MasterChef 2016 and the Curse of the Dreaded Mascarpone

MasterChef’s 2016 season is well on its way. In last week’s show, Tanorria, a terrifically talented home cook from the Southern USA, somehow managed to out-do the two Hispanic contestants, Andrea and Alejandro, by acing the Latin-themed mystery box challenge presented by chefs Aaron Sanchez and Claudia Sandoval - last year’s MasterChef winner.

She cooked a dish based on an old Southern recipe containing shrimp and creamed corn that wowed the judges and beat out Alejandro’s arepas and Andrea’s stuffed poblano pepper and spicy spot prawn dish.

All of the judges were impressed by Tanorria, who won a major advantage for winning this mystery box challenge.

As part of her advantage, Tannoria got to choose which desert the remaining contestants would bake, and she chose pie. The best pie by far was baked by Terry, the construction worker, whose hands, Gordon Ramsay pointed out, were almost as big as his pie. His latticed berry tart was deemed pie perfection, and Gordon Ramsay called it the best pie ever baked in the MasterChef kitchen.

Four people struggled with this baking challenge, but only Lisa-Ann, a New-Jersey based home cook with Sicilian roots, avoided being in the bottom three. Her ill-fated decision to add mascarpone to her fruit filling left her pie with a soggy bottom, but her flavour profile saved her from being up for elimination.

Sadly, that wasn’t the case for Eric, the firefighter, Brittany, the restaurant server, or Brandi, the Southern mom whose apple-cheddar pie failed to impress the judges.

Ultimately, it was Brittany, an enthusiastic but inexperienced young cook, who was sent home for a rhubarb-berry pie whose filling lacked flavour and whose crust was badly under-baked.

This week, Gordon Ramsay gave the home cooks a master class in lobster, first demonstrating how to poach and shell a live lobster and then showing them how to make lobster tortellini in a seafood broth that was flavoured with anise liqueur.

In the first challenge, eleven out of the sixteen contestants impressed the judges by getting all the poached meat out of the lobster shell and displaying it properly on a board. The stand-out was Alejandro, whose presentation was far superior to those of his fellow competitors.

A few people failed to perform up to the expectations of the judges, which this week, included Gordon Ramsay, Christina Tosi, and Aaron Sanchez, again.

The five contestants on the bottom, and whose challenge was to cook the tortellini dish that Gordon Ramsay had demonstrated earlier, included Nathan, the preacher’s son, whose religion forbids him even to touch alcohol, let alone cook with it, as well as Diana, Eric and Lisa-Ann.

Surprisingly, the bottom five also included Andrea, the talented young Cuban-American cook whose nerves got the best of her during the first part of the lobster challenge.

These five contestants had to make fresh pasta, a seafood broth using the shells from the lobsters, and a tortellini filling that included lobster and a just a touch of mascarpone cheese.

Perhaps last week’s fiasco with mascarpone still haunted Lisa-Ann, as her dish never really came together. She started out badly, preparing the broth first, when Gordon Ramsay had instructed them to begin by making the pasta for the tortellini.

I can only imagine how nerve-wracking it must be to compete in a show like this, and how much pressure these home cooks must be under. In Lisa-Ann’s case, she was so flustered during the tortellini challenge that she added the anise liqueur to her pan just as Gordon was looking in at its contents, nearly singeing off his eyebrows in the process. Sadly, Ramsay was not impressed.

When it came to Lisa-Ann’s completed dish, four out of the five tortellini had burst, her pasta was overcooked and her broth was too salty. Gordon Ramsay liked the flavour of the tortellini filling, but not much else. He told her that he’d hoped for better, given her Italian roots, and said that he was sure she was a much better cook than this. Lisa-Ann admitted that she’d been “over-thinking things too much.”

The other four contestants fared better, to varying degrees. Nathan had “clunky” pasta but a “fantastic” broth, according to the judges; Diana’s tortellini were torn and soggy, but the flavours in her dish were acceptable; Eric’s dish rated low for presentation but high in flavour, and Andrea redeemed herself by presenting a near-perfect broth, filling and pasta.

In the end, Lisa-Ann was sent home, possibly never to go near mascarpone again, and the fifteen remaining chefs live to cook another day. I can’t wait to see what the next challenge will be.