MASTERCHEF “Top 6 Compete” Season 2, Episode 16 – This week’s MasterChef presented two of the most difficult challenges we’ve seen all season. The Team Challenge had Suzy’s Red Team in a head to head challenge against Tracy’s Blue Team to learn and recreate four of Patina restaurant’s dishes.
With Jennifer and Adrian on her team, Tracy brought her usual good sense of leadership to the team and they adjusted to the demands of the kitchen fairly quickly. On the contrary, Suzy and Ben on the Red Team seemed like deer in headlights and they stumbled around the kitchen completely overwhelmed.
I don’t blame them, I was overwhelmed just watching the insanity in that kitchen. As if to bring a little bit of Hell’s Kitchen into MasterChef, Chef Ramsay took it upon himself to do the expediting. He dived right into the service, shouting the orders at the MasterChef contestants expecting them to know exactly how to react. I was so impressed by how quickly these home cooks adapted to the pressures of the kitchen and how well they were able to replicate such beautiful looking dishes.
They labored for over two hours nonstop to serve the patrons in the restaurant and while I put little value in the opinions of diners who had negative comments about the food they expected at Patina, (we all know they’re dining in that restaurant for free and they know they are eating food prepared by MasterChef contestants at the very least because they are surrounded by MasterChef camera crews, so spare me the whiny disappointment) I was very interested in the opinions of the chefs that are responsible for Patina’s Michelin star status.
Their feedback was fair, clear and constructive and seeing them break down the positive and negative aspects of each team’s dish really made it clear how impressive some of these contestant’s cooking abilities are. From the critiques of the Patina chefs it was pretty clear that the Red Team presented better dishes overall than the Blue Team and the MasterChef judges agreed.
Tracy, Jennifer and Adrian ended up facing the Elimination Challenge which required them to scale, filet and prepare a king salmon. Chef Ramsay gave them a quick tutorial and then they had 45 minutes to try and duplicate his beautiful results. Once again, this was a challenge that many professional chefs might fail, but these three home cooks did relatively well considering they had virtually no idea what they were doing.
Ultimately Tracy landed in the bottom of the Elimination Challenge. I admit that I had low expectations of her at the start of the season, but she surprised me, prepared some great looking dishes and got much farther than I anticipated. Chef Elliot, on behalf of himself and the other two judges, presented her with a year of “MasterChef Enthusiast Classes” taught by Le Cordon Bleu Chefs. Although it seemed like it was 10% consolation prize, 90% in-show-infomercial for the MasterChef branded course, it’s nice to know that Tracy didn’t go home from the competition empty handed.
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