It's the second week of MasterChef heats.
Last time, nine home cooks auditioned for a place
in this year's competition.
Be right back.
I am finding your chicken completely and utterly addictive.
Thank you.
I think it's a really good start.
Only seven earned an apron
and the chance to become MasterChef champion.
It's a lot more intimidating going into the kitchen.
There's a lot less of us.
I really need to up my game.
Pressure's really intense.
I'm sure the butterflies will be going again.
For me, the biggest takeaway is stick to the brief,
follow your process, don't get distracted.
Tonight, they face two tough challenges.
Calm down, dear.
First, a brief set by one of the country's
most renowned restaurant critics...
Technical brilliance is for nothing if it's not nice to eat.
..before going head-to-head in a cook-off.
I absolutely love it!
They've got their aprons. The competition has begun.
They are going to have to rise to the occasion.
Come on! Let's turn up the heat.
Good to see you.
You've all got your MasterChef aprons.
Very, very well done.
Now your job is to stay in the competition as long as possible.
Who knows? Maybe all the way to the end.
You have been set a brief,
and that brief is to create a wonderful dish
using a batter or a dough.
WE didn't actually set that brief.
That brief was set by a special guest.
Ladies and gentlemen, food writer, restaurant critic Jay Rayner.
Welcome, Jay. Lovely to be here.
There are batters and doughs in almost every culinary tradition
around the world, and people therefore assume
that it's very simple, but it isn't.
It takes a lot of technique and it takes a lot of skill,
plus I really get excited when people crank up the deep-fat fryer.
We can only take the best cooks through.
Ladies and gentlemen, one hour and 30 minutes.
Let's cook.
There is quite a fine line between success and failure
when you're dealing with batters and doughs.
Either it's light and it's crisp and it's joyous,
or it's a deep, dank thud.
I'm hoping for lots of light and joyous and few of the dank thuds.
Jay Rayner is the one person who could have come through the door
that would have made me go, "Ooh!"
Pressure's really on now.
Proper chuffed - scared, but proper chuffed.
So excited to cook for Jay Rayner.
When he walked in, I was trying to hide my little fan person smile,
but you can't hide it. It's amazing.
Bristol-based bricklayer Adam's culinary hero was his father,
also a bricklayer who loved to cook.
After a few minor errors in his audition round...
Your sauce needs work.
..he secured himself an apron with an impressive pasta dish.
Making any filled pasta is the hardest pasta to make,
and you've done really, really well.
I think he's a great cook.
Now he's got his confidence,
I hope we're going to see something brilliant from him.
What are you cooking for us today?
I'm cooking you chicken and waffles.
Oh, wow!
My little one-year-old absolutely adores waffles,
so it's something I'm comfortable with.
And the chicken traditionally should be deep-fried, shouldn't it?
So I still get the deep-fat fryer. Yes.
And I'm going to batter some pickles and fry them as well,
so you're getting frickles as well.
Oh! That makes me very happy.
JOHN:Adam's dish has got two very different batters,
one for his waffles, like a thick American pancake batter,
and the other one is for his frickles,
which is more like the coating for your fish when you go to the chippy.
Waffle, chicken, frickles, and coleslaw, with a maple butter -
it's definitely naughty.
I will admit that, when I came up with this brief,
my mind didn't go to waffles.
It's an American south classic, and I really like it.
I'm going to get a lot of stick on the building site
for putting some pretty garnishes on my dish,
but it's the MasterChef kitchen.
If you're doing fried chicken and waffles, make it pretty.
If you don't start confident, you won't finish confident,
so let's go for it.
24-year-old personal trainer Cliodhna's sticky toffee pudding
won her plaudits in the audition test, despite her decorative touches.
That's quite a thick, big piece of peanut brittle.
As for the rest of it,
I think it's delightful.
I have been impressed with Cliodhna, I have.
I know she's got potential.
Today, in front of Jay Rayner, I want her to prove it.
I was inspired to do this dish because it's something that I made
for my boyfriend on Valentine's Day and he really, really liked it.
So hopefully Liam has a good palate,
and it's not going to screw me up on this challenge.
Can I say, "Screw me up"?
What are you cooking for us today?
So today I'm going to make for you
tempura squid with black garlic and squid ink aioli,
caper and raisin puree, and edible flowers.
Well, that sounds very pretty.
When you heard what the brief was,
did this idea come to you immediately?
Yeah. I really love doing squid and different battered things at home,
and I love a fresh flavour, so I thought
this would be a great thing to bring to the table.
The coating on the outside of that squid is paramount.
A tempura batter, a light batter from Japan.
The idea of a tempura batter is it's really, really thin.
It's almost completely translucent.
And what happens when you bite into it?
It is really crunchy.
MasterChef is a pressurised environment.
Is it more pressure when someone like Jay comes in?
Absolutely. Yeah. There's three of you to please now, not two,
so it's another third as much scary.
If Cliodhna had told me that she was doing tempura squid
with a black garlic and squid aioli, or with a raisin and caper puree,
that would have struck me as fine. Interesting.
But both of those at the same time on the plate?
All those flavours could end up fighting each other.
That could work against her.
Toy developer Omar from Barnsley
let his playful and creative side shine
with his debut audition round dish of big burger dumplings.
I think this is a really clever idea.
He is different,
and I've no idea what he's going to come up with today.
Definitely would say one of my strengths is creativity.
I think I'm showing them things they potentially haven't seen before,
so hopefully I can keep surprising them with my flavour combinations
and style of cooking.
I'm doing a cod and onion bhaji with a curry sauce.
There's a smoked aloo gobi mash.
How did you come across a cod bhaji?
I was making a fish curry one day, and we had the bhaji with it,
and it just tasted lovely, and just started going through my head.
So you started putting bits of fish in your bhaji when...?
Yeah. Just thought, "Why not?"
When I was growing up, it was just me and my mum.
But every month she'd take us out for a date night, the two of us,
to our favourite Indian restaurant,
So it reminds me of the kind of food I ate growing up.
So bhajis do require a batter. Yeah.
It's not the same as a Western, European batter.
It's significantly different.
Yes, so you kind of add the gram flour to bring it all together,
and that's how you get all the nice crispiness from it.
Flecks of fish mixed together with lots and lots of onions,
a little bit of butter, and then gram flour added to that.
Gram flour, the flour of chickpeas. It's really quite dry.
And there's a craft to making a bhaji because you can only put
a small amount of liquid in it, otherwise it becomes more of a dough
rather than a batter.
What I'm hoping for from Omar is something light and spicy,
that crisp, aerating crunch that echoes in the crevices of the skull.
I want a bit of that from him.
Ladies and gentlemen, you've got 45 minutes left.
Just 45 minutes.
Ooh! What's that? It smells really good.
34-year-old Forest was born in Hong Kong.
His cooking is influenced by his extensive travels.
He made a strong first impression with an apple cake dessert.
I think it's professional quality.
He's already made a dough that really, really impressed,
so, Forest, more of the same, my friend.
Right.
When I go into something, I get really focused,
and everything else just disappears,
so hopefully I can continue doing that.
It took me a while to actually come to what I wanted
because, personally, I don't fry a lot of stuff.
I notice you've got gelatine.
You've got a liqueur here.
What are you making?
I'm making a blueberry tart.
Well, that's quite a challenge.
Have you made the pastry from scratch here on the bench?
I've just made a pastry from scratch,
and currently blind bake it,
and then put a frangipane on it to bake it again.
And then once it cools down, I'm going to put blueberry jelly,
which will include liqueur, and then top with some whipped cream,
and then some caramelised nuts.
Just curious - you went the dough route.
You didn't want to deep fry something. Exactly, yes.
I really like sweet foods.
In the past, when I travelled to Paris,
I would always go to different patisseries
and just try out a lot of different things.
And, yeah, this is the kind of thing I love to do and eat.
That pastry has to be really, really thin.
That frangipane inside has to be lovely and soft,
and rich with almonds.
The flavour of blueberry is really very sharp,
and Chantilly cream.
This shouts of a confident man.
Let's hope he gets his timings right.
Are you making three individual tarts?
I am making three individual tarts, yes.
If one's bigger, I'll have it.
You guys, you guys fight over it. Yeah, OK.
Forest has said that the patisseries of Paris is his inspiration.
It's my natural habitat.
It's quite a standard.
If he can do that, brilliant.
I'll be very, very excited.
Aged 16, Claire joined the Royal Navy and sailed the seas for six years.
She now owns a cheese and wine shop in Darlington,
and blew the judges away with an interpretation
of her favourite takeaway.
The coating on that chicken with the sesame seeds,
I think that is lovely.
Claire, of course, was fast-tracked straight through,
with the quality of her Korean chicken.
What else has she got?
I'm making fresh pasta for my dish today.
Trying to cling onto a little bit of summer,
like a bit of lemon, a bit of basil, a bit of burrata.
I'll take you to the Amalfi Coast, you know.
Not literally, I can't afford it, but...
The filling, whipped burrata. Yeah.
Burrata is a sort of even younger version of mozzarella.
And did your mind immediately go to making pasta... Yes.
..when you saw the brief?
It's something that I love doing.
I get so much relief out of it.
Like, just hand rolling it and making it, it's just nice.
When you've had, like, a bit of a crappy day,
you can just come home and take it out on the pasta dough,
and it's very, like, meditative.
How are you feeling about the competition now?
Erm...
..ask me in about 30 minutes.
A sharp, sour burrata inside a piece of pasta. Wonderful.
When you bite into it, it should explode with cheese.
Should have ample filling in there.
And then toasted breadcrumbs, giving it texture.
That pasta dough needs to be lovely and thin,
and there has to be more filling than dough.
Otherwise, it's just this doughy thing with a tiny bit of cheese.
Half an hour left, guys. Half an hour left.
Born in northern India, 40-year-old chartered accountant Anurag
now lives in Essex,
and credits his cooking skills to his late mother.
In the audition, he impressed with stunning presentation
and the flavours of his heritage.
Great cookery, great technique, and absolutely delicious.
I can't really compare this experience to anything.
I think this is the best and most exciting experience of my life.
I love spreadsheets.
It just makes your life so easy.
So when it comes to MasterChef,
I couldn't think of any better way to plan my cook.
Today my biggest worry is, because I'm cooking something
which is very regional to Indian cuisine,
and to appreciate that food,
somebody needs to be aware about it, at least.
What are you making for us today?
So I'm making a dosa for you.
I love dosas.
They are one of the greatest expressions of batter in the world,
so I'm very excited by this.
So dosa is a savoury Indian crepe,
with spiced mashed potatoes, with sambar,
which is a lentil vegetable stew,
served with idli, with a couple of chutneys.
What's an idli?
This is like dumplings.
So idli got semolina, a lot of spices.
And do you make dosa at home a lot? Yes, I do.
When I was growing up,
we didn't have any exposure to any foreign cuisine whatsoever.
So dosa was southern India, that was a kind of a foreign country
for north Indians, so it used to be a treat for us.
Anurag's making two completely different batters.
One batter, made from rice, to make dosa,
and the other batter, made from semolina and water, to make idli.
Idli is steamed. Dosa are fried.
I've never seen idli on MasterChef before.
We've only ever seen dosa on MasterChef once before,
and it didn't work,
so I just hope that Anurag is able to get this right,
because I think it sounds fantastic.
Calm down, dear.
Born in Wales and living in Scotland,
46-year-old Jo is mum to four children.
She was inspired to cook as a child by both her mother and grandmother.
In the audition round, she needed to pare back on quantity.
I'd like to see Jo just calm it down a little bit
and do a couple of things really well,
than lots of things and not get them quite right.
Today I am making a chicken curry pie
with an onion bhaji lid,
and some spiced fondant potatoes,
some cauliflower and paneer, and a pickle and a raita.
Oh, dear, I've done it again, haven't I?
How do I put this? What are you thinking, Jo?!
This sounds like a ridiculous amount of stuff to do.
This is quite pared back for me.
You've got a pastry case. Bottom and sides? Yep.
And then the filling is? So you've got chicken curry,
and cauliflower and paneer.
Does it get mixed in with the chicken? No.
It's separate? Separate. I'm hiding it in the pie
so it doesn't look like I've put too much on the plate.
What about the bhaji top? Where'd that come from?
There might have been wine involved.
I love onion bhajis.
How did you feel about cooking for Jay?
I'm a little bit excited.
Your face lit up when he walked in.
Yeah. Why's that?
Sunday's not a Sunday till I've read your column.
This is a woman of impeccable taste.
JOHN:Jo's taken some chicken, cooked them in a pressure cooker.
In another pan, she's got paneer,
that lovely cheese from India, with cauliflower,
which she's roasting with spices.
The amount of sauce into that pie is really important,
and Jo's reducing that curry sauce down so it's really, really thick.
I hope we don't end up with a pastry cup which is dry,
with a pie filling which is dry,
and a dry onion bhaji across the top.
Jo's given herself a huge amount of work.
She seems to be soldiering on, but I'm concerned right now.
I'm a bit nervous about my pie cases,
but hopefully I'm not serving soggy bottoms.
Come on, babies.
Contestants, you have five minutes.
I'm really short on time. I think they're OK.
Come on, mate. You've got three minutes.
That last dosa's going to have to go on last minute.
Oh, my God. I can't breathe.
Your pie case is still in the oven? Yeah. Whoa!
Final minute. Final 60 seconds.
Sod it.
I'm going to have to go for it, I think.
Cooked? Yeah. Doing good.
Your time's up.
Well done, all of you.
Oh, my Lord.
Oh!
Oh, that was right up to the wire.
I didn't think I was going to get that done.
Ow!
The bhajis were a real rush.
Anurag, please come and join us.
Chartered accountant Anurag has made two batters,
one for a fried dosa, filled with a spiced mashed potato,
and the other for an idli,
a steamed spiced dumpling of lentil and semolina,
served with sambar,
a lentil-based vegetable stew,
a coconut chutney,
a tomato and peanut chutney, and a roasted peanut salad.
Everything is delicious.
I'm loving the peanut salad.
The idli is gorgeous.
The key thing is I asked you to make a batter or dough the star,
and you did that with the idli and the dosa.
This is remarkable. I'm just going to carry on eating,
and they're going to talk to you.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Your dosa is thin.
It's lovely and crispy.
You toasted it beautifully.
And then inside that goes these beautiful spiced potatoes.
That's fantastic.
Then we got the idli, this lovely sort of almost soft,
like a savoury marshmallow in texture,
with two absolutely brilliant chutneys.
I think it's fantastic.
I just keep going back in and nibbling more and more of it.
It's addictive.
I'm amazed you got all the work done in the short space of time,
and it really is quite delicious.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Really appreciate.
When I was leaving for the day, I looked at my mum's picture,
and I said, "Mum, I'm going to make dosa today."
And kind of, like, I heard that she said,
"Yes, go, go ahead and make me proud."
So I really feel very blessed.
Personal trainer Cliodhna
has cooked tempura squid,
served with a black garlic squid ink aioli,
and a caper and raisin puree.
Lovely crisp batter on the squid.
The squid's well cooked.
There's proper seasoning in that batter as well. Well done.
Is the only aioli on there the stripe?
Yes.
That's not easy to eat.
I would have liked more of that aioli.
I would have liked a big pile of it, actually.
The raisin and capers,
you've got this wonderful sweetness from the raisins
and then the sharpness of the caper at the same time,
which, with the pepper that's on the outside of that squid,
I think it really works.
I've got to tell you, I'd pay for that in a restaurant.
Oh, thank you.
I'm kicking myself a bit because they wanted more of the aioli.
There's a massive dish of it as well.
LAUGHTER
But John said he'd pay for my food in a restaurant, so that was, like,
the highest compliment I could ever think to receive.
Toy developer Omar
has cooked a cod and onion bhaji,
served on smoked aloo gobi mash,
with a cucumber raita,
date and tamarind chutney,
and a chunky curry sauce.
Your bhaji is fulfilling the brief, and it is full of undulation.
The fish and the onion, it works very, very well.
And then underneath, you've got your mash, which is deep and rich
and comforting, and it goes very, very well.
I love this curry sauce.
It's a proper slap about the chops.
I just love all of it.
It's really brave for anybody to walk in here
and try and create something completely different
from anything we've ever eaten before in our lives,
and I applaud your bravery.
Your bhaji, I think, is fantastic.
And I love the sweetness of that raita.
That lovely date chutney I think is really good.
You are as much an inventor as you are a cook.
Your dishes aren't ever conventional.
This one, I'm really enjoying.
I like the bhaji with a bit of fish in it.
And I was very, very doubtful, Omar.
Jay said he loved it.
I literally felt like I could stand there and cry.
Just wanted to call my mum, and just was like a five-year-old.
Mum of four Jo
has cooked a half and half pie with two fillings,
one with chicken curry,
and the other a spiced cauliflower paneer,
topped with an onion bhaji lid,
served with spiced fondant potatoes,
cucumber pickle,
and a beetroot raita.
You like to do a lot, don't you?
I didn't think I was doing a lot. Right.
It doesn't really look like a pie to me.
You have made a receptacle for quite a dry curry.
I'm afraid the bhaji just hasn't worked.
There's not enough batter and it's not crisp, and you know that.
Yep. There are some lovely things here.
I love the pickle. I love the raita.
And I love the spicing of the chicken curry.
I was disappointed when I cut into the pie,
and it didn't ooze out sauce or gravy,
because that's the point of a pie, right?
But the paneer with the cauliflower, the paneer is salty and tangy,
almost sour, like a yoghurt, which is nice.
Oh, I wanted it to work because I think a curry pie
sounds like a lovely idea with a bhaji top.
Jo, we know you can cook.
This hasn't worked, has it? No.
Thanks, Jo.
I'm such a fan of Jay Rayner,
and to get the opportunity to cook for him
and then just... Oh!
Gutted.
Bricklayer Adam has cooked waffles and deep-fried buttermilk chicken,
chilli jam,
cabbage slaw,
and frickles, served with a whipped maple bacon butter.
Adam...
..you've cut up the waffles!
These are great ingredients,
and I'm just not sure why you've done it like this.
You've cooked some lovely chicken, you really have.
You fulfilled the brief on the batter front.
You made a lovely waffle.
And I like your slaw.
The frickles, the battered pickles, lovely.
You know, technically it's great,
but then you have to bring them all together on the plate
in a way that makes sense.
When you cut up food, as soon as you chop it up and it's hot,
the moisture, it's steam - it disappears.
That means that bit of chicken that was lovely and moist
inside its casing has gone dry.
That means my little waffle, which had crispy bits around the outside,
and lovely soggy bits in the middle,
has now not got the beauty of that texture any more.
You've heard what they've said about chopping it up,
and they're absolutely right. Do you want to hear some good news?
Please. You can cook.
That thing tastes fantastic.
To chop up a chicken and waffles for Jay Rayner,
who absolutely hated his food chopped for him.
But I'm just so happy they liked the taste.
And my wife told me to cut it up.
Cheese and wine shop owner Claire
has cooked hand-rolled tortellini pasta,
filled with whipped burrata,
served with a home-made lemon garlic butter,
a Parmesan black pepper crumb, and basil chips.
Claire, great flavours.
Like the lightness of the cheese,
and I'm picking up a bit of lemon zest as well,
which freshens the whole thing.
Across the breadcrumbs, there's pepper,
and I'm also getting nice basil from your basil crisps.
However, the pasta is a little thick, especially where it joins.
You look like you know that. I do, yeah.
The issue with a filled pasta is you need a lot of filling,
and they usually should be about 50-50,
and it needs about four times the amount of that.
That's why it's difficult to make.
I agree with John.
There does need to be more filling, and a little more seasoning,
but I really do adore the crumb underneath.
I could sit with a big bowl of that and a spoon,
and I'd be very happy indeed.
Thanks.
It wasn't great. It wasn't perfect.
It wasn't what I wanted to put out.
I knew my pasta dough was just too thick.
I shouldn't have hand-rolled it, I should have used the machine.
Marketing director Forest
has made a sweet shortcrust pastry tart,
filled with a layer of blueberry jelly, with blackberry liqueur,
and a frangipane layer,
topped with Chantilly cream,
encrusted with chopped caramelised nuts,
cornflower petals, and sea salt.
It's unadorned,
and the excitement is when we cut through that, isn't it?
Indeed, yeah.
Oh! Ho-ho!
Splendid.
Technically, it's brilliant.
But technical brilliance is for nothing if it's not nice to eat,
and it is very nice to eat.
You interpreted dough as a crisp, thin pastry shell.
You executed that in the time given you extremely well.
You've taken us to the best of Parisian patisserie. Thank you.
Thank you.
Awesome.
Absolutely awesome.
Inside, that frangipane, rich with almond, but lovely and soft.
Above that, we've got a jelly made from blueberries.
Across the top, then I've got peanuts.
Underneath that, really lovely cream,
lightly whipped to the stage it's in danger of collapsing,
and I'm amazed that you've actually held it together.
It's just a thing of deliciousness.
Thank you.
Forest, this is the work of a craftsman.
It's lovely and light and fruity, creamy,
and just perfectly yummy in every way.
I almost didn't know what to react.
I just stood there, smiling and, "Yeah, thank you. Thank you."
But at the same time, a part of me inside were feeling like,
"Yes! Yes! Yes!"
We've seen a few moist eyes today, people getting a bit emotional.
I understand it, because you really have put your all into it,
and you've done the thing that is closest to my heart,
which is fed me well.
Thank you.
We said at the start of this,
we can only take the best cooks with us.
It's going to be a tough decision.
We'll call you back in as soon as we can. Thanks very much. Off you go.
Great round, great food.
Show-stopping dishes.
Huge smiles on our faces.
Good brief from Jay. Come on.
Before we go any further, we have to shine a spotlight
on the beautiful tart made by Forest.
He cooked today at a professional level, and that tart was beautiful.
Forest has got himself a place in the next round.
Somebody else today I think did sterling work,
and that was Anurag.
Dosa and an idli? This is great cookery, John!
And so much work in a short space of time.
Anurag's going through, we agree that? Yeah.
Cliodhna - tempura squid.
It was pretty. It was interesting.
I thought it was beautiful.
Do you want to put Cliodhna through? Absolutely.
Do you know what I liked with Omar today?
I think that invention really worked for me.
A bhaji with strips of cod in it.
The flavours were great.
Omar has got himself a place in the next round.
Good on Omar.
We've now got a discussion between the three
who actually made mistakes.
Now, Adam made us a plate of what I call promise,
and he chopped it all up.
You can't take what's a big fun dish
and try and make it look like smart restaurant.
You mess it up, you rip its soul out.
Jo made us a curry pie,
but what we had was we had a chicken curry with reduced sauce
inside a pastry cup.
In half of that curry pie,
we had cauliflower and paneer without any sauce at all.
And the bhaji, that didn't work. It wasn't crispy enough.
Claire's dish - I thought the flavours were great.
But the pasta was too thick.
There wasn't enough filling, which made it dry.
We said at the start of this we can only take the best cooks.
Who stays? Who goes?
Mm.
I didn't fulfil the brief.
It was just a pastry bowl with some stuff in it... Ugh.
They might completely get rid of me because of how I'd served it.
Chopping up food for a food critic was just stupid.
I know that I could go home.
My dough wasn't MasterChef quality, so...
..we'll see.
Thank you, all of you.
Your cooking today made for an absolutely great day.
At the start of this, we did say
that we can only take the best cooks with us.
We've decided...
..that two of you are leaving us.
The first person leaving us...
..Jo.
Sorry, Jo.
We've loved meeting you. We really hope you've enjoyed it.
Honestly, I've absolutely loved every second. Bless you. Take care.
Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.
The second person leaving the competition...
..Claire.
Claire, nice to have met you. You too. Thank you.
I really hope you enjoyed yourself. Thank you. Cheers.
The MasterChef experience has been great.
It's been a right laugh, and the contestants have been lovely,
and I'm so glad the ones who have gone through are going through,
because they're brilliant, and they deserve it.
I didn't do as well as I hoped I would, but I did...
I'm really proud of myself.
And what an experience. I mean, genuinely, what an experience.
It's been magic.
One, two, three, four, five.
Journey continues, right? The adventure carries on.
Come on!
Some say roller-coaster, I think tightrope.
I feel like I'm walking it. I could fall off any time.
Smashed it! It's all good.
Last woman standing. I can't believe it.
I'm just going to have to, you know, take the lead,
and try and show them all who's boss.
It is amazing. It's been a great day. Really, really happy about it.
The competition continues, and it just gets better and better.
But we are looking for four quarterfinalists.
This is where the pressure really starts to mount.
We've got some seriously talented cooks in this group.
This is a battle royal.
Definitely a tough competition.
Everyone's really bringing their A-game,
so you've got to step up and try and beat them.
Feeling a bit excited, nervous, all mixed bag.
I'm just trying to channel the energy to be productive
as opposed to letting it get the better of me and ruining me, really.
Welcome back.
We have set you a challenge -
I think an incredibly exciting but not easy challenge -
and that is to cook a dish featuring chocolate.
Your dish can be whatever it wants to be.
It can be sweet. It could be savoury.
You can use whatever you want in your dish
that is going to champion chocolate.
One hour 30 minutes, four quarterfinal places,
two portions of your dish.
At the end of this, sadly, one of you is going home.
Let's cook.
The brief is chocolate,
and it sounds very tempting, very delicious.
So today my dish is inspired by a volcano, actually.
I am not trying to make a volcano looking-like dish,
but kind of picking the inspiration,
how the Earth has different layers, crust, texture,
so that's what I'm portraying in my dish today.
So my dish is a chocolate dome filled with coffee cream
and raspberry tequila gel,
which will sit on top of chocolate brownie,
served with raspberry sorbet and butterscotch sauce.
Whoa.
The raspberry, pretty bright vibrant red colour, represent lava.
Last month, we visited Lanzarote.
The whole island looked chocolate, so I thought,
"OK, can I make something in the MasterChef kitchen?"
Wow. Mate, you have got a creative bent, that's for sure.
What Anurag is doing is huge amounts of process.
We've got a tempered chocolate dome. Tempered chocolate -
you take it up to one temperature, bring it down again.
It means that all the crystals disappear,
and you end up with a lovely shiny piece.
I hope that dome is really lovely and thin,
so when you crack it with a spoon, it does just that, it cracks open.
We haven't seen a sweet dish from you yet, have we?
Yeah. And you'll be surprised how big a sweet tooth I have.
I make my own birthday cake every time.
I think that might be a tiny little bit sad.
No, no, it's not! I can imagine lots of people at home going, "Aw!"
The sad thing would be to eat a bad cake on your own birthday.
Exactly!
I think that even without all the good feedback,
there is already a pressure to keep up the standard.
I know how my dishes are meant to go,
so in the end, it's whether I am able to produce my dish
in the way that I wanted.
So today I'm making a Paris-Brest,
which is a typical French patisserie
where you have a ring of choux pastry.
And then what I'm doing is I'm putting in praline cream in there.
I don't want to put you under pressure,
but a Paris-Brest may be my favourite, favourite pastry.
It commemorates the famous bicycle race from Paris to Brest...
It does. ..and that's why it's a bicycle wheel, right? Indeed, yeah.
No chocolate, traditionally, in a Paris-Brest,
so how difficult was it to introduce it?
So what I'm doing is that I'm putting a chocolate craquelin
on top of the choux pastry,
so that it melts into a bit of a cookie texture on top of it,
and then topped with a chocolate ring.
Do it well.
Choux pastry make up things like profiteroles, chocolate eclairs.
If that choux pastry doesn't work, and it's not lovely and crispy
on the bottom, and hollow on the inside, and it's doughy,
we've got a real problem.
Craquelin across the top -
it's a coating of chocolate that, as the actual choux pastry bakes,
it cracks into little tiny pieces,
giving you a really lovely rich flavour.
But is that enough chocolate for our chocolate dessert?
30 minutes have gone.
You do have an hour left.
Now that there's less of us, if you do mess up,
it's going to stick out like a sore thumb, really.
It can make it a little bit intimidating,
but I'm quite a tenacious person,
and I won't stop until I've given it my absolute all.
Cliodhna, actually, you look a little bit stressed. Are you OK?
I'm quite nervous today.
I'm just trying to not let the nerves get the better of me.
What are you making?
Today I'm making a dark chocolate and sea salt tart
with a candied orange and pistachio cream.
So I'm using the dark chocolate for the tart
and I'm using the white chocolate in my pistachio cream.
Are you a chocolate lover? I absolutely adore chocolate.
You could put chocolate on chocolate, dip it in chocolate,
smother it in chocolate, it wouldn't be chocolaty enough for me!
I absolutely love the stuff.
Another not-personal-trainer comment coming from me!
We've got a sweet crust pastry base.
On top of that, we've got a ganache made from bitter chocolate
with sea salt in it,
and that is going to make everything salty,
so we've got to make sure that pastry case is lovely and sweet.
She's taking pistachio and white chocolate,
mixing the two together, and putting that with whipped cream.
That cream is going to be really sweet.
Cliodhna is using raw pistachio nuts,
she's not using pistachio paste,
so hopefully we have the flavour of pistachio nuts.
It's just a bit of a strange one again today.
Like, I'm just doing something a bit odd,
but something that I really love and love eating.
Omar, you're doing something savoury in a chocolate round, aren't you?
Yeah. I am.
If anybody was going to be different, it was going to be you,
right? Can't be normal, Gregg, it's too boring.
What is the dish?
So my dish today is lamb shanks with a chocolate gochujang sauce.
There's roasted butternut squash and pickled chillies.
Where did this come about?
So last year for my 30th, we went to a really great Mexican restaurant
and did, like, a chef's table,
and that's where the chocolate thing in kind of savoury
started to kind of play around in my head a little bit.
Yeah. Central and South America,
they use chocolate in savoury dishes a lot... Yeah.
..but not a lot in Europe. No, not a lot in Barnsley either.
Omar, being Omar, is taking lamb shanks,
which are really quite British.
He's dusted it in cocoa, so it should go quite bitter.
Gochujang from Korea.
Gochujang, a paste made from sugar and chillies.
And then chocolate, which was coming from Central America,
and putting the whole lot together.
We're on an Omar adventure.
I've had chocolate with goose. I've had it with chicken.
I've had it with a bit of seared beef.
I've never, ever had it with lamb.
I think the sauce is probably, like, the hero of the dish.
It brings everything together. It's where the main chocolate flavour is.
It's got a lot of sweetness, a lot of heat,
so it's trying to find a balancing act of getting that right.
You have 30 minutes left.
Adam's making a chocolate biscuit-based tart.
He's filling it with a salted chocolate coffee ganache.
He's serving that with a toffee sauce inside the actual tart itself.
It should be lots of different layers and different textures.
Lovely.
But Adam seems to have a problem getting his tart cases out.
My tart cases are stuck in the mould at the minute,
so I've put them in to bake a little bit longer,
so I'm guessing that's what it is. They're not stiff enough.
With the whole dish, Adam's making some white chocolate shards.
And we've got a banana ice cream,
but he's making a speedy banana ice cream.
I'm going to blitz the bananas down in the blender,
and because they're frozen,
it should still have, like, an ice-creamy texture.
And then I'm going to stick it in the blast chiller.
I'm up against it, yeah, I'm not going to lie.
What do you think you have to do to grab yourself a quarterfinal place?
Not chop anything up on the plate!
I think I need to show you that I can present a dish
and every element is on there for a reason.
And I feel like this dish has... Everything's got a place.
I came into this competition quite cocky,
and then I got humbled by a couple of comments.
This is a brief designed for me.
I'm 100% addicted to chocolate, and I'm not even going to lie.
And if worst comes to worst,
I've got a chocolate dish that I can eat on the way home...crying.
12 minutes for your desserts... and for your lamb.
OMAR CHUCKLES
I'm filling my chocolate tempered domes with some coffee cream.
Yeah...I think I'm in control.
The choux pastry was on the flat side,
but taste is still there.
Lamb's not as tender as it could be,
but I'm just going to have to go with it now at this point.
The pressure's really on. Things are starting to go wrong.
SHE GASPS I've BLEEP it!
Oh, BLEEP!
The tart's collapsed,
because the pastry was still warm when I've tried to move it,
so I'm only down to one tart.
Right, come on. I can put one good plate of food together.
You've got three minutes.
Come on!
My tart popper.
Final touches, please. Ladies and gentlemen, final touches!
Time's up. Our time is up. Well done.
If you don't laugh, you'll cry.
I've got one version of my dish, so...
..it's just not gone right, but it is what it is.
I know it looks shocking, but it's going to taste good, hopefully.
Omar, are you ready? Come on.
The only person to do a chocolate savoury dish.
Yeah.
Omar has cooked lamb shank
with roasted butternut squash glazed in cocoa powder,
served with fresh grapes, pickled chillies,
whipped feta cream,
and a toasted cashew crumb
with a chocolate and Korean spice paste sauce.
Lamb, chocolate, cheese, grapes.
I love it.
I absolutely love it!
There is something of the Nutty Professor about you,
and I mean that with affection.
The lamb is cooked nicely.
That chocolate sauce is great.
You get the bitterness of the chocolate,
a slight bit of sweetness,
and then it goes into chilli heat, a lot of chilli heat.
The grapes are offering a little bit of sweet relief from the heat.
And, of course, you've got whipped cheese that's salty.
I'm very, very much enjoying this.
And I approached it with a great deal of caution, let me tell you.
The butternut squash is nice and sweet,
but turned bitter because you fried it in that lovely cocoa powder.
I think that's really, really clever.
I don't know at what stage your experimenting will go wrong,
but right now, you're on a pretty good ride.
I think some of the other dishes that I've done for John and Gregg
probably haven't been executed as well,
so they've questioned around the inventiveness and the creativity,
but I think today, they really saw the best of me.
Inspired by the volcanic island of Lanzarote,
Anurag has made tempered chocolate shards and sphere
filled with coffee cream, and a raspberry and tequila jelly,
served on a chocolate brownie
with fresh raspberries,
a raspberry sorbet...
..and a butterscotch toffee sauce.
The amount of work that's gone in here is quite extraordinary.
The chocolate with the raspberries and the coffee
I think is wonderful.
The brownie's nicely made.
Your raspberry sorbet is really lovely and smooth, and still sharp,
and flavoursome with raspberries, and really fragrant -
almost like a Turkish delight in flavour.
I really like it.
A perfect toffee sauce.
Not too sweet.
That's without a tempered globe of chocolate
with a coffee mousse inside that raspberry gel,
with the almost heat of tequila in it,
all sitting on top of a brownie.
This is exceptional work!
Thank you very much. It means a lot to me.
I'm feeling relieved.
I'm happy I was able to deliver what I planned for.
It just came together as I wanted.
Cliodhna has made a dark chocolate sea salt tartlet
served with a pistachio and white chocolate cream
and candied orange.
Gregg seems to have missed out here. I'm sorry, Gregg.
What's happened? The tart shell just burst in my hand, unfortunately,
so I've just decided to serve one as I'd like it to look.
OK.
We're going to cut it in half and share it. Perfect.
Your pastry is very fine,
maybe too fine to hold that amount of chocolate ganache in there.
The chocolate work is really well done.
It's just set, it's not too sweetened.
There's a little bit of salt on there as well,
which just emphasises the sweetness. I'm really, really enjoying that.
The pistachio and white chocolate cream,
I'm not getting a great deal of pistachio from it,
and it's going a little grainy.
On dissection, it seems that I have gifted Mr Wallace with my salt.
I would like the saltiness of that chocolate,
because your white chocolate and pistachio cream is actually sweet.
So is the chocolate filling, and so is the pastry,
and it needs that salt across the top just to break that away. Yeah.
I'm absolutely gutted about how it's turned out today.
It would have been quite easy to just throw the towel in
when the tart burst in my hand,
and I didn't give up, so that's one thing I'm definitely proud of.
It's taking, like, every fibre of my being
to not let one of these tears roll down my face.
Forest has made his take on a classic French choux pastry -
Paris-Brest -
filled with praline cream,
lemon gel,
topped with chocolate craquelin and a tempered chocolate ring.
It's another very confident-looking dish.
It is sugary and sweet. That's fine with me.
You've used chocolate two ways.
One is like a crispy pastry across the top. That works.
I think your ring is worked really well.
That's beautifully tempered chocolate.
It's got really nice gloss to it, and it's fine.
It's breaking with the crack of a spoon.
I like the addition of the lemon.
You get the tartness and sharpness of the lemon first
before all that praline cream comes in.
I'm really happy with this.
A huge amount of work in here -
tempering chocolate beautifully, making that crust across the top,
doing a praline, making your creme patissiere.
But we have got an issue here.
I think your choux pastry has misbehaved on you.
It's quite thin and a little bit hard.
My choux pastry, I slightly put a bit too much egg in there,
but it wasn't disastrous, and the flavour was good.
I really hope that this is enough to get me to the next round.
Finally, Adam has made an almond chocolate biscuit tart,
filled with a layer of salted caramel toffee sauce
topped with a dark chocolate and coffee ganache,
served with a tempered white chocolate shard,
chocolate soil,
and banana ice cream.
It's not the prettiest dish in the world. No.
Is there supposed to be toffee sauce in the bottom there somewhere?
Yeah. I think it's merged in. Maybe it wasn't set enough.
I think that's naughty in there. Proper naughty.
There's butter and there's nuts, and there is salt in there as well.
Quite a bit of salt,
but that's all right because the other flavours are powerful.
It's dark, deep chocolate,
and it's got the finish of a roasted coffee as well.
I mean, it's absolutely lovely. I'm loving it.
You've definitely hit the brief with chocolate.
You used chocolate pastry. You've used a chocolate filling.
You've got a chocolate soil. That's good.
It just needs a lot more finesse.
Yeah.
But I like the flavour of chocolate and coffee. Yeah, same.
I'm happy. I've done... done the best I can do.
No. Sorry. Scratch that.
I feel like I could have done better.
Chocolate is tricky.
I'm not surprised we had mishaps.
However, along with the mishaps, we had some stunning work.
Omar - lamb shank with butternut squash, gochujang, chocolate.
An absolute invention all of his own.
He was the only one who did a savoury dish with the chocolate,
and it was fantastic.
Omar's got himself a quarterfinal place.
Anurag is nothing short of a phenomenon.
The amount of work that young man does is quite incredible.
I didn't have an issue with any bit of it.
It's good enough for a quarterfinal.
Oh, mate, he's more than good enough for a quarterfinal.
After that, really, I think we've got mistakes going on
from the other three.
The fact is there are only two more quarterfinal places.
Forest made us a Paris-Brest.
The choux pastry wasn't quite right.
It wasn't a disaster, but it wasn't as light and as fluffy as he wanted.
But the chocolate ring was beautifully tempered.
I thought good work from Forest.
Adam gave us a chocolate and salted caramel tart.
We want a bit of finesse.
Could he have made it look better? I kind of think he could.
However, I liked that toffee met salt,
chocolate, coffee.
It was rich. It was dark. I liked it.
Cliodhna had a disaster.
The outside of that tart, the pastry was really, really fine -
so fine that one of them collapsed in her hand.
We both agree that pistachio cream didn't work.
Not quite sure if it was the white chocolate that made it go grainy,
or the cream was slightly overwhipped.
It needed more flavour of pistachio.
And we were supposed to get two tarts, and we had one.
I'm taking the negative comments.
I'd really like to take that into the next dish
and show them that I can come back and do something really strong.
I came in every day thinking that things would go wrong,
and it is a matter of how many things go wrong.
I think I am definitely concerned.
Unfortunately, my bad day in the kitchen was today,
and you can't be asked to produce two plates of food
and then just come out with one that's not absolutely perfect.
You five have been brilliant.
An incredible example of fantastic amateur talent.
As you know, there are only four quarterfinal places to give.
That does mean that one of you is leaving the competition.
The person leaving us is...
It's Cliodhna.
Cliodhna, love your fight. You've been a great contestant.
Thank you very much indeed. You're leaving us. Thank you so much.
I should have made some spare tart cases,
but I just thought I'd cut some time,
and, yeah, ultimately,
that was what's cost me my place in the competition.
Congratulations. You've got yourself a quarterfinal place.
Come on!
RELIEVED LAUGHTER
To be able to do this odd dish
that I've just made in my little kitchen in Barnsley,
and bring it to the MasterChef kitchen,
and it be so well received, it was amazing.
I feel ecstatic. Relieved, more or less.
Yeah, I got the quarterfinal place.
I'm so happy. I couldn't ask for more.
I think today's a bit of a close call,
but I'm so glad that I got through.
I made a lot of mistakes today, and I'm not going to do that again.
I'm just...overwhelmed. Absolutely overwhelmed.
Next time, it's the quarterfinal,
and Omar, Adam, Anurag, and Forest
return to face their toughest challenge yet,
as they battle for a place in knockout week.
It's like a sandwich but on steroids.
It is technically genius.