It's the MasterChef quarterfinal,
and this week's four best cooks are back.
Really excited and, strangely, really nervous today.
The butterflies are like, it's a farm!
The pressure is on.
It's on before I even touch the stove.
I just want to put out the best food I can,
and I've only got one chance to do it.
When you go in there, the adrenaline gets going and you're like,
"I just want to get on and cook and do it."
Tonight, their toughest challenge so far...
You need to roll and fry as fast as you can.
..stands between them and a place in knockout week.
It's really quite delicious.
Just to relax you even further,
you're supposed to be serving now.
I'm impressed by their fight, their drive, their desire.
If they've got this far, they're going to want to go further.
I think we've got a great four.
I think we're in for a really exciting day.
Welcome to the MasterChef quarterfinal, and you four
should be really proud of yourselves.
But you need to prove that you've got what it takes to go
even further in this competition.
To help us make the ultimate decision on who goes
into knockout week,
we have invited two past champions and a semifinalist of MasterChef.
Irini Tzortzoglou,
Tom Rhodes
and Nisha Parmar.
You have a massive job.
1 hour and 15 minutes to cook for us
two courses and four plates of each course.
At the end of this, we will only take the best cooks with us.
Ladies and gentlemen, we wish you the very best of luck.
Let's cook.
I've got quite a lot to do, yeah.
It's going to be a quite tall order.
Miles, very creative, very inventive.
I love his flavours, but being creative means
that he could divide the crowd.
I really like the idea of classic French cooking, but as usual,
with my dishes, I'm changing things up a little bit.
It's not going to be traditional.
There's going to be a French person somewhere crying watching this.
But don't worry, it's all in hand.
Miles? Yes. Quarterfinal. Yep.
What are you going to make for us?
To start with, I'm doing torched mackerel on butternut squash
with a sauce vierge.
Sauce vierge classically tomatoes, shallots, olive oil.
My version is going to be a little bit different.
I'm using pickled pears rather than tomatoes to add
that fresh sort of pickled note.
And dessert is going to be a clafoutis with nutmeg,
cardamom, dates, raspberries.
Are you at all concerned of the guests reading a menu
that says pear and mackerel?
I guess they're probably looking at it thinking, "What's he doing?"
But just want to show that I'm daring enough
to just try different things.
Mackerel with a torched skin. Nice crispy skin, beautiful.
Oily fish, great.
He says a sauce vierge.
But it's not, is it?
He's taking bits of the sauce vierge and he's just playing
around with it.
I've never, ever had a mackerel with a pear, but I'm willing to keep
an open mind.
Followed by a clafoutis.
Clafoutis being a lovely pudding
made from a batter, classically done with cherries.
We have got dates and raspberries.
It could be delicious.
The actual batter itself, nice and light, soft across the top.
But if it's over-whipped, it's like a souffle
and it completely collapses.
We don't want a collapse.
This is going to be tight today.
It's just trying to find a balance between not rushing and doing things
properly and then enough speed to get things set.
I have fallen in love with Thuy's Vietnamese flavours.
It's really good, it's exciting,
it's vibrant, it's colourful.
Tell us what you're going to cook for us.
I'm going to make a twist on a Vietnamese banh mi.
Many people might not know about Vietnam.
There was a huge French influence,
and so a banh mi is a French baguette,
usually filled with Vietnamese flavours, pickles and meat. That's right.
So instead of making baguettes, which take too long to do
in an hour, I'm going to make a flatbread.
And what sort of meat are you putting in this banh mi?
I'm making a Vietnamese chicken marinade.
Why did you choose the banh mi?
It's something I have always as a child.
When you go to school in the morning, your mum
would give you some money.
You'd go to the stand, you'd pick up your sandwich for the day.
And it's something I eat a lot for my friends.
OK, and then dessert?
It's going to be a lemon posset topped with passion fruit
and a shortbread beside for a little bit of texture contrast.
Banh mi, I really love.
We're getting Vietnamese flavours in a salad.
Garlic mayonnaise, chicken which has been cooked
with lots of different flavours, should be sharp and chilli hot,
with a piece of flatbread that you can make into your own wrap.
I really like a good sandwich,
but is it enough for a quarterfinal?
Lemon posset, one, it's got to be really, really lovely and sharp.
But if that posset doesn't set,
you've got yourself a lemony, creamy drink.
That's no good to anybody.
Everything, it's all over the place.
Linda has impressed me.
We've seen lemon tart, an amazing chocolate fondant
with a caramel centre, and we've even seen North African chickpeas
with perfectly cooked fish.
She just needs to give us a bit of polish.
From lemon tarts to Moroccan fish, an octopus?
I know. I must be mad!
What are your two courses?
So I'm doing an octopus and a clam linguine,
and a fig and apple pudding
with butterscotch sauce.
Do you like octopus? I love it.
You cook octopus at home a lot?
A few times, yeah, but not one that size!
LINDA LAUGHS
If Linda can cook this octopus properly, I'll be really impressed,
cos she's only got an hour to cook it, chop it up and serve
the whole thing.
Oh, cook, cook, cook.
Right.
I don't normally cook that much in an hour and 15 minutes.
I'm normally taking my time
in the kitchen at home.
She's making a beautiful pudding.
We've got apples across the top
and they're going to have figs inside.
I'm hoping she puts enough fig in there so that flavour permeates.
I'm also hoping that she's really greased those moulds,
because if she doesn't, it could stick.
It's so stressful, because if that goes all wrong, and all them people
are trying your food,
I am so worried about it.
I'm laughing, but inside I'm dying!
Oh, it's smelling good.
Owen is a flavour master in my opinion.
That poached cod
in that tamarind sauce was absolutely delicious.
That pork tenderloin the last round with that exquisite mushroom
sauce was impressive.
Everything he cooks makes the crowd happy.
I'm taking a big risk in this round, as I have a lot
of things to prepare.
So it's going to be challenging.
I'm going to listen to what my mum says.
"Owen, whatever you do, keep your eye on the stove."
My first course is chicken liver,
piri-piri, with a roti flatbread.
The next course is salmon en croute.
So, salmon in pastry with cream spinach?
That's correct. You've made this before?
Once, for my partner.
She wanted to be surprised, and this was it.
So she was like, "Wow!"
First was the wow factor.
And then when she just cut through,
oh!
It was a wonderful evening.
Owen realises he's up against a time constraint.
And right now he's doing two things at once.
With his right hand, he's mixing up some roti bread,
and with his left hand,
he's crushing up bird's eye chillies to make his piri-piri.
Piri-piri spice, nice hot chilli
around the outside with cumin and coriander
all mixed together. Lovely.
Salmon en croute.
Whoa, that's ambitious.
He's cooking the spinach before he puts
the spinach between the fish and the pastry.
And I hope he really squashes that, drains it.
If not, the moisture's going to come out of the fish.
More moisture's going to come out of the spinach.
And you can only guess how soggy his pastry's going to be.
I'm so excited to be here.
MasterChef has changed my life.
I'm now a private chef and I have the amazing job
of cooking for some well-known celebrities.
So I've actually been living my dream.
You are so nervous in this round, but I would say to them,
"Go for it. Just create pleasing, lovely food."
I like to think that I can be quite kind,
because I know what pressure the contestants are under,
but I'm still looking for excellence.
Miles, seven minutes on your first course.
We doing all right? Yeah.
Fish is there, ready to be torched?
Fish is ready to be torched.
It's quite bold to put pears and the sauce vierge
against that mackerel.
It's definitely an ambitious cook.
Hopefully it's not too fruity.
Right, samphire.
The tempura samphire,
that's got to be really light, really crispy, cos if it turns out
greasy with the mackerel, that's not going to be nice at all.
Looking pretty sexy.
You have a minute to get this out.
Very pretty.
Come on, let's go. Let's go!
Go, go, go!
Hello. Hi, Miles. Hello, Miles.
So, today I've made you torched mackerel, sauce vierge
with pickled pear, tempura samphire,
butternut squash cooked in chicken fat.
Enjoy. Thank you. Thank you, Miles.
See you later, guys.
I mean, this dish looked stunning and it tasted stunning.
The mackerel, cooked beautifully where the flesh has just got
that glisten on it.
I think what he's really nailed here is the cooking on that tempura.
It was so light, so crispy.
Do you know what I really love?
That pickling of the pear coming through with the sauce vierge.
It's very clever.
I would pay good money to eat this in a restaurant.
It's totally up my street.
I got a piece of mackerel which has been filleted
very, very well.
Sauce vierge is lovely and sharp.
I like the sweetness of the butternut squash against the oily
fish, and the pear, I really, really like.
That is a really elegant dish.
Miles, you've got desserts to do, my friend, you've got 15 minutes.
Clafoutis is quite a difficult dessert to get perfectly right.
And I really want to make sure that those spices come through.
I think with the dates, the nutmeg and cardamom,
I think that could work really well.
Hopefully the raspberries will give it a bit of lift
and a little bit of acidity.
Clafouti look OK?
They've sunken a little bit,
more than I would have liked them to, but...
Yeah, yeah, I'm happy with that.
Let's go.
Thank you very much. You're welcome.
So this is my version of a Clafouti with cardamom, nutmeg, thyme,
dates and raspberries, finished with creme fraiche,
seasoned with a bit of nutmeg.
Thank you. Thank you. Bye, guys. Good luck.
Thanks.
Oh, God, that's such a relief.
Yeah, I'm buzzing.
That was wicked day. I want to do it again.
Adrenaline is pumping, boy!
Oh!
The nutmeg and cardamom are coming through quite well.
The raspberries work really well with the spices.
It's quite delicious.
I like a little bit of the acidity of the raspberry
and the sweetness of the date.
I find it a little bit too rich.
I really like that he's played around with a classic Clafouti
and introduced some new flavours in there.
And that's what I like to see in the MasterChef kitchen.
As a clafouti, it sunk.
This is a date-raspberry pudding.
I like the dates at the bottom. They're nice.
They're not too sweet.
However, that batter mix is far, far too wet.
How many flatbreads have you made so far, Thuy?
This is my first one. Sorry.
Right, you've got eight minutes, Thuy, you need to roll and fry
as fast as you can.
Thuy's main course, a twist on chicken banh mi.
Oh, this is going to remind me of my Vietnamese holiday.
It's the best street food ever.
While those were cooking, can you plate up the rest?
Yes.
Go, mayonnaise, lettuce.
So, we've got the chicken, which hopefully
will be perfectly cooked.
I want a really light flatbread, but then we've got pickles,
we've got red onion, we've got a garlic mayonnaise.
Just to relax you even further,
you're supposed to be serving now.
Right, we've got to go now, Thuy. OK.
Five minutes over, Thuy.
Hello. Hi! Hello.
Please accept my apology for the lateness.
We've all been there.
Thuy's twist on a Vietnamese banh mi is chicken thighs in a fish sauce
chilli and garlic marinade,
served on flatbread with garlic mayonnaise,
lettuce, cucumber, pickled chilli, pickled onion and coriander.
It's a very big piece of chicken...
It is. ..for quite a small flatbread.
I can go for it.
Here we go.
Flatbread, it's very nice.
It's just charred, it's just thin enough.
OK, it could be bigger to help you roll it and eat it,
but I had a pretty good go.
The chicken's been cooked really well, and it's absorbed
the flavours of the chilli and the garlic.
Great flavours of fish sauce, great pickle, garlic in the mayo.
that little hint of chilli. I think she's done a fantastic job.
I'm really liking the buttery soft chicken.
I'm liking the crunch and the sharpness
of the pickled vegetables. I'm enjoying it.
But there's not a lot to this dish.
This is a flatbread with some things on top of it.
15 minutes. Lemon posset shortbread, yes?
I love Thuy's dessert.
The difficulty with such a simple dessert is if you spoil one
of the elements, the dessert is totally ruined.
Where's your posset?
It's in a glass chiller, it's not quite set. Oh!
Set, please set.
You happy with that, Thuy?
I prefer this a tiny bit more set.
Right. 30 seconds, Thuy.
I'm looking for a really nice, crisp shortbread to go
with that smooth lemon posset. That's a winner for me.
That's it. Finished? GREGG: Beautiful.Off you go.
So I made you a lemon posset and a nice passion fruit on top
and a side of shortbread.
I hope you enjoy it. Thank you.Thank you. Thank you.
I was really looking forward to the lemon posset, but there's
something about the texture of it
not having set that really puts me off.
I went for the shortbread and I find it undercooked in the middle.
She's packed loads of lemon flavour into that lemon posset,
but when I have it with the passion fruit,
it is mouth-puckeringly sharp.
I think that might be too sharp for some people.
It's a shame, but it's, yeah,
sadly not worked for Thuy.
That's not posset texture.
That's almost creme anglaise texture, which is a shame.
You need to be able to spoon that out, and right now
you could almost drink it.
So I know there are big issues that personally I wouldn't forgive,
cos I think, you know, it's the quarterfinal, you know,
you don't make these kind of mistakes.
But do you know what? I hope the flavour's good enough.
LINDA:So slippery.
So Linda's main is home-made
linguini with octopus and clams
cooked in tomatoes, garlic, chilli and parsley.
I am mega-excited about this.
I really want to see some nice, thin pasta with some nice bite
to it as well.
How are we doing here, Linda?
Erm, getting there! SHE LAUGHS
It's hard to find a Greek who doesn't like octopus,
but that also makes me a little bit of a tough critic.
Octopus is very tough and chewy when undercooked.
Are you happy with that, Linda? Yes. Yes. Well, yes.
Wonderful. Smells good.
It's not as neat you'd like it to be, but...
Well done. Thank you. Go for it, Linda.
For her main course, Linda is serving handmade linguine
with clams and braised octopus in a chilli, garlic and tomato sauce.
I think this was a really nice, light, fresh dish.
And she's been ambitious,
you know, she's picked two pieces of seafood which aren't always
the easiest to cook.
She's made her own pasta, she's made her own sauce,
so I really commend her.
The pasta has been really nicely well made.
It's so thin. She really knows how to make good pasta.
I think the clams have been cooked well.
The octopus is really soft.
You eat it pleasantly.
Overall, a very good effort.
Nice fresh pasta, little bits of octopus cooked well,
nice and tender.
Salty clams running all the way through, sweet tomatoes.
It's a good dish.
Please come out.
This pudding sounds delicious.
Fig, apples, butterscotch
all go really, really well together.
GREGG:That's crumbling inside the ramekin.
Yes. It hasn't come out as well as I wanted it to,
but at least it's cooked...I think.
SHE CHUCKLES
I am concerned that everything does sound a bit sweet.
GREGG:Yay!
There you go, you've done it.
It may not be that elegant, but it smells great.
Go, Linda. Thank you. Well done.
So I've cooked for you an apple and fig pudding with a butterscotch
sauce and just some fresh cream.
Great. Thank you. Well done.
I think my one's got stuck in the mould, cos there's edges
of it missing.
The sponge is a lot lighter than I was expecting it to be,
which was great. But for me, personally, it's so, so sweet.
The butterscotch is very definitely strong
butterscotch flavour. Really good.
I couldn't really pick out the fig, sadly, but it's quite
a warming, comforting dish.
That is a lovely, sticky, sweet sponge with a beautiful butterscotch
sauce. Like the bit of apple on top, giving a little bit of sharpness,
and pouring cream over it to just let it all down a little bit.
That is a gloriously gooey mess.
That was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
But it was exciting as well, and amazing and a lot of fun.
SHE LAUGHS
I need a large drink.
That's what I really need now.
Owen's starter is piri-piri chicken livers with roti.
You've got two minutes before your starters go out.
Have you got any rotis cooked at all?
No. I'm behind time.
How long are those rotis going to take?
Hoping five on a high heat.
Are the chicken livers cooked?
The chicken livers are almost done, yeah.
With livers, if you overcook them, they can go grainy.
I don't want them to be dry.
I'm looking for spices that have been layered and they sort
of creep up on you.
Half a roti each.
You are eight minutes over, Owen.
Let's go. Well done, my friend.
Well done.
Hello!
Hello.
Oh, faces I see, beautiful people!
Oh, my goodness!
So sorry for the delay. It's OK.
Today, I've cooked chicken liver, piri-piri, with roti on the side.
Thank you!
I thought this was delicious.
I can really pick out the depth of those spices there.
However, the lasting impression I do get is the chilli,
it is very hot.
The livers are a bit overcooked for me and they're starting to go dry
and they're starting to go grainy.
I love how thin the roti is,
and at the same time
very buttery, very moreish.
But I would have liked to have a bit more roti with my whole dish.
A nice amount of spice on the outside, a good amount of chilli.
But look at it, look at the dish. Half a piece of bread.
No presentation.
Have a look at those, tell me how
long you think they're going to take.
We're looking at about 16 minutes.
You need to get your pea puree done, season your butternut squash,
finish off your courgettes and leave your salmon in there
as long as you possibly can.
Salmon en croute, it's a lovely classic dish, but done well,
beautiful.
Well, the difficulty, of course, about cooking anything en croute
is you've no idea what's happening inside the croute.
LAUGHS:It's true!
JOHN: Nice colours.
OK, salmon now.Go, the fish! Come on, Owen!
That pastry's got to be really light, really flaky, cooked
all the way through, cos that's always the fear with puff pastry,
that it's soggy in the middle.
Time's up, but we'll give you a little bit of leeway.
Finishing touches. Off you go.
Good job.
WHISPERS:Thank you.
Owen is serving salmon en croute, salmon and creamed spinach in a puff
pastry case with butternut squash mash, mint pea puree
and charred courgettes.
This is perhaps the most generous salmon en croute
that I have ever seen.
The salmon, I think, is actually quite nicely cooked and the purees
are actually seasoned really well.
But unfortunately we've got a lot of pastry
which is really undercooked or soggy.
Soggy pastry is, like, my worst nightmare.
I don't like the cloying feeling.
Overall, the dish sadly falls a bit short.
That salmon is cooked really, really nicely inside the pastry.
The issue we've got here is the surround of that salmon
is not cooked enough.
That water that's coming out of there is spinach that hasn't
been squeezed with a little bit of moisture that's coming
off the fish. It's made the pastry soggy.
I was always concerned about timing.
I wish I could have done better, but I gave it all.
There's no way I can rewind time now.
Quarterfinal day in the MasterChef kitchen, there's always pressure,
and our four felt the pressure.
What we saw was some ups and some downs.
You and I both really enjoyed that mackerel dish from Miles.
It looked very elegant, and the dining room
absolutely loved it.
The dessert from Miles, the clafouti itself didn't work.
That clafouti sunk.
However, I did enjoy the flavours.
Thuy cooked for us a banh mi.
We had a piece of flatbread, a piece of chicken thigh,
and we had some pickled onion.
We like her flavours, but there wasn't a lot to that dish.
All agreed that Thuy's posset did not work.
It was more of a thick milkshake than it was a posset.
Linda did us a rather nice bowl of pasta.
The octopus was cooked well.
We had a lovely pudding.
The fact was, though, that when Linda took the pudding
out of the mould, it started to fall apart.
Owen actually delivered, I think, a decent plate of chicken livers.
We only got a bit of flatbread because he really ran out of time.
The salmon en croute, the salmon inside cooked very, very nicely.
The pastry didn't work.
The dining room didn't like it very much at all.
Nobody had cooked pastry.
I hope I can get through to the knockout round.
And if I do get that opportunity...
HE GASPS ..oh!
I can walk out of here with my head held up high,
even if I leave now.
If it's my time to go, you know what, it is the right time.
And I think it's what you perform on the day that counts.
I feel like if I can get through that, then I'd love
to go forward.
We'll have to wait and see.
We said at the start of this we would only take the best
cooks with us.
We've decided two of you will be going through knockout week,
which does mean that two of you will be leaving the competition.
The first person going through to knockout week is...
..Miles. Congratulations.
The second person going through to knockout week is...
..Linda.
Congratulations, Linda.
GASPS:Thank you.
Thuy, Owen, I'm really sorry, you're both leaving us.
Oh, MasterChef.
Being on MasterChef is incredible.
And it's started my journey and I'm moving forward from here.
I'm going to try and live my dream of passion for cooking.
Being on MasterChef has been a big part of my life, so I will
really miss it dreadfully.
But I'm actually relieved that I can actually sleep
and eat again! SHE LAUGHS
Miles, Linda, congratulations, you're through to knockout week!
Oh, my God!
I just can't believe it!
LAUGHS:Really.
What a day it's been, right? What a rush.
I feel like my head's going to fall off.
SHE LAUGHS
This is a joyous moment for me, man, I'm loving it.
Who's cutting onions in here?
I'm going to go back in the kitchen,
I'm just going to, day and night, just bang it again.
I can't wait. Yeah, let's bring it on.
Next time, nine new hopefuls audition for the right to wear
a coveted MasterChef apron...
How are you feeling? Fantastic! Thank you for asking!
..and to secure their place...
Good luck! Thank you.
..in the competition.
That's powerful.
I think this is absolutely brilliant.