umami, the MasterChef finale, a programme we can say without hyperbole is the most significant annual cultural event in the world, is upon us.
Who will win? Will it be Josh, the simple country lad who has defied the
odds and enraged thousands of furious tweeters with his gauche insistence on cooking food that people like to eat? Or will it be Nat, the person who is going to win? Only time will tell.
As is traditional, we begin with an emotive opening sequence that brings new meaning to the word “padding”. Josh and Nat’s families enter the kitchen, having been kept hostage by producers for the last three months. Finally, four hours into the finale and therefore with only 18 hours to go, we get to the subject of food.
Fennel, lemongrass, black peppercorns, mint, and baby leeks. A good name for a prog-rock band? Certainly. But they are also the five ingredients placed before Josh and Nat, who must take turns eliminating them one by one to reach the single ingredient they must use in their dish for round one of the finale. After an insufficiently brief but extremely pointless elimination process, it is decided that it’s the pepper that both will have to infuse their dish with. Round one will count for 40 points.
Josh immediately leans into his strength: meat. Nat also leans into her strength: impressing the judges. “I want to make a classic pub meal, but make it Thai,” she declares. She then tells Andy that she is making a Scotch egg, which is extremely confusing unless I have been mistaken about the words “classic”, “pub” and “Thai” all these years.
“You want to know why I’m concerned?” asks Andy. Nat has absolutely no desire to know why he’s concerned, but out of politeness lets him tell her. Apparently the reason he’s concerned is because that’s his job. Scotch eggs are hard, he says, making sure that Nat is doubting herself, before moving on to tell Josh that his plan for Brussels sprout puree is a grotesque travesty.
Josh makes a heartfelt speech about how much he wants this victory. “I’m sick of coming second,” he says, a pretty insensitive comment to make given his wife is right there in the room. Meanwhile, Nat is fretting over the fact that her dish has so many flavours it might be difficult to make the peppercorns stand out. Luckily, the spectators on the balcony call out “you’ve got this”, which helps enormously.
“It’s time to put all my love into this peppercorn sauce,” says Josh, somewhat disgustingly. On the other bench, Nat’s cooking intuition kicks in, which is kind of like Spidey Sense, but for runny eggs. She runs into the garden to pick flowers so that her dish has that essential non- edible element. Both finalists are happy with their work as round one – possibly one of the top two most important rounds of the day – comes to a close.
Nat’s Sai Ua Scotch Egg is gooey and delicious and the final proof of the existence of God. Josh’s rib eye steak with peppercorn sauce is great but his Brussels sprout puree is, tragically, made from Brussels sprouts, which has to cost him.
For round one, Nat scores 36 out of 40. Josh scores 33 out of 40 and feels deeply the shame he has brought upon his family. “Sorry,” he says to his family on the balcony. They think carefully about whether they are willing to accept his apology.
Time for round two, the Golden Snitch of the finale. It’s a pressure test, in which Nat and Josh must make a dessert made by Clare Smyth, a Michelin-starred British chef. The dish is a “Core-teser” from Smyth’s restaurant Oncore. It
is essentially a giant Malteser with a puffy cloud of sugar sitting on top of it and served with a rendition of the Game of Thrones theme tune.
The cooks take a deep breath as they contemplate the ludicrously complicated task ahead of them. Josh looks up at his family, who gaze silently down, vowing to change their name if he loses. The finalists have just four hours until Nat is declared the winner, so time will be tight.
Nat is nervous because desserts are not her forte, whereas Josh, as a butcher, is an expert at them. “I’m going to go with what I know best, which is have a list,” she says, which could be a misstep, as lists often lack intensity of flavour. Meanwhile, Josh declares that he loves reading recipes, showing that MasterChef really does have a disturbing impact on the brain.
As Josh gets stuck into the preparation of his dessert, Nat sticks to her plan of reading the recipe and waving her arms around. Making the rookie mistake of starting to make the dish, she forgets to put her double cream in and has to start again. “I feel like so many thing are not going the way I want them to right now,” she says, and by “right now” she means “several hours ago, during the MasterChef finale which I won and am now describing in retrospect.”
Meanwhile Josh’s hazelnut anglaise is great, if you’re into that kind of thing. “Your dad’s turned into Willy Wonka,” he says to his kids on the balcony, as he dons a top hat and tortures children.
The finalists continue performing bizarre and baffling acts with chocolate, assisted by both the observers on the balcony, who shout helpful advice such as “Let’s go” and “Yeah!“, and the judges, who periodically stop by their benches to waste their time. Halfway through the challenge, Josh seems a lot more relaxed than the flustered and harried Nat: the contrast couldn’t be more striking if this were a TV show constructed deliberately to generate maximum suspense by judicious editing.
Nat’s chocolate is crumbling in a cruel metaphor. “Watching this gives me so much anxiety,” says some guy on the balcony who may or may not have been a contestant this year. Nat has no idea how to save her chocolate. She briefly considers infusing it with bright and vibrant South-East Asian flavours, but doesn’t have the guts. With no other option, she turns to her last resort: a monologue about how she’s never felt she belonged anywhere until now.
Luckily, this was the next step in the recipe, and works perfectly. Meanwhile Josh is feeling great, so he’s screwed.
Nat and Josh work on their molten sugar puff, but they are doing it differently to each other. Josh’s is thin, Nat’s is thick. This is terrible news for someone. On the balcony, the watchers are confused, and also their feet hurt. Who is doing this element right will determine who gets their puffy bit to puff, which the judges quickly decide is the most important thing in the world, having checked to make sure that…yep, it’s Josh who’s stuffed it up.
Nat’s got a big puffy ball, and Josh has a gross brown mess. “It’s gone pear-shaped really quickly,” says Josh, but he’s wrong: if it were pear-shaped that would be much better. He tries to make it again. It turns out the same.
The show becomes extremely depressing as Josh reflects once again on the fact that he always comes second, and that life has yet again given him a knee to the crotch. Tears prick the eyes of all observers, their hearts only lightened by noticing that Andy is wearing Colonel Sanders’s tie.
The grim death march of this finale is nearly at an end, as time is up and the dark farce of tasting must now be undertaken. Josh’s family gather around him to weep and rend their garments. Nat’s family gathers around her to pop open the champagne.
Josh serves his dessert, minus the puffy bit. He admits he feels like he’s let his family down. “There are many ways a man can let his family down,” says Andy, and promises to give him a list to tick off after the show. Josh’s dish is absolutely perfect, but it’s missing a major element, and sadly the judges flipped a coin earlier to determine that this will be one of the episodes when leaving elements off the plate matters, rather than one of the episodes where they don’t care what you leave off.
Nat serves her dessert, which has every element present, but they are all terrible. Everyone sighs in relief as they remember that this doesn’t matter. Nat admits she had a lot of trouble with the final challenge, with the only thing sustaining her the knowledge that she is the winner. The judges find big pieces of undissolved gelatin in the mousse and the whole thing is unpleasant to eat, and if this were some kind of cooking competition that would be a real issue.
The judges have a tough decision, but having decided the winner in April it seems a bit unfair to change their minds now, and so the winner is…
Nat? Wow. Well THAT came out of the blue. Goes to show this show can still surprise you, huh? The judges decide that Nat’s inability to make a good dessert and Josh’s inability tomake a complete dessert are equal, and so as Nat was already in the lead she wins.
Everyone cheers and Nat breaks down with triumphant emotion. Or at least pretends to, as they film two endings and what we see on TV is actually everyone faking their reactions because they don’t know which one is the real one. And what a great production decision that is: nothing is more satisfying as a viewer than watching reality TV contestants pretend to be happy.
So Nat is the winner and gets a trophy, a title, $250,000 and a temporary job at Alumni restaurant – though to be fair, everyone who’s ever been on MasterChef gets a job at Alumni eventually.
And so ends one of the greatest seasons of MasterChef ever, a season that was
thrilling in its unpredictability, unless you watched it. We’ve learned a lot about food, about the human heart, and about ourselves. But perhaps more than anything, we have learnt that Curtis Stone recommends Coles brand pork. See you next year.
Ben Pobjie is a columnist.