MasterChef Recap: Competitors are giving this artistic challenge in the service of the hot van Gogh

Is there anything more pleasant than eating in the woods? Yes, of course there are a lot of things. Meals in the restaurant, for one. Yet today’s challenge for unfortunate pâtés MasterChef The kitchen is to cook dishes that for some reason evoke the feeling of a forest.

The contestants will arrive at The LUME Melbourne, Australia’s first digital art gallery, where they are surrounded by works of art by Vincent van Gogh projected on huge screens, just as the master himself never intended. “You’re literally in the middle of a picture,” says Jock, who doesn’t know the meaning of a few words he just said.

Tommy is sitting outside today because he won a chance to go straight to tomorrow’s immune challenge. The other 12 chefs are divided into two teams, each of which must prepare a three-course meal for 30 diners – respectively for three diners, ie jurors, whose opinions actually count as opposed to other diners, which can be served dry. toasts and mustard packages for all that matters.

The food they prepare must be inspired by van Gogh’s painting of the forest. Melissa explains that they want a multi-sensory immersive experience, something that is obviously literally impossible to achieve with a plate of food, so failure is inevitable. Although they should be able to make their experience more multi-sensory than van Gogh: his image could only affect one sense.

In the green team, Captain Alvin comes up with an artistic concept, and his artistic concept is to get everyone else to have ideas, which he then nods to.

Steph became captain of the yellow team, which she thinks will be good because she used to work at a bank. She decided that the team’s three courses should evoke different seasons, which seems pretty good compared to Alvin’s vision, which involves “leaf flow.”

Aldo and Julie take a yellow appetizer. Julie intends to fill her tortellini with homemade ricotta, but that’s where she made her fatal mistake: she’s not home, she’s in an art gallery. The best thing he can do is make a ricotta made in an art gallery that will lose its appetite. “I’m on it like a fat kid in a basket,” he cries at work, probably a direct personal attack on the author of these recapitulations.

Meanwhile, the yellow wiring is under Sarah’s control. “Our main course is to evoke a bush fire, so it will be all charred and beautiful,” he says, and perhaps overestimating how beautiful fires are, especially for people who live in the bush.

Alvin decides that the green team’s meals should have crazy names. Michael calls the main course “bull in the new forest”, which is a name that strongly evokes … a bull in the forest.

Jock asks Aldo how much tortellini he will serve to eat. Aldo says three. “Three?” Jock repeats, as if Aldo had just told him he would fill the pasta with human hair. Aldo needs to make 100 tortellini in 90 minutes, a performance that human hands have never been able to do. Julie tells him to pull his finger out. And put ricotta in there.

Back in the green team, Montana does everything well with mushroom ice cream, except that she makes mushroom ice cream. It’s always a gamble to make a deliberately disgusting dessert, but Montana believes that nausea for guests will pay off again.

Meanwhile, Michael cooks more wagyu than ever before and starts going crazy.

In the yellow team, Sarah, who thinks the fires are beautiful, works side by side with Dan, who is a firefighter and has a slightly different perspective. Dan makes a huge effort to persuade him to believe that the main topic of fire is a good idea. Sarah helps him by bossing him and looking sour.

Meanwhile, Aldo continues to be extremely relaxed about the tortellini while Julie panics.

Harry, who works on the green team’s starters with Mindy, makes a surprising confession: he hopes the starter will be good. Mindy has a great idea to apply puree to the plates so that it mimics the brush strokes of the painting. This is brilliant because everyone likes the feeling of eating color.

But if the starters are going well, the main feeder has run into a snag: Michael’s wagyus have different temperatures, embodying the fickle nature of Japanese cows.

Boarders who are looking forward to a strange meal in a strange environment will start to arrive. Aldo is excited about his tortellini. “Come on, Jock!” shouting. So he doesn’t, but you can see in his eyes that he wants to.

Meanwhile, the green team carefully prepares its appetizers. “It’s all about the visuals – customers eat with their eyes,” says Mindy, who dropped out of biology at school.

Inputs are sent. Alvin loves the efforts of the green team. “It looks like a painting on a plate,” he says, ignoring the fact that whatever you put on a plate looks like a painting on a plate, if it’s a still life painting of the thing.

A green appetizer is a small pile of leaf waste in a bowl. It hardly resembles real food, which means jurors love it, of course.

The yellow team’s appetizer is served. They are three small tortellini sitting in a puddle of stagnant water, decorated with weeds. It’s more like a yellow appetizer, but the jurors find that the pasta clashes with the green slopes, and they are offended that everything served to them is a really tasty meal.

The yellow team, meanwhile, is trying to get its main course on time, which could be costly if it mattered, but no one really cares if the stuff in the service call is done on time, so it’s irrelevant. Customers receive a free resource, not waiting for them.

The green main comes out. It is a tiny slice of beef accompanied by mushrooms hidden under a moldy leaf. It combines two basic requirements: a) insufficient food; and b) look awful. The judges are enthusiastic.

When the yellow main comes out, Sarah talks at length about how great it feels when she cooked something, and we approach her dangerously close and tell us the story of how she waited her whole life before preparing food inspired by the image of the forest and how MasterChef he finally gave her the confidence to make her dreams come true. The yellow barrel is a piece of meat with burnt twigs. Jurors do not like how bitter leeks are and advise on further advice.

A green dessert appears. It’s mushroom ice cream, which is disgusting, complemented by chocolate twigs, because people love food that looks like wood. The judges don’t like it, but they don’t like it because there are few mushrooms, which is a bad reason. The right reason I don’t like it is because there are mushrooms at all.

A yellow dessert is coming. It’s a log sitting in some dirt. Logs and clay are made from food, but cunningly disguised, so the diner is not turned off by knowing that their dessert is edible. The jurors love it because it tastes good, which they suddenly decided to be positive.

Time for ego death. Jock first announces that the best meal of all was Billie’s dessert, which was so good that the rest of the yellow team didn’t deserve to be associated with it. The best starter was the green team’s forest garbage. The best major was the moldy wagyu of the green team.

The Greens are winning. “I’m so happy,” Captain Alvin says, as if he really did something.

The Greens are now cooking for immunity with a challenge that Andy promises will be “unlike any immunity we have had this season.” Tune in to see the green team trying to avoid murder.