It's the last of the MasterChef semifinals.
Every time my name is called,
I am newly astonished that I'm still hanging on.
I don't want to go home just yet. I'm having so much fun.
So keep me!
I'm starting to have that self-belief,
and getting into the finals and hopefully lifting that trophy
would kind of seal the deal for me.
Tonight, just one unique challenge
stands between these six outstanding home cooks
and a place in finals week.
What they've got to do today is be inspired
by an extraordinary song - a Top 40 chart hit.
They can't have a wobble, wobble, wobble.
I need a smack around the face. We demand a buttery biscuit base.
Welcome back.
This year is a very important year.
It's the year of Her Majesty the Queen's Platinum Jubilee.
It's also 100 years of the BBC,
and we here at MasterChef,
we have our own very special anniversary.
This is ten years since the release of the single Buttery Biscuit Bass.
That actually got to number 37 in the charts
and, along the way, raised quite a bit of money for charity.
To help us celebrate this extraordinary anniversary,
you've been given a brief...
..and that brief is to cook a dish inspired by the song
Buttery Biscuit Bass.
The song has over 20 different food references,
and that means you can cook something sweet or savoury,
but it's got to be delicious.
You have one hour and 40 minutes.
At the end of this, we will have our five finalists,
and that does mean that one of you will be going home.
As you know, we love the base, base, biscuit base,
we love the buttery biscuit base.
Off you go.
MUSIC: MasterChef Synesthesia (Buttery Biscuit Bass) by Swedemason
# I like the base, base, base, base
# I like the buttery biscuit base
# I like the base, base, biscuit base
# I like the buttery biscuit base... #
We're not just looking for a buttery biscuit base.
They can go in any direction they like.
Their culinary imagination can go wild.
# Crunchy base, nutty base
# Buttery biscuit base
# Acid base, smack around the face
# I like the buttery biscuit base... #
It can be buttery, toasty, nutty, crunchy.
It can be jammy, it can be gooey, it can be slimy,
but I want a bit of wobble.
# Wobble, wobble, wobble... #
I don't care what it is, as long as it's got more oomph.
# It needs more oomph
# That base, that base, that base... #
We want it to be fun and adventurous,
but there's a lot riding on this -
a place in finals week.
The brief for this dish is absolutely hilarious.
I mean, the song is running through my head, and I'm not a fan of it
because it's just so annoying.
But I'm actually really excited, because it's fun, it's creative,
it's inventive, it's crazy.
# I like the buttery biscuit base. #
How old were you when Buttery Biscuit Bass first came out?
Um, I think I was 13. Yeah.
What's your dish?
So my dish is a tropical cheesecake.
It's not going to be presented in a typical cheesecake style.
When me and my brother were younger,
my mum used to make us dippy eggs and soldiers
for breakfast every morning so, when I think of something
buttery, it just takes me back to buttery toast with dippy egg.
So I'm trying to represent that,
and then I'm doing that with an oat and honey crumb,
so that's the toasty element
an "oomph" mango and passion fruit sorbet,
and then a "smack around the face" lime gimlet cocktail.
Radha is taking inspiration from Glynn Purnell,
who she worked with in the last round,
and her memories of a boiled egg and soldiers.
What we've got is an eggshell,
and the white of the egg inside is going to be
the cheesy bit of the cheesecake,
the yolk of the egg is going to be mango and passion fruit
and should be bright yellow,
and our toast is a buttery biscuit.
I think that is fabulous!
I feel like my dish connects to the brief very, very well
because I, literally, worked through some of the words
that came out of that cringey song.
So, yeah, I'm throwing a lot at it.
I just need to show them how good I am.
So today, I'm making chocolate, peanut and strawberry tart,
and then there will be popcorn ice cream, as well as a berry foam.
Where did chocolate, peanut and strawberry come from?
The peanut and the popcorn came from my childhood,
and it was a snack we would buy on the way to school
with our pocket money.
But the strawberry element
came from my love of peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Which bits of our song feature in your dish?
There will be a pate sable biscuit, so that's a crunchy element.
I'm going to be smacking your face with some Cameroon pepper
as well as some lemon in the mousse.
A massive amount of work from Olayemi - she's making tart cases,
she's making an ice cream flavoured with popcorn,
she's making jellies, jams, foams,
she's making ganache from chocolate.
There's a huge amount going on here.
To make it into the finals, I'm giving it everything that I've got.
I've got, like, seven or eight kinds of cheese, um...
Not that I need them, but I am putting them in.
It's just the combination in a tart
of chocolate, nuts and strawberry is troubling me.
I'm not quite sure how all of those things go together.
35 minutes gone, please.
If you need more oomph, do it quickly.
I remember studying in Merchant Navy College
when Buttery Biscuit Bass came out, and we played it quite a lot.
It makes me smile
and now, ten years later, here I am,
cooking a brief based around a buttery biscuit base
for John and Gregg, so it's kind of surreal.
Eddie is giving us a baked cheesecake.
On top of the cheesecake, he is going to do beautiful poached pear.
On the side of that, we've got a malty ice cream
and then we've got a white chocolate sauce
he's going to pour across the whole lot.
Eddie's decided to throw a couple of curveballs into the mix as well.
We've got Gorgonzola, which is a blue cheese,
actually in the cheesecake,
and he's got star anise and vanilla going into the poaching liquid
for the pear.
I mean, he is going for big, bold flavours.
Tell us about the inspiration for the cheesecake.
From the age of about 14,
I've always loved the idea of baked New York cheesecake.
I started making them at a young age and travelling to New York as well.
There's a nice cheesecake shop there, Eileen's Special Cheesecake,
and I used to love eating those.
Baked cheesecake, set and cut,
ready in an hour and 40 minutes?
Yeah. Is that doable?
The cheesecake should set. That's the main concern.
What's the backstop if the cheesecake doesn't set?
There's no backstop today.
You've still got to poach a pear and do ice cream. Yeah, yeah.
You've maybe got a buttery biscuit base.
Eddie, good luck. Thank you.
It's a technically challenging dish.
I think most cheesecakes are set cheesecakes,
so this is difficult in the time,
but I think the texture of a baked cheesecake is really nice.
What are they? I've not seen them for years. They're like lychees.
Rambutan. Rambutan! Yeah, it is rambutan.
When they sent me the brief, oh, it made my head spinning.
It's quite catchy, isn't it?
At first, I thought, "Oh, I'll do some seafood dish,"
but, hmm, is that too normal?
Pookie is doing us a classic savoury dish but as a dessert.
What we have is a dessert
inside a scallop shell that looks like a scallop.
My dish is going to be tropical fruit.
I'm going to use cream cheese and rambutan
and then set it into the shape of the scallop.
It will be scallop in Pookie-land.
So it's not a scallop.
She is taking pineapple-flavoured yoghurt, spherifying it
and turning it to look like the roe of a scallop.
When you open that up, it'll actually ooze out the sauce.
Then we've got peanut butter biscuit crumb,
so it looks like it's on the sand.
If she can actually recreate the look,
which I think she's going to do,
of a properly baked scallop, John, that's extraordinary.
Before we gave you the song,
had you ever heard Buttery Biscuit Bass? Nope.
Never heard it? Never heard it before,
and I just heard that to celebrate ten years, the song,
and it's actually my ten-year wedding anniversary as well,
same time, but, because I'm in the MasterChef kitchen,
so I didn't have time to cook for my husband.
So I used this occasion to celebrate, both for you and for me.
You're going to have the buttery biscuit base.
You're going to have nutty base, with the peanut butter.
You're going to have the jelly, like, sort of, wobbly bit,
so I think you're going to find quite a lot of elements in it.
This is extraordinary, Pookie.
I hope it tastes delicious.
I think so. I think it tastes delicious.
You have just 30 minutes left, 30 minutes left.
It's a really interesting brief.
There's a huge opportunity for us
to demonstrate that we're thinking out of the box.
I like to push myself. I like to have that creative flair,
and I think just the experiential element of this
will be, hopefully, something that stands out today.
Ioan, what's your dish?
I'm calling it fruity dodger.
So it's a take on a classic UK biscuit. Go on.
It is a goat's cheese and Manuka honey dome
with a raspberry puree in the middle,
served on a ginger and lemon shortbread biscuit crumb
with basil gel.
Where the hecky-decky did you get this idea from?
Somewhere in my head.
That's me as a personality - classical but slightly quirky.
This is exactly what we expect from Ioan.
He takes a classic idea, like a Jammie Dodger,
and turns it into something completely unexpected.
This is going to be all reliant upon that cream cheese dome
coming out perfectly.
It can't all just be creamy and slippery.
It's got to have some sort of texture to it.
We know the sort of cook Ioan is.
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt but, right now,
I'm not sure about goat's cheese, ginger, raspberry and basil.
It just sounds odd to me.
This brief I found extremely challenging.
I want to talk about the things that they talk about in the song
but maybe put a little bit of a different spin on it.
So I think my brain just works a little bit differently to other
people's because, you know, having chatted to my fellow contestants,
I'm the only one who interpreted it like this,
so I'm a little bit scared about that.
You're the only person cooking a savoury dish.
When I first heard the song, immediately, to me, buttery is mash.
I just thought, "Oh, nice, buttery mash."
So I've got some bone marrow going in the mash as well,
and then there was "gooey" in there, and "soft",
so I thought, like, a really soft beef cheek, nice and gooey,
with a really rich sauce.
I actually didn't even think about pudding.
Now I'm thinking that was maybe a mistake.
The thing for you now, you've got to make sure
that's presented beautifully. Yes. As you say, it's beef and mash.
It is. And how good can beef and mash be, Sarah? Pretty damn good.
Pretty damn good.
In a room full of beautiful luxury desserts,
Sarah is doing a beef stew.
I love the sound of Sarah's dish though -
bone marrow mash, absolutely yummy.
I mean, bone marrow gives a big beef flavour
and it acts almost like extra butter.
She's got a beef cheek, which she's cooked in a pressure cooker,
and she's going to take that lovely sauce
and she needs to reduce it right down
to make it really, really sticky on the outside.
She's going to take the carrots and roll it in a crumble.
There's the crunch.
I mean, she's being very, very clever about the brief.
What she's got to do now is make it refined and elegant.
Listen, you have 15 minutes left.
All right, great creations on the way.
But you've got 15 minutes to finish it.
Tarts in. They going to be cooked in time?
Yeah. Sure? Yeah.
Go, go, go.
Waiting to see what the cheesecake's like
when it comes out of the freezer.
Leaving it in there for as long as I can.
So I've still got to do a raspberry tuile.
I am as happy as I can be.
Oh, my God, I've got the shakes.
You have four minutes.
Whatever you're doing,
finish it in four minutes, please.
Giant scallop, King scallop.
This is the moment of truth and...
That's not bad, is it?
Final 60 seconds.
I'm quite literally trembling.
GREGG: Finishing touches.
That's it!
Your time is up, stop now.
Thank you, everybody.
First up, is marketing consultant Sarah,
whose savoury interpretation of the brief
is braised beef cheek
with an oatmeal and chestnut brown butter crumble,
buttery bone marrow mash,
a deep-fried potato nest,
crumbed confit carrots
and chard leeks with a horseradish emulsion...
..finished with a beef sauce.
Your ox cheek is really soft and falling apart.
The sauce that you've got over it is really rich
and it's got a beautiful shine to it.
You need a little bit more work on how you're gonna make
that a beautiful-looking dish because I think it tastes great.
OK. What I'm loving
is this pinhead oatmeal chestnut crumb gives you a texture,
but it also gives you a different flavour with everything you eat.
Sweet carrot with the crumb, sort of almost like cereal.
I've got this sort of lovely, almost like I've got
a biscuit with my piece of beef.
Your mash is lovely and buttery
and I'm really, really impressed
that you actually went with a savoury dish.
It's daring, it's brave.
It's delicious.
It needs to look smarter.
They need everything, right?
So I've given them flavour, I've given them the brief,
but I haven't given them presentation
and that might be my downfall.
Scallop in Pookie-land is Pookie's sweet take on a baked scallop,
a rambutan and lychee cream cheese mousse
topped with pineapple paste,
a chilli and pineapple cookie crumb,
chilli pearls...
..and lychee tuile coral,
with pineapple yoghurt roe.
Served on peanut butter sand...
..with a rum cocktail...
..and pineapple magic dust.
GREGG CHUCKLES What's that?
Welcome to Pookie-land.
Pookie, when you put your technical ability
with your imagination
and you come up with something like this,
I am gobsmacked.
I think this is so clever...
..but it also tastes great.
The mousse in the middle,
you can slice it like you can slice a scallop.
The texture is very, very good.
The thing I love the most
is this pineapple yoghurt,
which is the sauce of the whole thing.
Incredible.
I love your flavours.
And really, really clever.
I mean, that actually looks like sand
and you put it in your mouth
and it actually turns into salty peanut butter on your tongue.
I love the addition of chilli with that pineapple and rambutan,
It tastes amazing and looks great.
It was a risky dish to take on,
and I think it paid off because they love the flavour.
I definitely take John and Gregg to Pookie-land!
Law graduate Radha's egg and soldiers dessert
is a mango and passion fruit cheesecake
served in an egg shell
with an oat and honey biscuit soldier,
an oat and honey crumb...
..passion fruit curd...
..mango soaked in prosecco...
..and a mango and passion fruit sorbet
served with a lime gimlet cocktail.
On this plate, there is some real majesty, I really like it.
Your oaty biscuit, I think is great
because you can actually dip it in the egg.
It doesn't break and it's not dry, so that's wonderful.
Your mango with prosecco around the outside is inspired
because it starts to fizz in your mouth
and then gives you the lovely sweetness of mango.
It's delicious.
That little cocktail there should come with a health warning.
That is dangerous. RADHA CHUCKLES
Your cheesecake mix is a beautiful combination of tropical fruits
and a creamy cheesiness with quite a bit of vanilla.
The explosion of flavour in your sorbet is beautiful.
Powerful mango, finished with sharp passion fruit.
I love these flavours.
I don't want to get too confident and complacent,
but I'm feeling good.
I want to drink the prosecco.
So if I do go home,
it's just because everyone else,
you know, is so amazing and so talented.
But no, I'm feeling happy with myself.
Project manager Olayemi's buttery biscuit base-inspired dessert
is a chocolate, peanut butter and strawberry jam tart,
topped with balsamic vinegar
and pepper-soaked strawberries,
a tart of fresh strawberries,
peanuts, popcorn and strawberry mousse
and popcorn ice cream - also served in a tart case.
Olayemi, there's a huge amount of work on this plate.
You've done lovely pastry,
which is very, very crisp and buttery,
but it is a little bit thick.
You've got a really lovely, light strawberry mousse.
I really like that.
The tart with the strawberry jam and the chocolate...
The chocolate and strawberry, I can cope with,
but because the peanuts have been added to it,
it's just also very, very rich.
The one I'm really struggling with is strawberries and peanuts... Yep.
..because that strawberry is not strawberry jam, it's a strawberry.
Hm, yeah. You've got a mouthful of juice and salted peanut.
It's an odd combination.
But I love this popcorn ice cream.
It tastes like you're dipping into sweetened popcorn at the cinema.
Absolutely delightful.
I like individual bits without liking everything together.
Yeah.
I think I've pushed the boat out too much in terms of the flavour,
so I've put things they didn't expect together.
So yes, I am nervous about that and it could be the thing
that sends me home, but I don't know.
Marine pilot Eddie has made a baked cheesecake
with gorgonzola and lemon thyme
on a hazelnut praline biscuit base,
with pear poached in vanilla,
star anise and Poire William pear liqueur,
pear gel, a hazelnut crumb,
caramelised white chocolate sauce
and a malted milk ice cream.
Love the lemon thyme running through the cheesecake,
with that bit of blue cheese.
I think that's very, very clever.
And I love the salty base that sits on the bottom
because it is really salty
and it is like a cracker with my cheese.
Sitting next to that is a pear poached with star anise,
aniseed in Poire William, which is nd another. Grown-up bit of liquor -
like, booze.
I think it's a great combination.
I. Love. It.
It has hidden layers of flavour
that you don't expect from a relatively simple-looking dish.
Inside that cheesecake is quite a bit of blue cheese,
but it actually does work with the sweet,
almost toffee sauce you put across the top.
Your ice cream is so creamy and so smooth,
and it tastes like a bedtime milky drink.
I thought it looked a little safe until I tasted it,
and I realised it was anything but safe.
Thank you.
I wanted to make a dessert which was different.
And I was thinking outside of the box.
So to pull it off, I'm just over the moon.
Finally, it's marketing manager Ioan,
whose biscuit-inspired dessert is the Fruity Dodger -
a goat's cheese and manuka honey dome
with a raspberry centre
on a ginger and lemon shortbread crumb,
with basil gel, pickled raspberries...
..raspberry tuile
and a raspberry liqueur sorbet.
Inside that pretty, white dome
is a lovely, concentrated flavour of raspberry.
And when you eat it with that ginger crumb sitting underneath it,
it does taste like that lovely biscuit that you are inspired by.
And I love that.
But that cream cheese dome, for me, needs a bit more texture.
Mm-hmm. It's really quite runny,
and I don't think you need that basil on there.
I think it does detract from the rest of the dish.
I really like the basil, unlike John,
because the basil's been sweetened.
Mm-hmm. Love, love, love this sorbet.
This sorbet tastes to me like raspberry sherbet.
I think you've got glorious flavours here.
I think we need more texture.
There was definitely an added pressure today.
I'm glad that it's over.
Judges' feedback was positive, in the main.
Hopefully, it's good news.
A brilliant way to spend a tenth anniversary
of Buttery Biscuit Bass.
They did an extraordinary job,
but look, this is the last of this year's semifinals
and we are looking for our five finalists.
I look at Radha's dish today
and I think that looks like it should grace
a fine dining restaurant.
It had style, it showed technique.
I think that was absolutely fantastic.
Put her through. Put her through.
Radha's into finals week.
Right, Eddie...
I couldn't believe all that flavour and all that elegance
was coming out of a slice of cheesecake.
I thought it was a really sophisticated dish
which tiptoed between sweet and savoury brilliantly well.
Finals place for Eddie.
Pookie took a pineapple, a lychee
and a rambutan and turned it into a scallop in a shell.
It's, it's extraordinary, it's phantasmagorical,
but it also tasted good.
So Pookie's going through.
We've now got to make a decision between Olayemi, Sarah and Ioan.
Sarah was the only one to do a savoury dish.
It tasted great.
Really nicely cooked ox cheeks with mashed potato,
a rich gravy, vegetables on the side.
What I really love was that crumb.
I mean, it was wonderful.
Absolutely wonderful.
But Sarah's got to get her presentation right.
Olayemi put a lot of work in and gave us three separate tarts.
One of them had strawberry and chocolate,
which I actually liked.
We had a popcorn ice cream,
which I thought was absolutely lovely.
The next tart, peanuts and strawberry,
I just could not get on with at all.
All of that coming together was just way too much.
There is no doubt that Ioan is full of creativity,
and in this round, we end up with a goat's cheese dome
filled with jam?
I mean, it's great.
Not a fan of the basil on the side.
Really like the intense raspberry flavour,
both in the jam and the sorbet.
But there was a problem with texture there with Ioan's dish
because that dome needed to be firmer.
We're finding this tough, and so we should.
This is a big decision.
This is for a place in the final five.
I think this would be the worst time to go home
because it's within touching distance.
So yeah, I would be crushed if I went home today.
In terms of being confident as to whether or not
I'll get a place in the finals, I don't know where to place myself,
I can only hope I've done enough.
I think I've cooked something really appealing today.
Hopefully, the judges' decision will be...
..the right one. IOAN LAUGHS
Brilliantly well done, all six of you.
What a lovely way to celebrate our own personal anniversary,
ten years of the Buttery Biscuit Bass! Fabulous.
As you know, there are only five places in finals week.
The person leaving us is...
..Olayemi.
OK. Thank you.
Olayemi, thank you very much.
You've literally spiced up the competition.
Thank you.
It was lovely to meet you. Well done.
Sitting on the sofa at home watching this show,
I never really believed that my food
had a place in the competition,
so for me to get to the top six
bringing Nigerian food onto the table,
that was what I wanted to do.
Obviously, it's sad to be going home at this time.
I really wanted to make it into finals week.
But you know what?
I'm really proud.
You are our final five.
You are in finals week, that's a massive achievement.
Today was really hard and I knew I was taking a risk
by doing mash and beef
and I'm just really delighted that it paid off in the end.
I set myself a goal and that was to get an apron
at the start of the competition,
and now I can call myself a MasterChef finalist,
which is absolutely a dream come true.
It's a wonderful feeling.
But you know, one small mistake
could mean that you end up going home,
so it's... The pressure's really on more than ever.
Next time...
Wow!
..it's the MasterChef finals...
That's it, that's it.
They have got to step it up.
We have to judge every single one of these
as if they're gonna be the winner.
Let's get some energy in here.
That is brilliant.
At the end, one of these five exceptional cooks
will be crowned this year's champion.
That is...stupendous.