Starting Over

Reunited

Ben Pobjie — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 04:04:03 GMT

I went to my 30 year high school reunion on the weekend. I know, you’re thinking, dear GOD how can he possibly be that old, when both physically and mentally he is so alert and arousing? But what you don’t understand is that I was a child prodigy who graduated high school at the age of six. So, that out of the way, let’s deal with the Issues.

First, why would I go to a high school reunion, when that is objectively the act of a madman? Well, if you’re going to answer your own question…

But look, I really wanted to know what a high school reunion was like. These are things that thus far in my life I had only ever experienced via movies and TV, where they were always extremely romantic or traumatic or both. I had a sneaking suspicion that a real-life high school reunion would not result in as many public brawls or shocking revelations or true love’s kisses1 as I had been led to expect by the entertainment industry, but I really wanted to find out for sure - and to see what, if they were not about drama and confrontation and passion, what they WERE about.

And what they are about, apparently, is a group of middle-aged people in a pub, sort of…talking to each other.

There are worse ways to spend an evening.

The first thing I noticed when I entered the room was that, wow, a lot of these people are REALLY old. I mean, I knew that I was, in my own way, also old, but there’s a big difference between a sort of distinguished, slightly roguish and actually very sexy ageing, and just being a real suburban wreck, and I couldn’t help but be moved by how much older these people were than me.

The men, that is. The men were all super old. The women, however, mostly looked about 25. This is probably because women naturally age better than men. Or because women, at any age, just look better than men. Or maybe because women go to more effort to look good, because of SOCIAL PRESSURE. Or maybe because about 80% of the women in the room reminded me on first sight of the crush I used to have on them, whereas literally none of the men did.

I have to mention one old boy, though, whose transformation was truly mind-blowing. If I hadn’t read his name tag I would not have guessed his identity in a million years. He had changed astonishingly, and frankly for the better. I don’t want to put down the appearance of the lad who was, but 30 years later this guy was a truly beautiful man, and I don’t think anyone who knew him at high school could ever have imagined such a result.

Besides any issues of attractiveness and gender and the patriarchy, it’s really curious how some people look EXACTLY the same, so that seeing them was like seeing a photo album come to life, and some people were utterly unrecognisable. A lot of the people there I still don’t know who they were. They had name tags but I didn’t get close enough to everyone to read theirs, mainly because if you go and peer at someone’s tag you’re committing yourself to conversation, and if reading the tag reveals they’re someone you never want to talk to again in a million years, you’re stuck.

After noticing the ageing issue, though, the next thing that struck me was a massive wave of fear. I had felt pretty confident ahead of time, not particularly nervous at all, because while I had gone through some pretty shitty times at school, and I knew that some of the people responsible for those times might be present at the reunion, I didn’t feel those people, or their ancient sins, held any power over me anymore. I don’t feel scared of the people who scared me in high school: what I felt was that I’d be going into the reunion strong and cool and ready to pretty much kick back and relax, no pressure of any kind.

As soon as I came in all those feelings of confidence drained out of me like blood from Samuel L. Jackson’ in the climactic scene of Spiral: From The Book of Saw.2 Actually, they drained much faster than that if I’m honest.

Not that I was suddenly back in high school, feeling like that timid, insecure 17-year-old all over again. It was more that I was here in a pub, feeling like the timid, insecure 47-year-old I always am. In feeling super confident that I didn’t need to fear the crowd because I’m not in thrall to my teenage years any longer, I had forgotten that I’m still a socially awkward loser and very much in thrall to my own sense of self, which is not a good one.

Everyone was in little knots around the room, drinking and chatting and laughing and being nice, normal, relaxed people enjoying each other’s company. How I yearned to be one of them, and how impossible this seemed! I am not nice or normal or relaxed and nobody enjoys my company, I reminded myself as I stared wildly around, wondering what the hell I was to do. It seemed advisable to seek a corner, sit in it, and remain there for the duration.

Thankfully there were a couple of angels from heaven present, and they immediately approached me, started talking to me, and treated me, for some reason, like I was a fellow grown-up human with innate value. I will always be grateful for these people, because they rescued me at a point where my night was set to crash into a mountain before it even took off.

And from then on, it was…fine. It was actually kind of nice. But how strange…

The thing is, very few of the attendees had been close friends of mine. Some of them had been passing acquaintances. Some had been, in a very mild and juvenile way, enemies. A lot had been people with whom I had literally exchanged not a single word in all of high school. In fact, for most of the people I talked to at the reunion, I said more words to them that night than I had previously in my entire life.

So although there was a certain amount of reminiscence going on, I felt much more like I was meeting new friends for the first time, and learning that they were, pretty much, a lovely bunch of folks. I would quite like to have another reunion every few weeks, so we can keep getting to know each other. I think this would be a bad idea, though, because I have this odd suspicion that they are all normal and nowhere near as desperate for company as I am.

But what did I learn?

Firstly, I learnt that high school really was a long time ago, and it really is over. Everyone has different experiences at school. Some had a worse time than I did, some had a better time, but nobody had the same time. Like I said, I went through some rotten days back then, but also honestly I went through some pretty great days too. I met some of my best friends there, who are still my friends today (they weren’t there though, they lack the aforementioned desperation that fuels my being). I feel there’s still quite a bit of the guy I had become by the end of Year 12 in me today. Not too much, I hope, but my journey from 11-year-old to 17-year-old was a pretty important one in forging big parts of me. So I remember a lot of bad and a lot of good.

But that’s all done with now, and like me, nobody, whether they loved or hated their school days, stood still in the time since. When you see just how much stuff people have gone through in 30 years, you realise how much you’ve gone through too, and how complicated and strange life is.

Secondly, people are surprising. Some old schoolmates came up and greeted me like an old friend, despite the fact that back then, we were not friends. In fact, I tried to avoid these particular people due to the taunting and abuse I became accustomed to receiving from them. There were a lot of members of my year who, I was given to understand, held me in utter contempt. In one of those movies, I guess I would’ve called them out for daring to come on all sweet when they’d been so cruel back then. But that would’ve been stupid. The fact that we were able to engage just as people, that we were interested in each other’s lives and careers and parted, basically, friends, was a beautiful thing, and who the hell needs to hang onto resentment? The past happened, but we’ve left it behind and nobody would find their lives improved by insisting on holding each other accountable for the idiots they were as teenagers. And in saying that, I promise you I was big an idiot as anyone.

They surprise you in other ways. I discovered that, to certain people, I was more important than I ever thought, back in the day. The variance of memory is incredible. I had never thought anyone I went to school with thought particularly highly of me, but finding out that for some - not many, I stress, by any means - I actually did matter, that they thought I was, for want of a better term, pretty great, and that they actually wanted to thank me - me! Ben! This guy! - for being me, and for being there for them, when we were but kids…that actually really did give me a boost. I had thought the only real reason anyone would remember me was my height. Apparently there were memories of me much deeper and warmer, and I feel great that I did, somehow, make an impression much more positive. I made some people’s lives a little bit better when i was in high school. I’m proud of that.

But the biggest revelation of all was that a reunion is an opportunity for chance meetings that produce something entirely new. To talk for hours to someone who you remember well, but who you don’t recall ever talking to before, and having the time of your life - that’s great, isn’t it? It’s such a cool experience making a friend, and making a friend of someone who you went to school with, but were never friends with before…well that’s extra cool. High school did bring me friends for life, but I’m rather chuffed that it still is doing so, thirty years later.

Apart from that…well, there was no dancing, at least that I saw, and there were no drunken fights, there were no public meltdowns, there was no inappropriate displays of physical affection. I didn’t even kiss any girls, and to all the ladies present: you’re welcome.

It was just nice, grown-up people, remembering good and bad and strange and confusing, and enjoying each other’s company and realising that our shared experience was something that would always bind us together, but thankfully would never define us. And I got to tell a few people, who I’d always thought were fucken awesome but never had the courage to tell, that I thought they were fucken awesome. Even better, I learnt that a whole lot of people, whose awesomeness levels I hadn’t gauged before, are definitely, at this point of time, fucken awesome.

Which was nice.

Mind you, my mother told me to take some mints “for all the girls you’re going to be kissing”, which was encouraging. But also she said this because my breath was bad, which was less encouraging.

You know the one.

A Wild and an Untamed Thing

Ben Pobjie — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:25:10 GMT

“Give yourself over to absolute pleasure.”

I think for many people -perhaps most of the world - their first introduction to Tim Curry was in the form of a towering high heel boot rhythmically stomping in an elevator, before the camera revealed what appeared to be a spectacular big-haired vampire in a black cape, which was soon discarded to reveal a corset and fishnets as he sang the most banging of glam rock anthems in a decadently smooth posh-syrup voice.

If anyone’s ever made a better entrance let me know.

My first introduction to Tim Curry, however, was in the form of Rooster, the fast-talking con-man brother of orphanage head Miss Hannigan, in Annie, a colossal box-office flop that was watched on VHS in our house so often that my sisters and I have probably seen it more times than the collective citizenry of the world did at the cinema.

Obviously I didn’t know Rooster was Tim Curry, because I didn’t know who Tim Curry was. Even after I found out who Tim Curry was, I didn’t realise he’d been Rooster, until years later I rewatched Annie and was startled to discover that the nasty American huckster was the same man as the suave English butler I knew so well.

Because yeah, it took me a long time to acquaint myself with Frank N Furter. I was a late Rocky Horror adopter. For many years the definitive Tim Curry performance, for me, was Wadsworth in Clue. In this he was classically British and by turns condescending, panicky, devious, quick-minded and gloriously villainous. He was a genius and an idiot depending on which scene he was playing - or which ending you were watching. Wadsworth contained multitudes. So did Curry. And yet somehow, no matter how far he travelled from one character to another, he was always Tim Curry and there was no point in even trying to deny him - the sheer power of his innate Curryness would overwhelm you sooner or later.

Whenever anyone truly unique dies, the usual lineup of cliches are rolled out to describe them, and that’s OK, because the nature of unique people is that they exhaust the human capacity for description. We have to fall back on well-worn lines to sum up Tim Curry, because how on earth could we invent any adjective as singular as the man himself?

It’s easy to fall into the trap, with performers, of thinking that because they are the only person we’ve seen play a role, that they’re the only one who could have. But with almost every part Curry played, it genuinely is difficult to see how anyone else could’ve been half as satisfying. Even in the theatre - lots of people have played Frank N Furter, but they’re all just doing a faithful cover version of Curry. Lots of people have played King Arthur in Spamalot, but there surely isn’t anyone you’d choose over him to have been the first Arthur. Who on earth, ever could’ve been majestic and regal and silly and ludicrous and sonorous and gleeful and slyly self-knowing in that way? If you were asked to choose an actor to play a preening, strutting, wildly over-the-top and rather camp English king with a voice like a mountain river, flawless comic timing and the ability to play Monty Python comedy and send up Broadway tropes at the same time…honestly, who would you pick? If anyone but Tim Curry plays the part, you know you’re settling.

It might seem crazy to say nobody but Tim Curry could play Pennywise the clown - in fact Bill Skarsgard did an incredible job doing just that. But could Skarsgard have played him on television in 1990, when Pennywise had to be simultaneously terrifying and PG? Curry is basically unrecognisable in IT, but is STILL Tim Curry, to the ends of his fright wig. What other actor could have embraced the absurdity and the horror so exquisitely? Nothing else in that adaptation is scary today - not much was scary in 1990 - but Curry’s Pennywise is still chilling. And still hilarious. He knew how to hit the sweet spot, every time.

Tim Curry was in a lot of bad movies. He was in Home Alone 2. He was in Charlie’s Angels. He was in Congo. He was in a direct-to-video movie called Pirates of the Plains which I promise you is one of the most inane things you will ever see. And that’s probably not even the worst thing he’s done, especially when you count all his voice work.

But he was that rare star who, even when in something awful, made you sit up and rejoice to see him. “Yay, Tim Curry is here!” you’d cry. Maybe not out loud1. In fact, sometimes Curry in a bad movie is even more magnificent than Curry in a good one. It is absolutely insane how enjoyable Congo is, thanks to him. He may be the best bad-movie actor in history, and I think it’s because deep in his soul, he fully understood the beauty of a rubbish film. He knew full well when he was acting something terrible, and he saw that as nothing but an excuse to open up the throttle even more and let loose every ounce of unfiltered Curry he had in him. He knew that the worst of movies can be fabulously enjoyable, both to watch and to be in, and you never doubted he was having fun.

But he was in so many great movies, obviously, and it is still a wonder to watch them. If Pirates of the Plains was the low end of his pirate oeuvre, Muppet Treasure Island is the apex. And again, has there ever been anyone so well-suited to acting with Muppets? I mean, everyone has a blast hanging out with the Muppets, and many great performances have been coaxed out of thesps by strings and felt. But Tim Curry was practically a Muppet in human skin. Every cell in his body vibrated with the lust for life and invincible joie de vivre that defined Muppetry. The other towering Muppet accompaniment is that of Michael Caine, who achieved perfection by playing Scrooge as if he was simply surrounded by humans just like himself. Curry, on the other hand, played Long John Silver like a man who’d spent his life living with Muppets and had fully absorbed their ways, like a Muppet Buddy the Elf. Both performances are indelible.

There’s probably no point in going over, again, Curry’s Frank N Furter2. It’s all been said: he is, was and will always be Frank - whether it’s the role he was born to play, or the role he fashioned in his own image, is a moot point. Everyone who plays Frank, in perpetuity, will be paying tribute.

So many more. The languid young Jerome in Three Men in a Boat. The ridiculously-big-horned devil in Legend. The man had, as they say, range.

He also had a voice of rare beauty, the kind of voice you can fall into and luxuriate. Both speaking and singing, it was smooth and mellifluous and thunderous and seductive. It was a voice made for comedy, but could also roar and belt and climb to heart-breaking altitudes - go listen to “I’m Going Home” from Rocky Horror. At times he sounded, to pinch Bob Dylan’s description of Johnny Cash, like his voice was coming up from the centre of the earth. At times he sounded like he was auditioning for a reboot of the Carry On franchise (incidentally, he’d have been fucking incredible in a Carry On flick). At times he sounded like the essence of evil, and at times he sounded simply, haplessly, goofy. But at all times he sounded like Tim Curry, and it was just the best sound in the world.

What Tim Curry was, was a performer who let you know, with every word and every movement, what a marvellous thing it is to perform. You cannot watch a Curry performance without being aware of the sheer joy he is deriving from the sheer joy he’s bringing to you. I doubt there’s ever been an actor who brought to their work such a phenomenal sense of how glorious it is to be on stage, or on screen, or even just in a recording booth. How wonderful, he says with every role he takes on, to be doing this, to be able to step in front of an audience, throw back your head, and bellow to the heavens. What an incomparably beautiful thing it is to sing and shout and make a crowd laugh and cheer with the unbridled force of your own unstoppable personality. You can’t watch Tim Curry without being entertained, but more than that, for me at least, I can’t watch Tim Curry without wanting to entertain. He made dressing up and being silly seem the most perfect way to live your life ever devised. I think it might be. It is almost impossible to fathom the beauty of all he did. It is entirely impossible to calculate the amount of happiness he brought into the world, and that he has left behind. But I hope he had some idea of it. And I hope he went to his rest thinking of what a sensational, euphoric ride it had all been, for him and for all of us.

“Cos I’ve seen, oh, blue skies, through the tears in my eyes/And I realise, I’m going home.”

Actually, in tribute to Tim Curry, let’s make that a thing. When you see Tim Curry in anything, cry, “Yay, Tim Curry is here!” out loud. He always did everything out loud, so should we.

Rimshot.

Yeah that’s cool I guess

Ben Pobjie — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 03:45:48 GMT

Unconditional love? Yeah, I guess that sounds pretty sweet. So what you’re saying is, someone loves you, with no conditions? So no matter what, they’re going to love you, and nothing can make them stop? That sounds awesome.

But you know what sounds even better? Conditional love. Conditional love is absolutely the wasp’s tits. Imagine being loved, conditionally. Having someone who loves you for who you are, and would not love you if you weren’t that. Can you conceive of anything so wonderful?

Think about it: a person loves you - you, specifically. And they don’t just love you, they love you because you are you. They love you because they think you are loveable, because the things you do, the things you say and the person you are, are all things that they find themselves unable to avoid loving.

And those are the conditions placed upon their love. If you stopped being the person you are, if you changed into someone they didn’t love…they wouldn’t love you. That’s how you know they’re not just loving you out of habit, or obligation, or genetics: because their love is conditional. It’s not just the person inhabiting the space that you inhabit they love. They won’t keep loving you just because you exist. They love you because you are you, and if you weren’t you they wouldn’t.

That’s how you know you’re worth loving. That’s how you know you’re doing life right. That’s how you know that your time on this earth is being well-spent - because the way you’re spending it has caused someone to love you. If you spent it differently they wouldn’t, but they do. And isn’t that the most beautiful thing you ever heard?

Oh yeah, man. Conditional love. THAT is where it’s at.

It’s like…

I mean…

A friend in need? Yeah, they’re handy to have. A friend in need is a friend indeed, sure. That’s cool.

But you know what sounds even better? A friend even when you’re not in need?

Oh man. THAT would be sweet.

Don’t get me wrong - having a friend who will be there when you need them is super awesome.

But having a friend who’s there when you don’t need them? That’s a total rush, man. Can you even imagine?

I mean, wow. A friend who doesn’t just come running when you cry out in pain, but actually seeks you out when things are fine, just because they like you? How freaking great would that be?

Think about it: a person who doesn’t need to hear that you’re in trouble, or feeling depressed, or posting melancholy screeds on Facebook, to drop you a line or give you a call. A person who actively wants to spend time with you. How amazing is that?

I’m in no way disparaging the value of people who don’t want to spend time with you, but who are willing to lend an ear when you’re at rock bottom, as an act of kindness. They are selfless and admirable.

It’s just that, when I think about having a friend who levels up, from “I hope you stay alive and are not completely miserable all the time”, to the dizzying heights of “I like you”, my mind is absolutely blown. A friend even when you’re not in need. That’s something to dream about, for sure.

I’m just saying, you know? I’m just saying that…as much as I appreciate anyone who tells me that any time I need to talk, they’re there for me, there’s nothing like someone who just would like to talk to me. As much as I appreciate anyone who says they love me no matter what, there’s nothing like someone who tells me that they love me because I am loveable. It’s the difference between “I’m here for you” and “I’m here for YOU”. It’s knowing that for all the people who can handle you at your worst, it’d be a real gas if some of them knew that you have a best as well.

I’m just saying, is all.

I Ain't Marching Anymore

Ben Pobjie — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 23:02:16 GMT

Protests are great. Except, of course, when they are bad. Which they almost always are. But even when they are bad, they are, in a way, pretty good. Although not very.

OK, now to recap:

So this week a bunch of children took the day off school to protest against Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Which is great, obviously. It shows that these kids really believe in something, and that they are willing to stand up for those beliefs. And it would, obviously, be an act of appalling cynicism on my part to suggest that what they believe in is having a day off school, or to question whether, if the rally had been held on a weekend, the numbers would’ve been the same. So I am not going to suggest that, or to question in such a fashion.

However.

Look, I realise I am very old and that my grumbling on this subject is likely to get me labelled curmudgeonly and out-of-touch by people who are even older than I am but who are terrified that young people will label them curmudgeonly and out-of-touch. But it occurs to me that these idealistic young protesters have neglected one step in the activist process: a step that many other protesters have forgotten before them, and that many will no doubt forget after them.

That step is, roughly summarised: figuring out what the point is. Put another way, what exactly are you hoping to achieve with your protest?

One reason a person might protest could be to put pressure on a government to change its policy - or to do the same to a private corporation. Another could be to raise awareness of an issue that you think is not being given enough oxygen in public discourse, or not being treated seriously enough. Or maybe you want to win hearts and minds - to persuade others to your point of view.

These are all good reasons to protest, and I have to say very few protests that actually happen seem to have any of them as their aim - or rather, if they do, they would appear to be extremely well-designed to achieve the opposite of what they purport to be trying to do. So well-designed, in fact, that one finds it difficult not to call into question either the sincerity of the protesters, or their intelligence.

Take Just Stop Oil. Please. What they claim to want to achieve, via their protest actions, is the elimination of oil as an energy source, the replacement of it by renewables, the elevation of climate change as an urgent policy priority for governments, and the fortification of mass public opinion behind them.

To do this, their actions focus mainly on attacking people and institutions who are in no way responsible for either the climate crisis or the oil industry, on damaging or destroying things that the general public consider valuable or precious, and inconveniencing ordinary people in the course of their daily lives.

Now, some might say that Just Stop Oil, in concentrating their activities on these areas, is less likely to bring about meaningful practical change in the environmental space than it is to solidify public opinion against Just Stop Oil in particular, and climate activists in general, and by reinforcing a popular perception of environmentalists as destructive radicals with no respect for property or their fellow citizens, making it much harder to get any constructive climate action done, as governments and corporations now find it easier than ever to paint the activists as the people’s enemy.

In other words, Just Stop Oil is so good at doing their enemies’ job for them, you might start to suspect that they’re a false flag operation, or if slightly more charitable, that they are much more interested in attention-seeking and virtue signalling than ever getting anything positive done.

If Just Stop Oil IS sincere, however, and genuinely want nothing more than to, well, just stop oil, then it is certain that they have never sat down and actually asked themselves: what are we trying to do, and in what way will our proposed actions help us do it? Or maybe they have, and they’re just too stupid to come up with a coherent answer.

So we come back to the schoolkids of Australia. What, exactly, do they think their anti-Hanson protests are going to achieve?

Are they raising awareness? Very odd if they are - awareness of Hanson is higher than ever, both from pro- and anti- sides. If the kids’ message is, “hey, Pauline Hanson is out there, look out!” then you’d have to reply, “Yeah, we got that, guys”.

Are they trying to sway government policy? That would be a strange aim, given that the party they’re protesting against isn’t in government. They’re not even close to being in government, at either federal or state level - they might be polling well, but that’s literally all. Or maybe they’re trying to get the government to take a more anti-One Nation line, which would be weird because the government is already very much on board with the Piss Off Pauline movement. In fact, the government AND the Opposition are on board with it. So what do these children - or the adults who have encouraged them - actually want governments to do in response to these protests? I have yet to be enlightened.

OK, so maybe it’s a hearts and minds thing: maybe the kids are marching in order to convince others to hate Hanson too. And here maybe we need to get a little bit more nuanced. Because as great and noble a calling as hating Pauline Hanson is, I am sceptical that a bunch of schoolkids wagging school to announce their hatred is the best way to get many others to adopt the same attitude. In fact, not only do I not think it’s the best way, I don’t even think it’s a way. If hating Pauline Hanson was a football team, then schoolkids’ protests would be replacing all the seats in the stadium with steel spikes.

These protests will strike different people different ways, of course. Those who already hate Pauline Hanson will look at them and say, “good on ‘em! The kids are all right!” Those who love Pauline Hanson will look at them and say, “Typical kids, brainwashed by greenie commie teachers to hate their country”. Those who haven’t made up their minds about Pauline Hanson will look at them and say, “Shouldn’t they be in school? Is this really the best use of these kids’ time? Do I want children getting mixed up in politics and marching in rallies instead of learning? Maybe Pauline is right about some things…”

Hell, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe actually this is the start of a grand movement, where millions of Australians watch the kids marching, slap their foreheads and say, “Of course! I must vote against One Nation! The young have shown me the way!” Maybe that is what is happening. I simply invite you to ponder what you think is most likely.

For sadly, I think that when momentum is building for a political movement that sends the message that their opponents are rabble-rousing slackers without any love for their country or real ideas about how to improve life for ordinary Australians, and who furthermore seek to promote their anti-Australian ideas by indoctrinating youth via the spread of Marxism in public education, then this kind of protest action is almost perfectly-calibrated to confirm the truth of that movement’s message. I can easily imagine people shuffling a little further towards One Nation’s way of thinking upon viewing the schoolkids’ protests. I find it much harder to imagine anyone who isn’t already entrenched in the anti-Hanson position assuming it.

To boil it down, what I’m saying is that the organisers of these protests aren’t showing their working. I can’t see the mechanism by which protests lead to One Nation losing votes. One sign at one of the rallies said “Close Down One Nation”, which is very cute, but, I mean, the teenagers holding it know that that’s meaningless, don’t they? They’re schoolkids, but they’re not in kindergarten, right? If that’s their demand, then they really are in a fantasy world. Or maybe they’re aiming the message at One Nation itself? Maybe they’re asking the party to voluntarily dissolve itself? Seems a bit of a non-starter, tbh.

So as far as I can see, the true purpose of these protests is the same as the purpose of most protests: for the protesters to publicly announce that they are against the thing they are against. And, I suppose, if that’s so, then mission has indeed been accomplished. So…well done?

One student in Sydney said, “We're just fighting against the oppression and racism that they're putting us through.” His friend added, “We just don't want these people being in charge of this country, we have to do something to make a change.” Lovely. Except…you’re not, are you? You’re not actually fighting against anything - you’re just saying stuff. And you’re not doing something to make a change, you’re doing nothing at all.

What would be great would be if any of the protesters - indeed, anyone at any protest - explained, not what they are standing up for, or what they are fighting against, but how, precisely, what they are doing is going to lead to any change. How does marching against One Nation make One Nation less likely to succeed? How does saying that you, personally, hate Pauline Hanson, cause anyone else to like Pauline Hanson any less?

And if I may raise a further question that seems pertinent to an enormous proportion of recent discourse: how does calling large numbers of people bigots lead to less bigotry?

I want to be clear here: I don’t want to stop kids protesting. I don’t want to stop anyone protesting. I think the right to protest is absolutely crucial to a free society and I will violently oppose any attempts to deny that right - in fact I might even protest about it. Explain the mechanism, that’s all I’m asking. Before your next protest, sit down, decide what you’re trying to do, calculate how your protest will help you do it, and then lay it out for the rest of us.

Because until someone does this, I’m going to continue believing that protests are like adultery: it would be a disgrace if people weren’t allowed to do it, but nine times out of ten it’s still a bad idea.

Masterchef FINALE RECAP: Is it over yet?

Ben Pobjie — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:08:33 GMT

And so it has come to this. Two men, professing deep friendship but secretly wishing only pain and anguish for the other, facing off to determine who is the best amateur cook in Australia who actually applied to be on Masterchef and didn’t at any point during the audition process or the series itself have a really bad day and get unlucky. Quite an honour to be named, sort of, that.

But what does the contest between Vinnie and Petro say about wider society? After we got down to the final four of this year’s Masterchef, we could say confidently that it was proven that men are better at cooking, and at being on television, than women. Having demonstrated this, what can the final possibly tell us? Well for a start we will learn whether Italians are better than Greeks, and that’s been vexing mankind for millennia.

Anyway, here we are, the grand finale of Masterchef 2026, and once this epic battle is over, to the victor go the spoils, and to the runner-up go some other, somewhat more modest spoils, and to most of the other contestants go a few little spoils also, and to the judges go some really big spoils, and then when it’s over they will burn down the building and declare that Masterchef is over forever, only to renege on their promise next year. ‘Twas ever thus.

The Grand Finale begins with Jean-Christophe saying that Masterchef Australia is “definitely the best cooking competition in the world”, though it’s not saying much. Have you seen what it’s up against? Jesus. Sofia then informs us that Vinnie and Petro have cooked food really good, and then gotten even better at cooking food, and that this is pretty amazing. Poh reveals that Petro has, during the competition, cooked some nice food, and is probably the most wonderful man she has ever met. She has promised to marry Petro if he wins tonight. Andy then gives his opinion that Vinnie is a brutally efficient chef who has killed more people than anyone can even count, just to become a professional chef. Andy thinks Vinnie is probably literally a god, and tonight he hopes Vinnie wins so he can give up his job and become a full-time disciple of his cult.

This all takes place amid a montage of things that happened so you might already know it all, but on the other hand none of it was very interesting so you might’ve missed it. Basically, the story so far is:

Vinnie and Petro entered Masterchef
They cooked some good food
But sometimes they cooked some bad food and people were worried
But someone else cooked something worse
So people were relieved
Vinnie and Petro then cooked some good food again
And here we are

The finalists arrive at the kitchen and Poh tells them that tonight one of them will win and get a lot of money and their name will be carved into a big plate for whatever that’s worth. Whoever loses should not be downhearted, though, because even if they don’t win, they will get the honour of pretending they’ve won for the cameras because this show shoots two endings because it sucks.

Poh tells the guys that it’s an emotionl experience for her because it reminds her of when she was on the show and didn’t win. And of the other time she was on the show and didn’t win. “You are in a room full of people who adore you and want you to succeed today,” she sobs, as we see Emily and Aaron on the balcony, smiling with the knowledge that this is untrue.

Vinnie and Petro’s loved ones enter the toom, clapping their hands and smiling and begging to be allowed to go home or at least for a little water to drink. These guys have a lot of loved ones - like, five or six each, which is too many. It’s a bit show-offy. Poh makes a joke about how Mediterraneans can’t stop breeding and everyone laughs racistly. Vinnie has parents and grandparents and siblings, Petro has parents and siblings, but only Vinnie has a girlfriend, so he wins this round. Also Vinnie’s mum is kind of hot. Andy, who is dressed as a criminal, asks Petro’s dad how he feels about Petro quitting the family business to cook like some kind of filthy urchin. Petro’s dad tries to contain his bitter rage. Vinnie’s dad says a swear and everyone laughs because that is hilarious. Vinnie’s nonno reveals he doesn’t really know what is going on and everyone laughs again because old people, right? LOL. Every time she laughs, Poh bends at the waist, like she’s trying to see if her face can touch the floor while she’s still on her feet.

It seems inappropriate, but the show now begins addressing the subject of food. The first round of the finale is a mystery box. Inside the box are ingredients from various guest stars of this season. This is a lot less special than it sounds, but everyone goes “oooh” so as to keep in the spirit of things. The ingredients include Jerusalem artichoke from Meghan Markle, cavolo nero from Jane and Jimmy Barnes and ooray plum from Robert Irwin, so they’re not only using stuff from the actual chefs, they’ve let the stupid baffling guests join in too.

In round one each judge will score the dishes out of ten, making a total out of forty. Vinnie and Petro have 75 minutes, which doesn’t seem long but when you consider that every minute of screentime on this show lasts about half an hour, it’ll seem a hell of a lot longer.

Petro decides that to stand out he has to do something that Vinnie won’t do. “I’m doing a tart,” he tells Poh, who doesn’t realise he’s trying to flirt. She tells him to control the balance of his flavours, and to make sure his szechuan caramel really tastes exactly like whatever the hell a szechuan caramel is supposed to taste like.

“Petro is a very very good cook,” says Vinnie, with withering sarcasm. Vinnie is cooking a duck, because that is a refined protein and also he has borne a grudge against ducks ever since a childhood incident that left him limping for months. He is also making a Jerusalem artichoke gratin, which is a controversial choice in the current geopolitical climate. Within two minutes of the start of the cook, he has already used the word “cheffy” twice, which does not augur well.

The judges, who are sick to death of each other by this stage, talk over the happenings with each other. Sofia describes Vinnie’s duck and artichoke dish, making Jean-Christophe and Poh nod dully. Poh explains that Petro is making a tart and is thinking about frying up some artichoke. “Does that not sound like the best tart you’ve ever put in your mouth?” exclaims Andy, who recently had a baby and is very sleep-deprived. The other judges humour him and say yes, of course, Andy, why not.

Petro says that Greeks vs Italians is an old rivalry, but that the Greeks usually come out on top. Petro has really missed his Roman Empire studies here. Can a man so unversed in history really hope to ever be a great chef.

With just half an hour to go in round one, Vinnie is struck by the terrifying passage of time and the existential emptiness of his current lifestyle. Time is running out, and yet he is paralysed by reflection on how unimportant all this is. Also, his duck is overdone so his life is basically over.

Everyone watches Vinnie carefully, as he stares into the revolting viscera of his overdone duck. “You’ve got this, Vinnie!” lie the watchers on the balcony. “Do something else,” one of them calls. Resisting the urge to snap back, “Oh really? Do something else? No fucking shit!” Vinnie does, indeed, do something else. Abandoning his duck, he starts on a fish. He must fillet, butterfly, debone and cook a flathead in the twinkling of an eye. It’s no way to spend your life but the alternative is to let Petro win. Nobody wants that. The man doesn’t even have a girlfriend.

Petro is being quite smug, knowing that Jean-Christophe isn’t standing behind him, shrugging in a resigned manner. His tart is going well and the caramel is good and the pastry and blah blah blah sichuan whatever.

Vinnie salts his fish. Everyone is cheering loudly for him. It is clear that everyone wants Vinnie to succeed, or to put it another way, everyone wants Petro to fail. I’m pretty sure even Petro’s family is cheering for Vinnie, who makes a snap decision to do a Jerusalem artichoke puree, which earlier on he said he didn’t want to do because it wasn’t “cheffy” enough. Just goes to show that promises rarely mean anything when you’re dealing with the Holy Land.

With five minutes left, Petro’s elements are ready to go, and he puts them together., and when he has finished he has some tarts. It’s very boring. Much more interesting is Vinnie pulling the head off his fish and running in slow motion as if a shootout is going on in the kitchen. He’s got his fish, he’s got his artichoke, but he needs something with extra acid. He breaks open a battery with his teeth and pours the contents over his fish. Despite the odds, he has managed to plate up a dish that could actually kill someone, and that’s all he ever wanted. Meanwhile Petro has realised that one of his tart shells is slightly more cooked than the other, so he might as well stick his head in the oven right now.

The judges shout a bit more and then taste the dishes. Vinnie is disappointed in himself for overcooking his duck, and he is right to be. Everyone is disappointed in him. His nonno and nonna are up on the balcony whispering about how they never liked him, and Jean-Christophe has blocked his number on his phone. Grudgingly, despite their intense personal hatred for him, the judges eat his fish. Andy cleverly observes that the fish is not a duck. He’s really coming along.

In the end, it turns out that Vinnie’s fish tastes like food. It’s a nice fish that is pleasant to put in a human mouth, and is certainly a lot better than a disgusting overcooked duck like you’d get from a filthy hobo marinating his dinner in his own underpants. Poh and Sofia and Andy all compete to be the first one to kiss Vinnie on his mouth, while Jean-Christophe pours scented oils over Vinnie’s feet and weeps with joy as he rubs it in.

Now Petro with his unevenly-cooked tart shells, which he’s got a lot of fucking gall to even serve given how appalling they are. He shoves his tarts down the judges’ gullets and Sofia looks at her tart shell like a woman who has just discovered a nest of spiders in her pubic hair. However, after consulting the chapter of the Judges’ Manual titled “Claiming That Weird Desserts Are Always The Best Thing Ever”, they drool all over Petro. However, Sofia does note that her pastry was a little bit overcooked, so she will have to pull out two or three of Petro’s toenails. Then Andy says that his tart “lost the Szechuan flavour”, which is the worst thing that’s happened to him in his life.

Time for the round one scores. Vinnie’s fish was super and gets a 9 from Andy, a 9 from Poh (or “Auntie Poh”, as she inappropriately calls herself), a 9 from Sofia and a TEN from Jean-Christophe, who we shall remind you is the only Michelin-starred chef in the room and whose opinion is worth much more than the other judges’. This gives Vinnie a score of 37 and gives Petro indigestion.

Petro gets a TEN from Jean-Christophe, so maybe he’s just going to give tens for everyone because his mind is going. He gets an eight from Poh, a seven from Andy and a seven from Sofia. The other judges, in their efforts to take Jean-Christophe down a peg, have left Petro on 32, five points behind Vinnie and humiliated in front of his parents yet again.

Time for round two, traditionally the round that goes for way too long. Round Two is a pressure test, set by an internationally-acclaimed pastry chef allegedly. Her name is Cherish Finden, which is clearly made up, and for all anyone knows she is a fictional character created just for this episode. Everyone is saying she’s a really famous chef, but how would we know? She’s got bright red hair, much as a demon might. She claims to always be thinking about pastry, so she’d be pretty terrible company. As a judge she says she is “very fair, but brutal”. She will make an honest assessment of the dishes put before her, and punish failure with fire and steel.

The challenge is Cherish Finden’s Chinese afternoon tea. This consists of three small oranges, three small teapots and three small firecrackers. BUT! They’re not ACTUALLY oranges, teapots and firecrackers! They are CAKES, or to put it another way, LIES. Cherish reveals the dessert is inspired by her grandpapa, who also used to disguise himself as a teapot. Cherish describes the contents of the dessert, which is stuff like mousse and chocolate and mango compote and coconut and meringue and black sesame and yuzu curd and cheesecake and something called “tiger sponge”, which sounds terrifying.

The finalists have five hours to make the afternoon tea, causing them to wonder if it’s really worth it. Honestly the smart move is to just say right now, “Nah, I’m good” and leave the building. But idiotically they both decide to try to make this dumb dessert. Cherish will join the judging so they will be scored out of fifty and as always, the best dessert wins because Masterchef decided long ago that it’s a dessert competition and savoury food can go fuck itself.

There are over a hundred and fifty steps in the recipe, and over half of them involve bleeding. “I think I’ve got the one-up on Vinnie in terms of desserts,” says Petro, pretty cocky for a man who couldn’t even get his tart shells right. On the other hand, Vinnie has the haunted look of a man who has searched desperately through the recipe to find any mention of pasta and come up empty.

Vinnie begins making his tiger sponge. First he takes four newborn tiger cubs and whisks them to a soft peak. Sofia and Poh come over to make sure he’s distracted and unable to complete tasks properly. From the balcony Casper tells Vinnie he’s doing a good job even though he has no idea whether that is true.

There are no chairs on that balcony. These people have to stand up the whole time. Some of them are like a hundred years old. Seems cruel.

Petro whips egg whites while Cherish stands nearby and looks intensely at him, just waiting for any excuse to bring out her billy club and smash his kneecaps. Up on the balcony the viewers notice that Vinnie’s daquois isn’t as chunky as Petro’s. He hasn’t put his coconut in. I think he was supposed to put his coconut in. The spectators are devastated. Cherish licks her lips, sniffing blood. Suddenly, Vinnie puts his coconut in, and the day is saved. Or probably not, because if he’s forgetting the coconut at this early stage he’s bound to forget more things, like not putting enough tiger in his sponge or forgetting to turn the oven on or using whale semen instead of milk or something.

Petro is frantically whipping the cream that is destined for his mousse, but he over-whips it. The cream lodges a complaint with the Human Rights Commission and Petro falls behind. He tries again. He over-whips it again. “You’ve got this, Petro,” says a balcony voyeur - the one phrase that is only ever said to people who do not have this. Cherish tastes his mousse. Petro asks her if it’s OK. She tilts her head in a silent gesture that roughly translates to “This tastes like my grandmother’s skin tags”.

Vinnie’s mousse, meanwhile, is chunky rather than smooth. His girlfriend tries to give him some assistance, leaning over the railing and saying helpful things like “what’s wrong” and “that’s good”. He blends his mousse and it is not chunky anymore. Cherish tastes his mousse and smiles, but she smiles in the way a Bond villain smiles before flogging some testicles. And by now it’s pretty obvious that Cherish has flogged her share of testicles in her time, and is hungry to flog some more.

Petro is happy with his cheesecake, but if only that were enough for a man to live a contented life. He needs his yuzu spheres to come out well too, if he’s ever to feel he belongs on this planet. Meanwhile Vinnie has finished his compote and doesn’t sound as happy about it as you’d expect. What happened to those carefree days, when finishing your compote was a joy? Now all it means he has to cut his dacquoise, and start on his pandan, or…I don’t know, this is all really hard to follow. All I can tell is that both men are mixing stuff and blending stuff and spooning stuff into plastic bags and Cherish is stalking around the room peering at everything they’re doing and looking like a serial killer unable to fight her urge any longer.

Suddenly tragedy strikes. Petro has cut his dacquoise wrong. He cut it into strips, instead of into a rectangle. He feels pretty inadequate, but he shouldn’t be so gloomy. I mean, I don’t even know what a dacquoise is, so it’s all a matter of perspective. Anyway he still has some dacquoise left to cut the right way, so he gets back to work and now must make his handle and knob.

Halfway through the cook, Vinnie is not halfway through the recipe. He needs to pick up the pace, so he decides to save time by making dreadful mistakes. He takes out his cheesecake and Pat observes that it looks like it’s been in too long. Luckily, Pat’s opinion doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.

Vinnie is happy with his pandan and coconut mix. He adds in his gelatin. “Did you just add your gelatin?” asks Cherish. “I just added my gelatin,” says Vinnie. “Read your recipe,” says Cherish. Vinnie reads his recipe and realises he missed the bit on page eighteen where it says “VINNIE IS A MORON”. He didn’t sieve his gelatin which is apparently vital because otherwise the gelatin will be poisonous or something.

There is hope for Vinnie, because not only is Petro over-obsessing about his handles, he’s skipped a page and hasn’t even made some weird green goop that he was supposed to make apparently. If only he’d had Cherish around to say “Read your recipe” and pull a scary face at him. From above, Petro’s dad looks down in contempt, thinking, “Quitting the family business not looking such a brilliant idea now, is it you cocky bastard?” Petro has missed making his pandan and coconut mousse, and now he makes his pandan and coconut mousse, since that seems like a good idea. For the purposes of this competition, that is: obviously as a general rule making pandan and coconut mousse is a terrible idea and a pretty great way to waste your life.

Vinnie has his own pandan and coconut mousse issues. He consults Cherish as to whether sieving his mousse now, before all the gelatine has been incorporated, can save the mousse. Cherish refuses to tell him whether he should do this or not. “Chef, you have to decide on your own now,” she says, which seems mean. What’s the point of having a tiny red-haired psychopath staring at your for hours, if she won’t even tell you what to do with your gelatine?

Annabel observes that Petro’s been cooking his pandan leaves much longer than Vinnie did. She doesn’t know what this means, she just wants everyone to get along. Petro blends his puree, strains it, adds his gelatine, etc etc. Almost everything happening in this cook could just be summarised as “Vinnie and Petro cut some stuff up, mix up a big bowl of mush, and put it in the fridge.” I don’t know why I bother. But even more, I don’t know why THEY bother.

Vinnie wraps up his firecrackers. Petro squirts goo into moulds. Someone tells him he’s got this. He doesn’t throw anything at them but he should. Petro’s chocolate is setting too quickly for him to wrap it around his firecrackers. Cherish looks at his failure impassively, not betraying any emotions and not needing to, because her joy at witnessing his suffering can be taken as read.

Petro takes some time to stand at the side of the room and have a good cry. Andy goes over to say some unhelpful things. “You are here for a reason,” he says, which isn’t very comforting because the reason might be to be publicly pantsed by Vinnie. But something in the sincerity of Andy’s turtleneck gets through, and Petro rushes back to his bench to have another crack at this fucking bastard chocolate. He wraps those firecrackers up, sticks them in the freezer and all is well, according to the way the show has been edited.

Vinnie’s girlfriend tells him he has to hurry: he’s just finished spraying his mandarin, which means…I don’t know. He has to assemble his firecrackers, which have to not only taste great, but actually explode upon contact with the human digestive system. Vinnie’s firecrackers are a little wonky, but who among us is perfect? What right have you to judge him for his wonky firecrackers? He is as God made him! On the other hand, his teapots aren’t exactly like Cherish’s, so Hell is all he deserves.

Time is nearly up and Poh is fighting back tears as she thinks about the time she was in the same position as these young men, and failed miserably. She wonders which one of them will be the Poh of this year, and whether he will then go on to steal her job.

Finally it is over. Both men slump to the ground, screaming for someone to kill them and end the pain. They hug each other and declare their undying love, while Vinnie’s girlfriend looks on sadly, realising he will never love her the way he loves Petro. Petro is also sad because there are physical flaws in his dessert, and all his life he swore he would never be the kind of man whose dessert would have physical flaws. He’s become everything he ever hated, and it hurts.

Vinnie declares that he is proud of himself. Jesus the ego on this guy. His dad runs down from the balcony to hug him. He did not get permission to do this, and is tasered by security. Poh is crying even harder now, knowing that this ensures she’ll get a lot of time on screen.

It is time for the year’s last tasting, and Petro and Vinnie reflect on the growing realisation that they will never again feel fully alive or do anything meaningful in life.

Vinnie serves his dessert first. Poh thinks it smells amazing. Sofia finds it very consistent. Cherish despises their weakness. The tension is so thick I almost forget to look at Sofia’s cleavage. “Oh my goodness,” Cherish cries, and declares Vinnie’s fake mandarins “va-va-voom!” This is good, it would seem. As Andy and Sofia have minor orgasms, Cherish declares the firecrackers are also good and that she’d like Vinnie to work for her, so she can swallow his soul. On the downside, his teapots are a big disappointment, as he’s overcooked his cheesecake. “Also it’s quite dense,” says Cherish, getting all ableist about it.

Carefully, the judges write down their scores for Vinnie, and then their fake scores for use in the fake ending.

In comes Petro, dispirited and drained of energy and longing for death. Cherish looks ready to oblige him. Before the judges taste his dessert, they make him cry to fulfil his contract. Then they eat, bracing themselves for the worst. Actually it turns out he’s done OK. His teapots are wonderfully smooth and nutty and teapottish, although his handles were absent, a grave insult in many cultures. All the judges bang on about the teapots for ages in a frankly suspicious way. Then they wank on about the marmalade, but Cherish says he’s over-whipped his mousse and must be punished. Sofia goes on to describe her intense hatred of Petro’s firecracker: he left his pandan leaves in too long and consequently they don’t taste like real firecrackers at all. In fact the pandan tastes fermented, and though I’ve never had fermented pandan I’m guessing it’s pretty harrowing. “I just can’t express how upset I am for him,” says Andy, but nevertheless he tries, with a brief interpretive dance.

It is time to reveal the final scores and crown a winner, who won’t actually know he’s the winner until the show airs, making all emotions we see on screen fake and meaningless.

Petro gets a 7 from Cherish, a 7 from the suddenly rather bitchy Jean-Christophe, a 7 from Sofia, a 7 from Poh and a 7 from Andy. This adds up to 35, giving him a total of 67 in this timeline. That means Vinnie only needs 31 to win. Piece of piss.

Cherish gives Vinnie an 8. Jean-Christophe gives him an 8. It is looking good for the Roman Empire. Sofia gives him a NINE. Poh gives him a NINE - god, it’s always a competition between those two. And Andy gives him a nine too! He’s got 43, and a total of 80, and he has DESTROYED Petro.

Everyone cheers and applauds. Vinnie’s family hugs and kisses him. He gives an emotional speech about how wonderful it’s all been, how grateful he is for the friends he’s made and how far he’s come on his Masterchef journey. He adds that he is really proud of Petro and loves cooking alongside him. Vinnie lifts the Masterchef trophy above his head and celebrates under a rain of confetti.

Then everyone re-takes their marks, and again cheers and applauds. Petro’s family hugs and kisses him. He gives an emotional speech about how wonderful it’s all been, how grateful he is for the friends he’s made and how far he’s come on his Masterchef journey. He adds that he is really proud of Vinnie and loves cooking alongside him. Petro lifts the Masterchef trophy above his head and celebrates under a rain of confetti.

Both endings in the can, the producers tell both finalists to piss off home as we all reflect on the incredibly moving fake ending we just saw.

That’s it. Tune in next year, when god only knows.

Masterchef Recap: Pray for Death

Ben Pobjie — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 06:41:26 GMT

This episode has no purpose other than to fill in space so the series can last another week, so I am, for once, going to treat the show and its participants with a certain amount of disrespect.

We begin with a close-up of flowers in the garden, as a reminder that, like flowers, human beings are beautiful but doomed to fade and die in a short space of time. Death will be a constant accompaniment to the proceedings in this episode, as all involved show on their faces the knowledge that they soon will die.

The final three, Petro, Vinnie and Aaron, enter the kitchen to be informed that they are not cooking today: rather, Poh and Jean-Christophe will be cooking and they will be judging along with Sofia. The finalists are overjoyed, as cooking is the one thing they truly hate.

Sofia tells Poh and Jean-Christophe that they will be cooking “mano a mano”, which of course means “hand to hand” - they will be beating each other senseless with whatever utensils they can find. Then a truck pulls up. It has potatoes in it. The chefs have to cook with potatoes. Thrilling, isn’t it?

They have 60 minutes to cook a potato dish, but for anyone watching it will seem much, much, much longer. Poh runs to the pantry to shove whatever she can into her waistband to take home. Jean-Christophe looks in the oven to see if anyone is hiding there - he’s been shivved by too many midgets in ovens to take any chances these days.

Poh announces that she is going to cook the dish she was eliminated on in Season 12, which was the second season that she competed in and the second season that she didn’t win in, making one wonder why she got the job of judge in the first place. I mean, I have as many Masterchef titles as Poh does, and I wasn’t even considered for the gig. Anyway, she’s going to see whether in the last six years she has learnt how to cook pasta.

In the pantry, Petro pesters Jean-Christophe, taunting him with wisecracks about pretentious cooking and the shame of the Vichy regime. Sofia meets with the three amateurs to discuss the challenge and why the hell any of them are bothering. “What do you want to see?” she asks. The lads admit that they would really like to see the building and everyone in it burn. Petro adds that he’d like something that he’s never had before, like happiness or a sense of self-love.

The show goes on and on and on. Nothing important happens, even by Masterchef standards. Poh rolls some dough. The people on the balcony laugh. The dough is green because it has been flavoured with human mucus. Her dish is called curlurgione, a name Poh made up, and it originates in Sardinia, a place Poh made up - she got the idea from a tin of sardines in her eyeline.

“I cannot let Jean-Christophe beat me,” says Poh, but I think she’s selling herself short. I genuinely believe that if she puts her mind to it, Poh can let herself be beaten by almost anyone.

Jean-Christophe is excited by potatoes, but then he has been drinking since dawn. He puts butter in his pot with the wrapping paper still on, because honestly he is past caring about anything. He pours booze in the pot and sets everything on fire. He stares into the flames, lusting for the sweet agony of his future in Hell. Sofia comes to his bench. Jean-Christophe tells her she looks great. Sofia says duh, she knows that. Jean-Christophe explains that he is cooking some bullshit with potatoes or whatever.

“I have no idea what Jean-Christophe is trying to make,” says Aaron, “because I wasn’t listening and I don’t care.” This feeling is shared by everyone in the kitchen and also everyone watching at home. Most of the people on the balcony are taking a nap. Sofia has popped out to see a movie. Petro is darning his socks. The camera crew wanders off to film some butterflies for a bit.

Jean-Christophe explains that he is using the juice of the potato to thicken his sauce. He then begins leaping around the kitchen waving his arms and making Daffy Duck noises, heightening the suspicion that the potatoes have been infected by some mind-altering fungus. “What the hell am I doing?” he asks, not rhetorically. Nobody can help him. The judges begin a GoFundMe to try to raise the money to get him the help he needs.

Meanwhile Poh is making a Jerusalem artichoke veloute, in one of the least interesting developments in television history.

With minutes to go, Jean-Christophe begins adding new ingredients to his dish. “What is he doing?” asks Luke, not understanding the rudiments of bomb-making. “Where’s my glasses?” asks Poh - she has accidentally sauteed them.

“I feel like I’m at the circus watching JC,” cries Dot, as Jean-Christophe leaps onto an elephant’s back and begins hurling confetti in the air. And then, suddenly, time is up, and everyone sits back and reflects on just how meaningless this experience has been.

Jean-Christophe has made a thing called “around the world flying with potatoes” and why not. It’s got “chicken mousse”, which sounds pretty revolting, and a bunch of other crap. It is apparently very good. Hooray, everyone yells.

Poh has made a thing called “a riff on a Sardiniain dish called culurgione”. Grace exclaims “Poh’s dumplings look so beautiful and so refined”, but unlike Grace I have been paying attention to Poh’s cooking, so I have no opinion on that. Apparently the dish is nice. We weep with joy.

The winner of the irrelevant contest is Poh, showing the power of pity. And so we come to end of…

Oh sweet Jesus no, we are still going. There’s a round two. The three finalists are going to cook a “finals feast”, against Poh and Jean-Christophe. This means another half hour of this, giving new meaning to the phrase “fucking hell”. Sofia’s co-judges will be Dot and Luke, because they are the most likely to throw up during tasting. “This is honestly a dream come true,” says Luke, and…really? This is your dream? REALLY? THIS?

“Any words of advice for our cooks today?” asks Sofia, and Dot does indeed have some words of advice, although none that are worth writing down.

The challenge begins. “It is Poh and Jean-Christophe against our top three,” says Grace, although she does not manage to fully capture just how uninteresting it is.

On it goes. And on. And on. The cooks pick up meat. They pick up vegetables. They pick up eggs. They talk. They place pots on stoves. They say things like “proteins” and “butterfly” and “prawns” and “dessert”. Time passes like treacle. People clap. People shout. People glaze over. “Gratin dauphinois,” says Jean-Christophe, who has given up on the show and is teaching Poh French.

With forty-five minutes to go, I begin having periodic blackouts. Losing consciousness for unknown periods of time, I find that each time I wake up, nothing has happened. Hannah observes that Poh has made “sick floating islands”, so I guess the tedium has induced hallucinations. “I’ve steeped mandarin into the custard,” says Poh, throwing words out at random. Sofia and Dot ask Jean-Christophe what he’s doing. He refuses to answer. He does, however, claim to be making a dessert. Poh is also doing a dessert. Jean-Christophe is surprised to hear this. Sofia asks Poh if she knows that Jean-Christophe is doing a dessert. Poh doesn’t care, so she’s really caught the mood of the moment. Dot is stunned to observe the complete lack of communication between the two chefs, but it’s amazing how all the rules get tossed to the wind when you genuinely have no interest in what you’re doing. For example, here is a list of actors who have played Dracula:

Lorne Greene
Bela Lugosi
Gary Oldman
Jack Palance
Christopher Lee
David Suchet
Mark Gatiss
Tony Todd
Lewis Macleod
Frederick Jaeger
David March
Thomas Studley
Orson Welles
Sean Cronin
Denholm Elliott
Joe Flaherty
Claes Bang
Graham McTavish
Ken Marino
John Carradine
Aldo Monti
David Niven
Paul Askonas
Patrick Bergin
Rutger Hauer
Peter Stormare
French Tickner
Frank Langella
Stephen Boyd
Leslie Nielsen
Richard Roxburgh
Judd Hirsch
Daniel Day-Lewis
Gerard Butler
Nicolas Cage
Caleb Landry Jones

There are others, of course. Anyway: Masterchef

Vinnie is making potato gratin. He’s never made it before, so it’d be a brave move in any exercise that involved consequences of some kind.

“We’re not really a team,” says Poh, but “I think it’s going to be OK actually”. She is correct: it is going to be OK because nothing that happens in this kitchen today matters. To emphasise this, Jean-Christophe drops some acid and stares at a magpie for ten minutes.

A quick look at the clock reveals that it is actually starting to move backwards. The time before this challenge began is a dim shadow, barely discernible through the mists of memory and regret. Petro’s cake is too warm, which means that in any meaningful sense, his life is over. He takes the top off his cake, an ancient symbolic ritual intended to express sorrow and beg forgiveness from the gods. They do not show him mercy, insisting that he must stay in the kitchen until this episode is over.

Time is nearly up and everyone is trying their best to act like they give a damn. Finally it is over, but of course not really: we still have to go through the judging. But the cooking is over, and the people on the balcony breathe a sigh of relief because soon they can sit down.

“It’s amazing what you can do with no communication,” says Poh, inaccurately.

Sofia, Dot and Luke eat Poh and Jean-Christophe’s food, which is chicken and ratatouille and potatoes and red peppers and fennel and radishes and parsley and “ile flottantes” which are something or other. It is a lot of food but luckily the judges have been purging, so they are ready to take it on board. The food is good and so forth. Luke and Dot are very complimentary, which means very little to Poh and Jean-Christophe because who cares what losers think? “Poh, I want to pour this cream all over my body,” says Sofia, which is a pretty brutal insult: if you like a dish you want to put it in your mouth, not all over your body. But anyway, that’s what Sofia wants to do, and Poh makes a mental note to meet Sofia after the show to pour her cream all over her body. It’ll be available as an online extra on 10Play.

The three finalists serve their food, which is definitely worse than the professionals’ but could win because of the judges’ innate bias. The food is steak and cake and potatoes and prawns and things. “That jus belongs in the Louvre,” says Luke, meaning it tastes like paint. Apart from that though it is nice, though Sofia does not wish to cover her body in any of it, which is obviously a letdown.

And so finally, after one of the longest episodes ever, coming in at just under fifteen weeks, it is time for the judging. The judges have won, and isn’t that just so incredibly fucking thrilling for us all?

Tune in tomorrow, when something that matters might happen.

Masterchef Recap: Rise of the Planet of the Grapes

Ben Pobjie — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:01:38 GMT

For an account of the now-legendary appearance of Meghan Markle, Duchess of Suits, check my Good Food piece here.

There are four men left. Why only men? Is it institutional misogyny? Is it just random happenstance? Well, neither: it’s actually just that men are better at cooking than women, something that is not only widely known but scientifically proven. One example is Gordon Ramsay, who is not a woman. QED.

Anyway, four men left: Casper the Friendly Ghost, Petro the Friendly Greek, Vinnie the Sexy Italian, and Aaron the Walking Photo Album. Petro gets to sit this elimination out, because unlike the other three who were too stupid to make celerica ice-cream yesterday, he made celeriac ice-cream yesterday. Someone is going home today, and it will be a devastating blow to the amateur cook who has to face the fact that his life, in all meaningful senses, is over.

But before someone cries over being kicked out, people first have to cry over family ties. Not Family Ties - they’re not being forced to watch the episode where Alex talks to a psychiatrist about his dead friend - but their actual families. Each of the three potential losers must read a letter from a loved one before they cook.

Aaron’s letter is from his partner, who he hasn’t really mentioned before what with bringing up his grandparents every five minutes, but she supports him fully in his food journey and tells him he better not fucking come home. She also sends him some garlic, remembering how much he fears vampires.

Vinnie’s letter is from his father, who reveals the shocking news that Vinnie’s name is actually “Vincent”. Vinnie’s dad is a chef, so Vinnie has had an unfair advantage this whole time. His letter makes Poh cry. It makes Sofia cry. It makes Vinnie cry. Jean-Christophe has seen too much of life to ever let himself feel human emotion, so he’s fine. Vinnie’s dad has also sent him some sardines, and anyone who’s seen The Godfather well knows what it means when a Sicilian sends you fish. Enough said.

Casper gets a letter and some grapes. “There’s a lot of memories around grapes,” he says, embarking on a strange tale about a family who incessantly and insatiably eats grapes for reasons impossible to fathom. The letter is from a shadowy organisation that Casper refers to only as “mum and dad”.

Petro isn’t cooking today, but he does get a letter. It’s from his parents, who reminisce about how much Petro always wanted to be on Masterchef and how they urged him to stop his foolish dreaming and learn accountancy. This letter makes everyone cry too and it’s all a bit much really. As a professional recapper it’s actually pretty unfair on me to include genuine, sincere feeling in the show when they know I depend entirely on cruel mockery. “When boys cry, it gets you in the heart,” says Annabel, and she’s right. It does. How dare they.

Anyway, there’s cooking to be done in theory. Aaron must use garlic, Vinnie must use sardines, and Casper must use grapes, and they all must cook something inspired by family or love or memories or mail or something. All that “cook with your heart” nonsense they go on with, you know. Like Strictly Ballroom. Remember that? “It is real Fran!” Classic.

Where were we? Oh right. Food. Casper is feeling motivated, which is pretty ominous. He reflects on the fact that the other three are all from Melbourne, meaning they’re close to family, whereas Casper’s family, being in the Navy, are deep within the polar ice cap, unable to be reached except by trained seal mail. He feels lonely, and isolated, and increasingly paranoid that the people on the balcony are plotting to murder him.

Aaron is cooking a crab, which…doesn’t he always? I think he always cooks a crab. Feels like he’s taking revenge against something here. “I want to make a dish that will make my partner proud,” he says, and it certainly does seem that if this crab doesn’t blow the judges away, the last thread of Crystal’s respect for her man will snap. If it weren’t for her, Aaron wouldn’t even be on Masterchef, as it was she who bribed the producers in the first place.

Vinnie takes a good hard look at his sardines, which look back at him with that accusing stare that sardines always have. He is going to make butterflied sardines, which are sardines stuffed with butterflies. He heads out to the garden to catch his stuffing. He tests whether he needs to take the scales off his sardines by putting a couple on the Hibachi. The sardines scream in pain and Vinnie smiles smugly. “Are they salty?” asks Petro from above. They are salty - in fact they’re downright irate.

Casper is doing a dessert because his family has given him grapes, which he charitably does not interpret as an act of sabotage. “I’m thinking about balance of flavours and textures and temperatures,” he says, getting really carried away. He knows almond goes well with grapes, but how on earth can he make use of this fact in a culinary way? With a cookie! He’s also going to make a granita, which is what Masterchef contestants always make when they don’t have the guts to make revolting ice-cream.

“I love this challenge,” says Sofia, “not like all those shit challenges we’ve had before.” She tells the other judges that cooking with garlic is really hard, so she fears for Aaron’s sanity. Poh replies by noting that cooking with sardines is really hard and Vinnie will probably fail miserably. Jean-Christophe nods wisely and adds that Casper is basically fucked because grapes? Jesus Christ, grapes. Andy doesn’t say anything because he’s not there, he’s at home looking after his “baby”, having apparently decided that making human beings is more important than making delicious sauces, so to hell with him.

Sofia asks Aaron how he met his girlfriend. Aaron tells her it’s none of her damn business. Sofia moves on to the subject of garlic and how terrible it is. Aaron muses on the necessity to make garlic the star of the dish without making the dish taste like garlic.

Meanwhile Casper finds his cremeux is too sweet, unlike Casper himself, who we all know is JUST SWEET ENOUGH! He begins to realise that he has a really tough job ahead, and it’s all the fault of his freaking parents and their freaking grapes. Sofia and Poh note that white chocolate is a dangerous ingredient: it’s the garlic of chocolate. Casper decides the solution is to put grape pulp in his cremeux, which is sort of disgusting if you think about it as a metaphor.

Vinnie makes his agrodolce dressing. Agrodolce is Italian for sweet and sour. It goes well with sardines. These are things we have learnt today. Isn’t that nice.

“Cook with your heart!” Sofia bellows, even though it’s much better to cook with your brain, and even better to cook without grapes. Up on the balcony, Lydia reflects on the fact that she has never scaled a sardine, although this isn’t rare: few people ever bother to scale a sardine, given how low and relatively easy to climb they are.

“I’m feeling pretty good,” says Aaron, and why not - his girlfriend is hot. It’s time for him to build his sauce. He gathers cement, gravel, plywood and steel. “This dish is such a balancing act,” he says, listing disturbingly to the left. “I can smell the garlic,” says Sofia, clearly trying to insinuate something derogatory. “It is the hero,” Aaron retorts. And he’s right. You tell him he has to make a garlic dish and then you sneer at him for making it with garlic? Will you never be happy, woman?

“Don’t let this be your last cook in the Masterchef kitchen!” Sofia shouts, very unfairly. No matter well they cook, it’s going to be the last cook for one of them. It’s totally illogical to shout this. Kind of mean, when you think about it.

Casper is feeling nervous because his dish doesn’t taste enough of grape. He tries to think of a solution. Running away does seem like the best course. “I really need to add more grape flavour,” he panics. “What can I add to this?” Suddenly he hits upon the answer: grapes! Nothing has more grape flavour than them! He grabs some grapes and begins to pickle them, showing the innate cruelty that has been his trademark since day one.

Vinnie is cooking his sardines and so forth. They taste good. Cool.

“Use your emotions!” cries Jean-Christophe sarcastically. With three minutes to go, Aaron’s dish tastes like garlic, Vinnie’s dish tastes like sardines, and Casper’s dish tastes like sadness. “What is grape?” he asks himself, wondering whether he’s ever really known the truth.

Time is up, for some more than others. Aaron serves his dish first. “I think I’d have made Crystal really proud,” says Aaron, and you wonder whether his insistence on saying this so many times speaks to deep insecurity. Shouldn’t someone asks Crystal’s opinion on whether she’s proud? Maybe stop putting words in her mouth, Aaron, yeah? But anyway he’s made crab pasta and it’s very garlicky and nice. “Aaron has been very brave,” says Jean-Christophe, in awe of the enormous piles of garlic that have been shoved in this dish. He falls to his knees and weeps, for never has he eaten so much garlic, and never has he known such joy.

In comes Vinnie with his special sardines. They are butterflied, barbecued and brought onto a base of beans. And agrodolce sauce, the sauce that combines Agro with Joe Dolce for a comedy sensation. The judges reckon Vinnie’s sardines are quite sardiney, which they approve of, although obviously they would’ve preferred him to make some sardine ice-cream like a proper chef.

Finally, Casper: pickled grapes on an almond biscuit with chardonnay verjus, white chocolate cremeux and a grape juice granita. It’s all very grapey, which is a bit of a shame. Casper avers that he loved getting a letter from his parents, though he does wish they had the slightest clue about cooking, so they didn’t send him frigging grapes. He tells the story again about his family sitting up all night eating grapes, and it’s kind of awkward because that’s…that’s super weird, man.

The judges look at Casper’s grapes much as a cat looks at a deworming pill. Against their better judgment, they eat. “I’m actually quite amazed,” says Jean-Christophe, finally realising how insane his life is. Also, he loves the grapes! Poh thinks the grapes are fine but they don’t taste enough like grapes. “That white chocolate is punching so hard,” she says, showing the bruises on her face to prove it. Sofia can’t taste the grapes. “I don’t think this is a balanced dessert, and I do not think it’s a dessert that heroes grape,” she adds, unable to mask the vitriolic contempt in her voice. She can’t believe anyone would be so vile as to not hero grape, and she’s as angry as she’s ever been.

Judgment time and you all know who’s going home. The judges try to make up some kind of bullshit about Vinnie’s cook on the fish lacking technical finesse, but there is no big twist coming here. Casper, who tried so hard and dreamed so big and buried so many of his victims deep beneath the earth, must now leave. His watch is over. Mind you, Poh says the decision wasn’t unanimous, which means Jean-Christophe, the MICHELIN-STARRED CHEF, though Casper should stay, but oh no, Poh and Sofia think they know better. How many Michelin stars do you have, Poh? Sofia? Huh? What’s that? Speak up!

Everyone is very sad to see Casper go, and slightly scared of what form his vengeance will take. They all agree that Casper is very good at cooking and it’s a gross injustice for him to go home. If only he’d made ice-cream. When will they learn?

Tune in next week, when the final three choose violence.

Masterchef Recap: Follow the Bleeder

Ben Pobjie — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:58:18 GMT

Today nobody will be going home, so there’s that faint atmosphere of pointlessness around the kitchen. We’ll see some cooking, but we won’t see any real emotional trauma, so it does feel a bit like treading water. But anyway, let’s get through it, whatever.

There are only five amateurs left, and so as they enter the garden they have an awkwardly rehearsed conversation about how far they’ve come. On enterting the kitchen they see the five benches lined up in a row, and Andy wearing his chef clothes, looking somehow sexier than ever.

First order of business of congratulations to the cooks for making the top five, and everyone celebrates the absence of the losers. “The four of us couldn’t be more proud,” says Poh, as if they had something to do with it. The amateurs all discuss how happy they are and how unexpected it all is and how the gender imbalance is extremely offensive. Annabel speaks on how much more confident the men are than she is, proving the power of the patriarchy and the base entitlement of men. Casper declares that his goal was to make the top five, so really he should leave now. He figures he can now imagine himself winning the whole thing. “Gotta do a bit more than just imagine it,” says Sofia. “Yeah, no shit, Sherlock,” says Casper. Not really, but he should have.

Today the cooks will have to keep up with Andy, one of the easiest tasks in all of culinary history. “This is something that I have been wanting to do forever,” says Vinnie, but this is a lie. Twenty years ago he didn’t even know who Andy was: how could he possibly have wanted to keep up with him?

So basically, Andy cooks, the amateurs try to follow along, and fifteen seconds after he finishes, they’re finished. It’s high pressure, high stakes, and medium entertainment.

The dish is barbecued lamb, burnt eggplant cream and braised bolotto beans, and is on the menu at Andy’s restaurant, which he plugs without shame. Annabel admits she’s worried, because she watched the keep-up challenge with Gordon Ramsay and saw how hard it is. The good news is: this is Andy Allen, not Gordon Ramsay, so she’ll be fine.

There are two Hibachis on each bench. Andy places eggplants on one. He gets a saucepan and puts it on the heat with olive oil. He cuts an onion. I am not sure I am going to find the will to write this down blow by blow. They’re cooking onions, and Aaron is zoning out a little. He tends to do this, when Andy is talking. We all do, if we’re honest.

Andy cuts up his lamb. “The first thing we want to do is take off the fat cap,” he says, unable to resist sticking it to Luke even after he’s gone. “We’re going to french this rack,” he says. FINALLY, this show is getting sexy. They french their racks, and it is HOT. “I’ve frenched a few racks in my time,” Vinnie boasts, like the playa he is.

Poh is worried about Annabel, who has already fallen behind because she’s never frenched lamb, being a decent, respectable sort of girl. She’s cut too much fat off her lamb so she has to get more lamb and cut the fat off that, while Andy serenely sails on with whatever he’s doing now.

The big question is, how do you french a lamb? Basically what you do is scrape all the meat off the bones to make sure that the dish is as small and unsatisfying as possible, in the classic French manner. Andy moves on to the rump. The rump of the lamb. I think. They also have to take the fat cap off the rump, and set it aside for a perverted ritual later.

They reduce their lamb stock, to a pale shadow of what it once was. The lamb fat is smoking - but not Petro’s which is blazing with a glorious fire. “Petro, your lamb’s on fire,” says Andy, more disappointed than angry. Petro ponders why his Hibachi always seems to start a fire, unable to face the possibility that the problem might be him. He tries to grill some more fat. It catches on fire again. Then everyone’s fat catches on fire. Maybe they’re doing this wrong. Then again, maybe Andy is doing it wrong and teaching them the wrong thing to do. That does seem likely.

After a quick break for the fire brigade to come in and wet everything down, they resume. Andy is making a mirepoix, against all expert advice. The contestants keep asking questions and getting him to repeat things, and he’s answering them although really he should just let them swing in the wind, if they couldn’t be bothered listening properly the first time. Casper thinks he’s keeping up with Andy. In fact he might be ahead of him. Casper suddenly realises he has developed the ability to see through time, and is dazzled by the sight of all history whirling before his eyes simultaneously.

They are now making a cartouche, which will be placed on the front of the sarcophagus in which the dish is to be embalmed. Andy now instructs the amateurs to take the skin off some garlic, which is one of Annabel’s least favourite jobs after she was forced by an evil stepmother to spend her teen years peeling garlic day after day. “We want a really fine brunoise on this,” Andy cries, referring to god knows what. Andy asks him he’s put garlic in the demiglace. Andy, for some reason, needs to look and see - shouldn’t he know?

Annabel is falling further and further behind as Andy digs savagely into the soft, yielding flesh of the eggplant, so similar to that of a human victim. “We’re going to bring the pan with the onions, then we’re going in with the eggplant,” says Andy, any remnant of logic long departed. Poh and Sofia agree this is the hardest following challenge they’ve seen, because nothing Andy says makes any sense whatsoever.

All right. Lamb. They cook it on the Hibachi. There is some more fire. “I shouldn’t see flames on our lamb,” says Andy, one second before his own lamb goes up in flames. This is very embarrassing and if the amateurs had any backbone this is the point at which they would rush Andy and overpower him, taking control of the kitchen for themselves. But all their courage was beaten out of them weeks ago, and they just meekly chortle and keep on slavishly following him.

Disaster strikes as Aaron takes his caramelisation too far and is pilloried in the tabloid press. He doesn’t have time to put more eggplants on the Hibachi, what with this modern world of faxes and teleconferences and all. He’ll have to work with what he’s got, which ain’t much. In better news, Andy’s got his shallots off the stove, and hopefully they can start to rebuild their lives from this point on.

It’s pancetta time, and Vinnie is jumping out of his skin, pancetta being his absolute favourite. Andy tells them to put a little pancetta in their pans. Vinnie puts more pancetta in his pan because Vinnie knows best, doesn’t he, Vinnie is always right, Vinnie doesn’t need advice for anyone, he’ll just put as much pancetta in his pan as he feels like and everyone can go fuck themselves.

Andy starts to fish everything out, really delving deep into his most repressed memories. “Beans are now in with the lardons,” he yells, and I have no idea what this means. I don’t know what anything means anymore. Everything everyone says is gibberish. The screen is just a whirling, indistinguishable mess of smoke and steam and knives and pots and pans and creme fraiche. “I’m going to get a thermometer and look at the internal temperature of my cutlet,” says Andy, and I just can’t bring myself to tell you what “cutlet” is a euphemism for. It is a hideous pieceof television.

Annabel has abandoned her strategy. Everyone else has abandoned their sanity. Annabel chops herbs. Andy transfers his sauce. On the roof, a banshee screams. “He’s going fast, isn’t he,” says Poh, suddenly understanding the premise of the episode. Andy demands they add a tablespoon of capers, just to see if they’ll do it. He laughs maniacally. He slices his lamb. Sofia’s drool begins falling on the amateurs’ heads. Andy carves his rump, and invites everyone to do the same. “He’s not just a sexy chef,” muses Jean-Christophe, finally realising that Andy, contrary to what he’s thought for the last few years, actually works in the food sector.

Annabel carves her rump, and also cuts into her lamb. It is pink inside, just like any of us. “Righto, we are plating,” says Andy, optimistically. “I’m going on at probably 1.30 o’clock,” he goes on, no longer even pretending to be conveying any kind of meaning with his words. Everyone attempts to plate like Andy. Vinnie is bad at it. Aaron isn’t even sure if the thing he’s putting the food on is a plate. Annabel asks whether she should put her eggplants on the Hibachi now.

Andy is done. They have fifteen seconds. Annabel frantically spoons her beans onto the plate. All is activity and desperation and sweat and blood and bile. It is over. The amateurs hug. The judges scream for death.

Casper sees that Petro has capers in his sauce. He thought Andy just said “caper juice”, and now his sauce has no capers. It is frustrating, particularly because “capers” is an anagram of “Casper”, so he always prides himself on his caper work.

The judges eat Andy’s dish and pretend that it is nice. Then on to the amateurs.

First, Petro. “How was it?” asks Jean-Christophe. “It was a lot of fun,” Petro says, bearing false witness in contradiction of the Bible. The judges chomp down on Petro’s lamb. “Your sauce is elite,” says Andy, knowing he never knew sauce before now. However, Petro’s rump is under, which sounds pretty sexy but actually just means bad lamb. “This plate is full of character,” says Jean-Christophe. “This plate is talking to us.” Jean-Christophe is sedated and taken away to a more comfortable institution.

Next is Aaron. “How do you enjoy keeping up with Andy, Aaron?” asks Sofia. Aaron also lies and says it was fun. There is a full and frank discussion of Aaron’s dismal eggplant failure, and then they eat. Aaron’s dish is OK but not great, as the eggplant is a little bit bitter and the lamb has its own regrets.

Annabel is next, and admits there are flaws in her dish. The judges agree. Her puree was a deep disappointment to all, but on the bright side everyone loves Annabel’s general vibe so that’s cool.

Next is Casper. He is in an agony of anticipation, knowing his failure to put capers in his sauce makes him deserving of pain. “I think it’s a decent-looking plate of food,” sniffs Andy disdainfully. “I think it really resonates well,” says Jean-Christophe, struggling with his English. “This is a really solid effort,” says Sofia, gushing embarrassingly. “I miss the capers,” Andy bitches. Overall Casper’s done OK, but it’ll do no good flattering the boy.

Vinnie comes up last, and is feeling really good, possibly because he’s drunk. “Mate, I had an absolute ball,” he enthuses, having finally lived a slightly underwhelming dream. Everyone thinks Vinnie’s lamb is fantastic and better than Andy’s and that he should probably take over at Three Blue Ducks from this point on.

And so, after all that, with the futility of life pressing down upon us like heavy stones, we have just to learn the final verdict. Which is that Vinnie is great and the others are not. That makes Vinnie immune not only to tomorrow’s elimination but to any personal sense of shame. Casper, Annabel, Aaron and Petro will cook tomorrow for the right to be in the final four.

Tune in tomorrow when hate beats love.

(Late) Masterchef Recap: A Sauce Is Born

Ben Pobjie — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 05:42:02 GMT

Outside the Masterchef kitchen, jackals howl and vultures perch on gutters, waiting to feast upon the wretched remains of an eliminated cook. It’s black apron day, and one of the final six will go home - if they’re lucky, that is, given they will not be provided with transport and will have to walk the whole way.

Andy begins by asking Luke how he’ll feel if everything he ever wanted is taken away from him. Luke replies that he would be sad. Poh asks Aaron what he’s sacrificed to be here. Aaron, despite thinking this is a slightly odd question to ask right now, says he’s had to leave his family business (unicycle repair), which has been very hard in some ways but also pretty awesome because he’s on the telly.

Just as yesterday’s challenge was set by Sofia the non-cook, today’s is set by Jean-Christophe, who is revealed as actually having worked in the restaurant business in the past. He begins by teaching everyone to make a great sauce. The process is quite simple:

Be a Michelin-starred French chef.
Make a million sauces.
Make another one.

There’s probably more but if you think I was paying attention, you haven’t been. The amateurs sit and stare, slackjawed, as a sauce is born, surely the greatest miracle that Mother Nature has provided in Her wisdom. All of them realise that they have never really made a sauce before, and they fall to their knees, weeping, begging forgiveness for the shameful sauces they have inflicted on humanity in the past. Jean-Christophe forgives them, but does warn that anyone making a bad sauce from now on will have their fingernails pulled out with pliers.

And so the challenge. The amateurs must simply choose one of Jean-Christophe’s two sauces, slop it onto something or other, and sling it at the judges’ mouths. Exactly what they pair with the sauce is up to them, which is terrifying because these people crave structure and should not be left to their own devices.

“Chives, chives, chives!” chirrups Annabel as she roams the pantry, mind completely destroyed by the pressure. Over on the other side of the room, Petro says, “Celeriac”, which is even more worrying. He runs into the kitchen and the judges notice that he is carrying a duck, which is never a good sign. No sane person goes around with a duck in their hand.

Up on the balcony Vinnie applauds and cries, “Go, Caspy” because Casper is the only one he likes. As long as Casper does well, Vinnie is happy, although he obviously also takes pleasure in the failure of all the others. Where Vinnie developed his hatred for most of his co-stars it’s hard to say, but it’s been growing stronger every day.

Annabel has a blue-eyed cod that she is pulling apart with her bare hands, just like she used to do as a child, before she started seeing the doctor. She’s going to make fish and chips. “I feel like the good thing about fish and chips is the beautiful sauce that goes with it,” she says, never having had fish and chips before. She’s going to put Dijon mustard in the sauce. “It wouldn’t a French sauce without a bit of Dijon,” she grins, completely wrongly, reducing a rich and varied culinary tradition in a manner verging on racism.

Everyone seems to be doing a veloute, which is cool even though I don’t know what a veloute is. That dude did a white chocolate veloute one year, didn’t he? Someone should try that today. I bet they could make it work. Casper could do a great white chocolate veloute. But he’s not. Or is he? Poh comes round to tell him that the veloute he wants to make sounds pretty crap, so maybe the pivot to Milky Bar is on the cards here.

Aaron is trying to infuse some Asian flavours into his veloute, which is a massive departure for him. We’ve been wondering when Aaron was going to get around to finally using Asian flavours. He makes his sauce by chucking a bunch of prawns in a pot and then pouring any liquid he can find on top of them. Then he adds some detergent and is well on his way.

Speaking of disappointment, Luke is working frantically. He, like the rebel he is, is not doing a veloute, but making the espagnole (French for “Portuguese”) sauce. He’s got lamb, he’s got sauce, he’s got no idea what else he’s going to do, but lamb and sauce is enough isn’t it? If someone gave you some lamb and some sauce, you’d be happy. I mean, not if Luke gave it to you, but in a more general sense. Watching from above, Vinnie notices that there’s a big bit of fat on his lamb that could become an issue in future, but he’s not too worried because as far as he knows Luke has never made any terrible mistakes in the kitchen.

Annabel’s stock is tasting good, depending on how you define “good”, and she is planning to flavour her sauce with capers, dill, parsley, Dijon mustard and her “secret weapon” - shirodashi, which is a special seasoning she just made up today, that is a subtle mixture of horseradish and Pokemon.

Luke believes his dish needs something to cut through the sweetness, so he gets some radicchio to add that little bit of disgustingness that every meal needs. He’s also cooking Brussels sprouts, so the judges certainly can’t accuse him of pandering to human tastes. Vinnie notices that as Luke works hard on various elements, the one element he hasn’t started is the sauce. With twenty minutes left, Sofia asks Jean-Christophe how long it takes to make a sauce espagnole. Jean-Christophe, furious that Sofia wasn’t listening during his masterclass, refuses to answer. Nevertheless, Sofia is worried that Luke might not have enough time to make a decent sauce, although not that worried because she doesn’t like Luke. So she goes over to his bench to gloat. “Where’s your sauce?” she asks, knowing damn well where it is: nowhere. Luke decides that it might be time, in this sauce challenge, to make some sauce. “It’s probably not my wisest move,” he says, possibly referring to waiting until the last twenty minutes to start his sauce, or maybe just to going on Masterchef at all.

“I’m putting a lot of attention into the sauce,” says Aaron, which seems like an unnecessarily snide dig at Luke. He might put some cream in it. He might put some ginger in it. Maybe he’ll fuck around and put a bit of rabbit fur in, whatever. He is extremely relaxed.

Petro is not relaxed because he’s cooked duck three times in his life and now he’s cooking duck again and he’s got extreme duck anxiety. However, his stock has developed a lot of flavour, by means he cannot understand, and now he must thicken it through violence. He puts some dark chocolate in it, which is some kind of sick joke. He slices open his duck breast and declares it “perfect”. Know what I think is perfect, Petro? A living duck, swimming free in the great outdoors, soaring through the sky, raising a family of ducklings in the beauty of nature. As God intended. That’s what would be perfect to me. But no, you go on with your butchery.

With thirty seconds to go, Luke begins plating up the dish, though it’s hard to see why: it won’t do him any good. He hopes that the sauce, by some eldritch magic, turns out good, because nothing he’s done will have made it so.

And with that, time is up. Casper declares that he is feeling confident, mainly because Luke is there. But it’s Petro who serves first, with his espagnole duck (French for “Canada goose”). Jean-Christophe is aroused by the dish’s appearance. After eating, he announces, “I’m flabbergasted” (French for “horny”). Everyone thinks Petro’s duck is just fine, so that’s nice.

Next is Casper. Cod with veloute. His char has overtaken his veloute, in a classic demonstration of the perils of hubris. But as long as you just eat the sauce, and not the fish, it’s great.

Here’s Annabel! She has made fish and chips, sort of, and is so incredibly pleased with herself that you start to wonder whether anyone has ever thought of making fish and chips before. “She should call it My Tartare Veloute,” says Jean-Christophe, which the other judges think it just about the funniest gag they’ve heard in their whole damn lives. Everyone thinks Annabel is the best person they’ve ever met, and they all think fish and chips might catch on. Jean-Christophe is so excited by Annabel’s sauce the table at his end lifts six inches.

Here is Luke. “Every time I walk into the kitchen, I don’t let myself get into the mindset of ‘what if I go home?’” he says. Yeah, we could kind of tell. Anyway he’s made a spiced lamb rack with roasted figs, radicchio and an orange espagnole (French for “testicle”). He tells the judges he hasn’t thought about going home, and the judges all suppress a giggle. Immediately they notice the big hunk of fat on the lamb, which Vinnie noticed earlier and which Luke somehow didn’t notice the whole time. Andy thinks the lamb is cooked well but “the fat cap is a problem”. It’s always been a problem for me too, I’ll admit. Also his sauce is too sweet because it has too much orange juice in it and wasn’t cooked long enough, which is at least on-brand. “Luke is definitely in trouble,” says Sofia, oiling her riding crop.

Aaron serves his dish now, if you’re interested. It is an array of seafood with an Asian-inspired veloute, which doesn’t tell you much. It’s fish and prawns and mussels and shit, basically. Andy asks Aaron why he got so emotional when talking about his family. Aaron already explained this at the start of the episode but Andy loves hearing the story. Aaron relates the harrowing tale of the fight he had with his father when he said he was going on Masterchef, his dad insisting that the show sucks since Gary Mehigan left. Poh tells him that even if he ends up failing horribly as a chef, it’s OK, which is a weird thing to drop into the conversation at this stage. Anyway they eat his dish and the scallops are undercooked, the worst mistake you can make in the kitchen without being Luke. There’s a lot to like about the dish, and a lot to dislike about it. It’s a lot like Masterchef in that respect.

Judgment has arrived, and the news is that Annabel is good, Petro is good, Casper is not worth mentioning, and both Luke and Aaron are human garbage. Luke was worse though, so after a thousand near-misses he’s going home.

It’s a sad moment because Luke is a cute little rascal, but not too sad because honestly we all saw this coming a long time ago. Luke declares that he’s had a lot of fun and made some friends for life, sounding a little sarcastic. Petro says Luke is like his younger brother but with a worse moustache than he always envisioned his brother having. Jean-Christophe says he thinks Luke will go a long way, sounding even more sarcastic. “It’s shown me how much I’m capable of,” says Luke, which could mean a couple of different things. And then off he goes, for his bones to be picked clean by the birds.

Tune in tomorrow when Sofia refuses to explain the garbage bag she’s been wearing as pants.

Everything Wrong With The Odyssey (2026)

Ben Pobjie — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 01:22:39 GMT

There have been so many claims and counter-claims about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a movie that has already become the first film ever to debut with a negative box-office take, as angry cinemagoers storm theatres to demand the management pay them for seeing it. But with all the commentary swirling around it, how can you trust you know the truth about this movie, apart from watching it for yourself which obviously you can’t do?

Well, I took one for the team. I watched The Odyssey and I can confirm that it is terrible in almost every way. Specifically it suffers from the following flaws, which I have compiled in list form:

Although supposedly based on the video game Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, virtually none of the game’s characters are featured in the film.
Helen of Troy is played by Oscar-winning African-American actress Lupito Nyong’o, but canonically, Helen was not an Oscar-winning actress, so this is a major departure from the source material.
Anne Hathaway plays the mother of Tom Holland’s character, even though in real life Hathaway (14) is thirty-nine years YOUNGER than Holland (53).
The Cyclops puppet’s strings are visible throughout his scene. In addition, on several occasions he can be heard saying “Ow! My two eyes!”
The character of Eurycleia is played by Dame Angela Lansbury, who has been dead for nearly four years.
The so-called “Trojan Horse” is clearly far bigger than any horse in recorded history.
The character of Telemachus repeatedly refers to his parents as “Mom” and “Dad”, despite the fact that there is no word in ancient Greek for “Telemachus”.
Odysseus’s men sail to Ithaca, which is in New York, a state still unknown to the ancient Greeks. Also, the Trojan War is depicted as taking place in Troy, a city in Michigan.
The scene in which Circe turns Odysseus’s men into pigs is blatantly plagiarised from the scene in Willow (1988) in which Queen Bavmorda turns all the army into pigs.
Multiple characters make repeated references to “the gods”, who don’t actually exist.
The cyclops is blinded by having a burnt stick shoved in his eye by Greek soldiers while lying in a cave, which statistically is one of the least likely ways for a person to lose their sight, thus risking sending a misleading message about eye safety to the public.
Matt Damon has weird nipples.
The movie pushes woke transgender ideology by having the Greek soldiers light a fire in the Cyclops’s cave using a pile of Harry Potter books.
Homer’s central theme, of the need to crack down on illegal immigration by any means possible, is almost entirely absent from the film.
The city of Troy in the film is clearly made from papier-mache.
Lazy choreography in the musical numbers.
Three times other actors accidentally call Telemachus “Spider-Man”.
In the underworld of Hades, Odysseus talks to the dead, which is impossible as dead people cannot talk.
Odysseus’s men are attacked by an army of knights who are much larger than any real human being - clearly an uncorrected error in the CGI.
The film is set in ancient Greece, but many clues - street signs, licence plates, etc - give away that it was actually filmed in Vancouver.
It is anachronistic to give Odysseus the catchphrase “Me so horny!”
Odysseus’s dog “Argos” is played by a ferret on stilts.
Odysseus’s wife “Penelope” is also played by a ferret on stilts.
There is a gratuitous scene just before the climactic battle when Odysseus says to Antinous, “So everyone in this palace is queer?” and Antinous replies, “Yes, and we’re very proud of that.”
Numerous shots where a Tesla Cybertruck drives past in the background.
Scylla and Charybdis’s complicated open marriage is completely ignored.
The Sirens’ song is robbed of its power by Nolan’s decision to use Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Get Down”.
The use of IMAX backfires badly as in most shots the sound of the camera is clearly audible and every character ends every line by shouting “In IMAX!”

Masterchef Recap: A Star Is Born

Ben Pobjie — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:01:54 GMT

There are only six amateur cooks left in all of Australia: all others have been hunted down and exterminated by crack Channel Ten snipers. There is nowhere to hide. Literally: the production crew has filled in with concrete all the usual holes in which the amateurs would secrete themselves at times of stress. They can barely even imagine what horrors might await them this week.

In they come, to find the judges standing behind plinths in the dark. An Eyes Wide Shut situation appears about to break out, with secrets, betrayal and erotic revelation on the menu.

Of course it’s not going to be anything so fun. Instead a manly voiceover comes out of nowhere and tells them nothing of any interest. Suddenly Sofia is lit up and reveals that this week, each challenge will be set by one of the judges. Today it is a mystery box devised by Sofia. She has prepared four mystery boxes for them to choose from, but in keeping with her status as a person who is not a chef, each one has only one ingredient, because four ingredients are all she could think of. They must each choose between onion, yuzu, beetroot and almonds.

The contestants are shocked - so shocked that both Annabel and Luke use the word “plethora” unprovoked. But they each pronounce it differently, and the tension in the room rises dramatically as everyone starts to wonder whether anyone is going to point out that Annabel said it wrong. For now that remains unresolved, as the cook begins and the amateur must decide which ingredient they will use to make their pathetically inadequate dish.

Of course, although they may not use the pantry, they aren’t literally restricted to one ingredient. They can still use their under-bench staples: milk, sugar, eggs, filet mignon, camel-hair, black denim, etc.

Luke can’t figure out how to make a cohesive dish with one ingredient, even though you’d think that makes it easier. It’s when he has lots of ingredients that he starts to fall apart. In any event, he chooses yuzu, and so does Casper. Before this episode began I did not know what yuzu was, and I do not intend for this to change at any point. All I know is that it has juice and that Casper is planning on “Yuzu butchery”. I don’t think yuzu is meat, but Casper is always more comfortable if he can imagine himself slicing through living flesh, so he’s in the right headspace.

Casper is making a yuzu cruller. Annabel is also making a cruller, but with beetroot. I swear we’ve gone nearly eighteen years without anyone making a cruller, and suddenly two at once. It’s a bit suspicious really. A cruller, of course, is basically a donut but for cowards. Annabel says that if she doesn’t win top dish she at least wants to beat Casper, who has aroused a burning hatred in her since day one.

The judges convene. “I’m really excited about the challenge today,” says Sofia, yet to realise that eventually, if you say you’re really excited about today’s challenge every single day, people are going to start doubting your sincerity.

Luke is feeling confident because he came close to elimination and survived. “I’m a bit like a cockroach, you can’t get rid of me,” he says. He is wrong: you can get rid of a cockroach. It’s pretty easy, actually. You can spray it, or you can get step on it. Either of these things would be pretty easy to do to Luke, and will probably happen before the end of this episode. But he’s got courage and is making a yuzu meringe crepe cake. He’s never used yuzu before, but he’s pretty sure that after twenty times using ingredients he’s never used before and failing miserably, he is due for it to pay off.

Petro has gone for beetroot, musing, “I feel like it can be used quite a few different ways”. He is right, but the question is whether one of those ways is “as food”. Beetroot has been used by humans for centuries without coming to a definitive answer on this. But just as we’re considering whether Petro’s choice of beetroot is the last desperate act of a madman, something absolutely unbelievable happens. Something so incredible I can still barely believe I saw it with my own eyes.

Roughly, this is it: Petro rambles on a bit about how he wants to unleash his creativity in his cooking, and unexpectedly makes a connection between his cooking and…brace yourselves…his music.

AND THEN!

We suddenly cut to Petro walking down a dusty country road, playing a guitar and singing.

SINGING!

What the FUCK is going on?

Petro has been a singer-songwriter this WHOLE TIME, and we have waited until we’re down to the final six to mention it?

I MEAN.

WHAT.

Is Petro’s entire participation in this show just a way to plug his music? From the sounds of the song he’s singing on that dusty road, it’ll take more than that.

Sofia comes over to Petro and stares unnervingly at him with a Stepford-y fixed grin, then looks at the clock and…I’m sorry, I’m having a lot of trouble focusing right now. They’re talking about beetroot, but I’m still struggling to process this bombshell. It’s a hard thing, when you get to know someone like Petro over many weeks of cooking, and then out of the clear blue sky you suddenly have to accept that he’s been a secret James Blundell impersonator this whole time. I feel lied to. I feel betrayed. I feel USED. I…I just don’t know.

Um…what’s going on in the kitchen? I don’t know. It’s…OK. Focus. Let’s go.

So Aaron is chopping onions and reciting a list of dishes he’s made. “I want to utilise everything I’ve learnt,” he says, which is hard because he’s got to do it with onions, and a lot of things he’s learnt have nothing to do with onions. He wants to make tortellini and a broth. Vinnie is also using onions, and also doing a broth. So many copycats in this kitchen. “Onion has a lot going for it,” says Vinnie, which is nice of him to say but let’s be honest, it doesn’t have that much going for it. There’s a reason that everyone assumed Tony Abbott was mentally ill when he ate that onion.

Vinnie notes that he’s tried many different strategies to stand out in the competition, but they have often not worked. Bearing this in mind he’s decided today he will wear clothes, not carry any weapons, and just concentrate on the onions.

The judges convene again. Poh thinks Luke has a great idea for his yuzu, but Sofia thinks crepe cakes are really hard, and on reflection the judges agree that Lukes gonna Luke. They are all worried that Petro is trying to do too many things in a limited amount of time, and absolutely terrified that he might try to sell them a CD at the tasting table. Jean-Christophe announces that Annabel and Casper are engaged in a “battle of the donuts”, steadfastly refusing to use the word “cruller”, which no self-respecting Frenchman ever does.

“Everyone here is a strong cook,” says Casper with stunning inaccuracy, “but Annabel is in my mind one of the strongest cooks left in this competition.” He’s dead right on this: Annabel is almost certainly one of the six best cooks currently cooking in this kitchen. She proves it by putting some leaves in the microwave and setting them on fire. “Oh my god,” chuckles Casper, wondering what he was worried about.

Just noticed that Luke says “crepe” funny. Good on “plethora”, not so good on “crepe”. Disappointing. He’s also just discovered that a yuzu is not a lemon, which some people might have guessed from the fact that they are called different things, but Luke is not as other men. On top of this, his yuzu curd has turned into scrambled eggs, which are even less like lemons.

Aaron tells Andy and Poh that he’s making tortellini with onion broth. “Thoughts, Poh?” asks Andy. Poh admits that she hasn’t had any for years. Andy tells Aaron that his major challenge will be making his broth taste different from his tortellini filling, which is hard because they are both going to taste like onion. But then, it wasn’t his idea to make this dumb challenge with one ingredient. Blame Sofia, Andy, if the broth tastes different to the pasta. Aaron puts salt in it or something.

Meanwhile Vinnie’s got his pasta done and his ricotta has just finished. I think that if you can make ricotta, you’re being given too many staples. Ricotta is literally cheese. They’re letting them make cheese in here, that’s unacceptable. But Vinnie’s happy, and I guess that’s all that matters. “I’m going to do some burnt onion petals,” he says, mad with power.

“Yuzu every second!” shouts Poh, which is not a clever quip because most of the cooks aren’t using yuzu. I think the writers are on strike. Speaking of yuzu, Luke has used the juice of ten of them, has run out of eggs, and doesn’t really have the slightest idea what he’s doing, in which he at least has something in common with the audience. He declares himself sick of being in eliminations, so it’s weird that that has not coincided with a parallel feeling of being sick of making bad dishes.

Petro’s rough puff isn’t done, something that is never easy for a man to admit. He should be proud of himself for being willing to face it in public. Sofia asks what his plan is. He does not know what his plan is. He says he has a dressing. “For what?” says Sofia. “That’s going to go on top,” he says. “Of what?” says Sofia, smiling like a vulture about to feed. Petro is thoroughly sick of this shit, but Sofia has clearly never been more amused in her life. She wanders off, a pep in her step from the joy she derives from Petro’s anguish.

“I love a cruller,” Casper confesses, but it turns out crullers are hard to make. Annabel is making a similar discovery. “She hasn’t even piped yet,” says Andy (euphemism). Sofia refutes this, claiming that Annabel HAS piped and it’s shameful of Andy to spread these misogynist lies. But there is no doubt that time is running out, Casper is ahead of her, and that he is taunting her about it. “This is a cruller catastrophe,” Annabel laments, hoping against hope that this might develop into a popular catchphrase.

As the crullers bubble in the fryers, as the pastamakers fiddle with their dough, as Vinnie checks on his onion petals whatever they are, as Petro pours the blood of a goat into a beaker, and as Luke forms a large puddle on the floor, time finally runs out. For us all.

Luke has a sad look on his face and a sad stack of pancakes on his plate. Aaron comes over and asks him what’s wrong. Luke says he embarrassed himself. Aaron tells him he’s in the top six, he has nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s a sickeningly touching moment.

Aaron is serving first, and he has done onion tortellini with charred onion broth. He has onion petals too, yet another idea stolen from Vinnie. The judges think it’s good so la di da Aaron aren’t you special.

Next is Vinnie, who has also made onion pasta with onion broth and onion petals and has to serve second even though we all know he had the idea first. His dish is actually very different to Aaron’s though, because his pasta is kind of square-shaped. “It looks like a very comforting bowl of food,” says Poh, referring to Vinnie’s beard. Everyone reckons Vinnie’s pasta is nice, so w/e.

Petro brings forth his dish which is a big mess of ricotta and leaves and blood. It is called “Beetroot and Whey”, and looks it. The judges taste and demand to know what the deal is with that singing thing. Yes, yes, the dish is fine, but seriously what the hell is going on here? They’re slipping music videos into Masterchef, the foundation of all our assumptions of the world have fallen to pieces. Also actually the dish isn’t really very good and doesn’t taste enough like beetroot which sounds good to me but diff’rent strokes I guess. Petro thanks the judges for their feedback and links to his Soundcloud.

Next is Annabel who has a beetroot cruller, which sounds utterly foul. “I’m very determined to beat Casper today,” she says, but it’s kind of late to start now. She has also made ice-cream and actually put beetroot in it, which…Christ. You know? Christ. Obviously everyone loves the ice-cream, but weirdly, Andy dislikes the cruller. Even more weirdly, he pronounced cruller as “crooller”. Jean-Christophe thinks the cruller is great, Chapter Fifty-Eight in “Jean-Christophe subtly slaps Andy the fuck down.”

Now Casper, who has also made a cruller but is a bit saner so it’s a yuzu cruller instead of a gross beetroot one. He reveals that his creme anglaise has white pepper in it, which absolutely blows Poh’s mind. “WHITE pepper?” she gasps, never having heard of such a thing. “The texture of the anglaise is, like, dialled,” says Andy, declining to explain what this means. He then says “cruller” funny again, which is very distracting. The tragedy, though, is that Casper’s cruller is raw. He cooked his cruller at a lower temperature than Annabel did, which has cost him dearly. Everyone laughs at him and he walks away, ashamed and rightly so.

Finally, Luke. He admits that he’s had a shocker. “Every single dish I cook, I want to prove to the judges that I should be here,” he says, which is weird because honestly very little that we have seen in this series suggests that that’s what he’s been trying to do. The judges have enormous sympathy for the poor kid, who feels terrible about the mess he’s presented on his plate, but alongside their sympathy is a definite feeling of c’mon Luke, for god’s sake, dude. Anyway they taste the dish against their will. “Do you want it soft and fluffy, or do you want it hard and real, feedback?” asks Andy. “I think you know,” says Luke. Andy gives him some tough love, so apparently he didn’t know - Luke was definitely hoping for soft and fluffy. What upsets Andy more than anything is that Luke claimed he couldn’t get enough yuzu juice from the ten yuzus he used, even though there were fifty yuzus available and he could easily have gotten heaps more. Andy is very disappointed in Luke, as if he’s never in his life used only ten yuzus and ignored all the other yuzus. Way to cast the first stone, hypocrite. Poh actually thinks the dish tastes pretty nice considering it’s horrible.

Time for judgment, with the top dish sending its maker straight to the top five. It’s between Vinnie and Aaron, who both made awesome onion pastas. “It all hinged on which dish we would eat again,” says Poh, before revealing that they have all sworn to never again touch Aaron’s filth, so Vinnie gets immunity. The other five go into an elimination tomorrow, because in this place making a dish almost as good as the best earns the same punishment as failing abjectly.

Tune in tomorrow when Jean-Christophe goes on a rampage.

The first 21 Bond Films, Ranked

Ben Pobjie — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 23:01:09 GMT

Well it’s been a while, but I have finally made my way through the Dalton and Brosnan eras of Bond, and I am here to update my rankings and give you my thoughts. Obviously after this we move into Craig, and so this is really the end of the “We’re happy to be silly” age of James Bond, and we will soon plunge into the “We are pretending not to be silly” age. As it happens, I think Dalton-Brosnan is quite a strong era and the Welsh and Irish Bonds deserve to stand alongside the English and Scottish ones. And of course way ahead of the blobby Australian.

At this particular time it is also worth noting that, as mentioned on Substack the other day, Sam Neill would have made an AMAZING Bond. I don’t wish that either Dalton or Brosnan missed out, but if there’d been room for a Neill Bond somewhere we’d have got something very special. Luckily, in all of Neill’s actual films, we got something very special anyway.

And now, the Official and Correct Ranking of Every Bond Film Up Until 2002.

Goldeneye
From Russia With Love
Goldfinger
Tomorrow Never Dies
The Living Daylights
The Spy Who Loved Me
Diamonds Are Forever
The Man With The Golden Gun
Licence to Kill
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Live And Let Die
Thunderball
Die Another Day
A View To A Kill
For Your Eyes Only
The World Is Not Enough
Octopussy
Dr No
Never Say Never Again
Moonraker
You Only Live Twice

And some random thoughts I had while watching the last six on my list.

Timothy Dalton is massively underrated as James Bond. He has got pretty much everything you want in a Bond: he is steely, he is smooth, he is charming when he needs to be and utterly cold-blooded when called for. It’s possible some might find there’s a slight shortage of wit in the Daltons, and maybe people thought he got a bit too emotional at times. But I think he does Bond damn well. Licence To Kill suffers from being a bit too 80s, but The Living Daylights is brilliant.
Pierce Brosnan is also a bit underrated, and I think is as good as any Bond. I’m not saying he’s better than Connery, but I think he’s about as good. He is very, very Bondy, you know? Like he’s just Bond all over. He really IS witty, he’s incredibly suave, and like Dalton and Connery, he’s got that steel too. His legacy as a great Bond is stained by the fact that two out of his four films - The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day - are not very good, but that’s not Pierce’s fault. Goldeneye is the best Bond film of all, and Tomorrow Never Dies is massively enjoyable. I rate Brosnan extremely highly and I think he combines the best qualities of the other Bonds - as charming and witty as Roger and as commanding as Sean.
Unfortunately Die Another Day is very silly, but it’s still better than The World Is Not Enough because the latter is both silly AND boring.
Another reason Die Another Day is better than The World Is Not Enough is that DAD’s terrible actress, Madonna, is only in one scene, whereas TWINE’s terrible actress, Denise Richards, is in loads.
I only just realised that the initials of The World Is Not Enough spell TWINE. Quite good, that.
Carey Lowell was a really good Bond girl. We should talk more about her. She is incredibly attractive and is among the storied number of Bond girls who are properly badass and fun to watch.
The sex scene between Bond and Jinx in Die Another Day is very good evidence for the proposal that Bond works best when he kisses the girl, her dress drops gracefully to the floor, and then we cut to afterwards. The more we see of Bond actually getting it on horizontally, the more awkward and ridiculous it seems. I want to know that Bond is fucking on the regular, but seeing it happen ruins the fantasy.
The reason Jonathan Pryce makes such a good villain is that it is a requirement of Bond villains that they deliver unnecessary monologues about their evil plans, and Elliot Carver is established early on as the kind of weird unit who would do that. He’s just that guy who loves to monologue, so it’s perfectly natural when he does.
Conversely Robert Davi doesn’t make a good villain because he feels like he should be in a mob movie.
Robert Carlyle should make a good villain but is hampered by the fact that his accent is skittishly mobile, wandering all over the joint.
The World Is Not Enough stole its plot from The Dark Knight Rises. Or maybe the other way around. Not sure which one came first.
One of these days I will do a list of moments when bad guys could have killed Bond but didn’t, ranked by how much of a reason they had to do so. A special mention to the moment in Die Another Day when Rosamund Pike has a sword at Halle Berry’s throat, and doesn’t kill her, but orders her out of her seat, so she can…kill her. There is literally no reason for her not to slash her throat right then and there - it ranks with Blofeld’s “Walk over here so I can shoot you in a different part of the building, or else I’ll shoot you here” gambit in You Only Live Twice.
It’s a shame John Cleese didn’t get to be Q for a few more films, he was good fun. And he never got to play the part in a good movie.

Masterchef Recap: Smoky Smores and Tentative Tentacles

Ben Pobjie — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 23:00:49 GMT

It’s the final day of Heat Week, which means next week we get Freeze Week, when the remaining contestants will have their body temperatures lowered beyond a point compatible with life. But for now, we have a bit more earth to scorch.

The four amateurs who are so pathetic they couldn’t earn immunity in three whole days this week - Pat, Luke, Aaron and Vinnie - line up in aprons as black as their hearts, to find out what fresh hell awaits. Sofia tells them that the fight for survival in this competition has never been so intense, particularly if you don’t count any of the previous seasons.

Today it is Masterchef Duels - each cook goes head to head against another, and the losers of the first duels then cook against each other for the right to not be thrown into the gutter and expunged from history. Basically, this means Luke Vs Vinnie and Aaron Vs Pat. Luke and Vinnie drew “smoke” tokens, so they must incorporate smoke in their dishes. Aaron and Pat drew “fire”, so they must use the flambe technique in some way. Because god forbid we have an episode without some pointless gimmick.

Aaron notes that this is a tough challenge. “You’re literally fighting against someone,” he emphasises incorrectly. Luke is just worried about the smoke element, as he’s never really cooked with smoke and also smoke is a noxious pollutant that is really unpleasant to have in your mouth, which in theory is the opposite of what you’re supposed to do on a cooking show. In theory.

Vinnie tries to make it seem like he thinks it’s a challenge cooking against Luke. “He’s a wild cook,” he says diplomatically. “He’s been in so many eliminations!” Yeah. That means he’s bad, Vinnie. You know it. Stop blowing smoke up our…oh, actually today you’re supposed to do that, aren’t you. Carry on. “Smoke is a great superpower to have when you’re cooking,” Vinnie goes on, very clearly not knowing the meaning of at least one of the words in that sentence.

Luke continues to be baffled. He is worried both by the fact that Vinnie is much better than him and the fact that he doesn’t know how to make something taste like smoke. “I’ll have to think outside the box on this one,” he says, setting fire to his own hair on a hunch.

Eventually he decides to make a smore. Or a s’more? I dunno. A marshmallowy thing, you know. He tells Jean-Christophe of his plan to make a smoked meringue. “A SMOKED MERINGUE?” says Jean-Christophe, Lady Bracknell-style. He asks Luke if he’s ever done this before. “No,” says Luke with the confidence of someone born yesterday. “I have no idea how it’s going to taste.” Jean-Christophe can’t help but admire the chutzpah of the young man daring to do something he doesn’t know how to do, for reasons that make no sense even to him, at the very moment when knowing what you’re doing is most important. He asks if Luke realises how hard it’s going to be to get a smoky flavour into a meringue, not to mention how pointless it is to try. Luke understands the difficulty, but his philosophy has always been that if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth failing at.

Meanwhile Aaron has some photos of himself as a child to show us, just to emphasise, in case we missed this the last fifty times he told us, that cooking is very important to him because of his connection to family etc. And it’s not that I don’t believe him, and it’s not that I don’t admire his passion, it’s just that we’ve seen more shots of Aaron as a child with his grandparents this season than shots of him cooking in the Masterchef kitchen.

Anyway, over to Pat, who is feeling pretty cocky and why not, his beard is the best one in the whole room. Sofia comes over in a very colourful dress cut just low enough to make concentrating on cooking - let alone recapping - practically impossible. Pat informs her that, mad sprite that he is, he is making a pan-seared barramundi with a bisque sauce, charred leeks, potatoes and shaved fennel. “Are you fucking high?” asks Sofia, although not in those exact words. She asks if Pat has ever made a bisque in 45 minutes before. Pat admits he has not. Sofia opines that this might be because it’s impossible. Pat’s confidence in his ability to cook something that takes 90 minutes to cook in 45 minutes is slightly shaken, but he figures trying to do far too much for the allotted time has always worked for Luke, so he might as well go for it.

Jean-Christophe tells the other judges that Luke wants to smoke a meringue. Andy is so angry he needs to be restrained from slapping Luke in the back of the head. On the other hand, they think Vinnie needs to edit, because he’s trying to smoke too many things. On the other, other hand, Vinnie will be fine because all he has to do is be better than Luke. Sofia informs them of Pat’s spiralling megalomania. They all agree Aaron is going to crush him like a bug.

“I love the taste of the bisque,” cries Pat, knowing that Charlie don’t surf. He is “amping up the flavours” in his bisque, which is something you do to a bisque when you don’t have time to make a bisque but are still making a bisque because you refuse to live in reality.

Meanwhile Vinnie feels like he has a really strong foundation. “I feel like this is how I like to cook now”, and sure, who wouldn’t like to cook against Luke smoking a meringue? However, Luke is feeling a lot better since he got his chocolate cremeux in the fridge, a feeling we can all identify with. But now it is time for him to smoke his meringue. He has never smoked a meringue before, unsurprising because it’s a really stupid idea. He gets the smoke pipe thing that looks like a perverted instrument of torture and starts pumping smoke into his meringue. “How long do I smoke it for?” he calls in desperation. From above, Petro, Casper and Annabel look grimly down upon him, refusing to tell him how long he should smoke it for, even though they know full well.

Having smoked his meringue, Luke tastes his meringue. It doesn’t taste like smoke. Usually this would be cause for celebration - I’ve eaten many meringues and the fact they didn’t taste like smoke was usually my fa

Observers outside are stunned to see that Luke is smoking a meringue

vourite thing about them. But today Luke has been tasked with making something that tastes like smoke, and his meringue is not cooperating. He has no idea what to do, so nothing has changed there, but time is running out for him to figure out a way to make his very obviously bad idea work. “I’m feeling pretty devastated,” says Luke, making him officially the first person in history to have been devastated by the fact they’ve made a meringue that tastes like a meringue.

“OK, guys, if it’s fire or smoke,” says Jean-Christophe, and you sense that he’s about to drop some kind of epic zinger. But he suddenly realises he doesn’t actually have a line ready, so he just apologetically mutters, “Five minutes to go” and we have to be satisfied with that.

Pat has his charred leeks and potatoes on the plate, and he’s got his barramunda on the plate, and he’s pouring his bisque into a jug, and the essential banality of life is really summed up in this little passage. Meanwhile Vinnie tastes his figs and finds they have been over-smoked and taste burnt. He takes the figs off, perhaps appreciating the irony that he has filled his figs with too much smoke while Luke can’t work out how to get even a little bit of smoke into anything. Also Luke’s cremeux isn’t set, so really you can’t escape the implication that God hates him.

Time is up in the first round, and Luke thinks it’s touch and go whether he’ll make it through or not. Oh Luke…it is not touch and go. Trust me.

Anyway, Vinnie and Luke serve their things. Luke’s got his charred meringue and chocolate cremeux and a general atmosphere of despair. “The idea of this dish was really cohesive,” says Poh, but then so is glue. Luke’s cremeux isn’t set and his meringue is watery and falling apart - as, frankly, is Luke.

Vinnie did a Scotch fillet with a radicchio salad and a mysterious “green sauce”. Surprisingly, his salad is fantastic, even though all historical evidence suggests that a fantastic salad is a scientific impossibility. Sofia has been taken by surprise by the leaves, which she finds quite arousing. Everyone gives Vinnie a round of applause, and continues to not give Luke one.

Here comes Pat and Aaron. Pat has of course done his fish and bisque, and Aaron has cooked from the heart so the specific foodstuffs involved don’t really matter. Sofia asks Jean-Christophe if he’s ever made a bisque in 45 minutes. “Bitch, please,” Jean-Christophe chortles.

Pat’s dish is absolutely wonderful, according to the lying judges. “For a 45-minute bisque, I don’t think it gets any better,” says Andy, which might’ve been sarcasm. On the other hand, whatever Aaron has made is even better than a 45-minute bisque if you can believe such a thing. Andy sucked every little bit of juice out of a prawn’s head and felt the need to describe this in a rather alarming way. “The egg floss is so interesting,” says Sofia, off on one of her bizarre rants.

Anyway it’s pretty obvious that Aaron has beaten Pat, and “obvious” isn’t strong enough a word for the Vinnie-Luke situation. This means that Pat and Luke will have to cook off against each other, the loser to forever be known around the world as “the guy who couldn’t beat that other guy and had to go home and cry like a girl”.

They have sixty minutes to cook whatever they like, which is very bad news for Luke, who usually likes to cook things he has never cooked before and about which he knows nothing. Still, anything is possible in the rarefied air of Kitchen HQ. Aaron notes that Luke is up against it facing Pat, who has many skills and talents, thus strongly implying that Luke has none. Aaron has always hated Luke and he cannot keep it hidden any longer.

“Pat’s game is flavour,” says Luke, “and I don’t think I can beat him at his own game.” With this in mind he cleverly decides to make a dish with no flavour at all. Accordingly he begins filleting a kingfish that is bigger than him. He is making a kingfish mosaic, which is a technique of slicing a fish into tiny pieces and using them to tile the floor of a Roman villa. He is using Japanese flavours because at this stage why the fuck not, right?

Luke’s dish when completed.

Pat is roasting capsicums. Petro confides to Annabel that he loves the smell of roasting capsicums. Annabel loves the smell of roasting capsicums. Petro and Annabel stare at each other in stunned silence, as if for the first time they are really seeing each other, really…feeling each other, as souls entwined. “I thought I was the only one,” Petro breathes. “No,” says Annabel, tears of hope welling in her eyes, “I’ve always loved the smell of roasting capsicums…I just never felt I had someone I could tell about it.” The balcony is suddenly aflame with passion.

Back on the floor, Pat has put an octopus in the pressure cooker, no longer caring about the cook and focusing entirely on animal cruelty. He takes the octopus out of the cooker. It makes a break for it. Pat catches it, tastes it, and discovers it is mushy, having binged far too many romantic comedies. What is Pat to do? Roast some more capsicums, perhaps. Everything was going well when he was doing that.

Pat loses control of his dish with tragic consequences

Meanwhile Luke is…I don’t know. Putting vinegar in a pot, I guess. He has fish in a plastic bag so he can take it to work for lunch. He’s feeling pretty good right now: maybe he heard about Pat’s octopus.

But wait! Pat has pressurised ANOTHER octopus. In the octopus community, Pat is fast gaininig a reputation as a homicidal maniac. Everyone is very happy for him, though: he’s proven beyond a doubt that given sixty minutes, he can reduce multiple molluscs to edible rubber. He plates up: his sauce is bright orange and would look gorgeous if not for the revolting tentacle draped on top of it. Luke plates up too and he’s done an amazing job of putting some bits of fish in a small circle.

Luke gets to serve first because he is the youngest and has the less impressive facial hair. “Luke, you’ve got a little bit of that larrikin in you,” says Poh - by “that larrikin” she means Daryl Somers, and she’s right. The judges eat Luke’s fish bits. Andy leans over to Poh to mutter to her about uncooked fish bits. Sofia can’t taste the fish. Andy thinks it looks better than it tastes. Poh loves the flavours. Jean-Christophe frowns at all three of them, wondering what the hell they’re talking about. The panel is divided between the judges who think the dish is pretty OK, and Andy who is really really mean.

Pat now brings forth his charred octopus AKA mutilated xenomorph. He starts to cry as he talks about how much he misses his family, and how sad he will be if he has to see them again. “I hope it eats the perfect version,” says Andy, who’s been on Masterchef so long that he has lost the ability to create meaning from the arrangement of English words. Everyone eats. “It’s an interesting one because it’s a yummy dish,” says Sofia, herself having lost her grip on the meaning of the word “interesting”. The octopus has given Andy mixed emotions, as octopuses so often do to us all. He also thinks the sauce is hollow, which…sure. whatever, man. Jean-Christophe confesses to being seduced by the presentation of the dish, but the octopus is soft in some parts, chewy in others, and intelligent enough to crawl out of the tank and unscrew the tops off jars, which is terrifying.

Judgment hour arrives, and the judges tell Luke and Pat that they both kind of suck. Luke’s fish is tasteless, Pat’s octopus is uneven, and it’s so hard to decide which of these men have let everyone down the most. Although the judges seem to find it easy.

It’s Pat.

Pat admits he’s ready to go home to his girls, a very easy thing to say when you’ve just been told you have to go home to your girls. Luke, who has no girls, breathes a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to go home to his girl-less life.

It won’t be the same without Pat. He had a winning way with meat and nobody’s beard could ever measure up. But the old saying is as true now as it ever was: an inconsistent octopus comes before a fall. Bye, Pat. You did your girls proud, and hopefully next time you’ll remember to just cook a freaking steak.

Tune in next week, when Hope and Beau’s marriage hits the rocks.

Masterchef Recap: Old King Coal

Ben Pobjie — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:11:07 GMT

It’s another day in the Masterchef kitchen, one day nearer to death for us all, one more chance to contemplate the empty vessel that is the human soul and the impossibility of filling it with anything but hatred.

By which I mean, it’s HEAT WEEK. Today the show has kicked it up a notch, demanding that the amateurs show their commitment by giving themselves severe burns. Up on the balcony are immunonauts Annabel, wearing a stylish soccer jersey, and Casper, wearing the skin of the last bear he killed. They are looking forward as always to spitting on the heads of their competitors.

Today’s challenge is simple: cook a dish using just a Hibachi. Nothing else. Just the Hibachi. The only sources of heat they can use are the coals in the Hibachi and whatever they can generate by rubbing their thighs together. Their time starts…then!

“I’ve got to think and think and think,” says Pat, far from a natural activity for him. Petro runs out of the pantry with a pineapple and a box of cornflakes, having completely misunderstood the challenge. He begins roasting some corncobs, the first step in a modern art installation he’s waited all his life to make reality.

The judges listen to Andy explain the discreet charm of the Hibachi. According to him, the great thing about the Hibachi is that it’s really hot and will probably ruin your food. Sofia points out that all five of today’s cooks have used the Hibachi before, and this is extremely interesting for reasons she refuses to elaborate on.

“I do have a certain level of comfort when it comes to charcoal cooking,” says Aaron, seemingly about to segue into yet another slideshow of pictures of him sitting on his grandmother’s knee. Yet bizarrely, no happy snaps are forthcoming. What is his game? “Aaron, those wings look awesome!” calls Annabel, who is hallucinating that Aaron is a giant chicken. She asks Aaron if he’s making a beurre blanc. Aaron retorts that of course he’s fucking not. Annabel apologises for distracting him, something that every Masterchef contestant who’s ever stood on the balcony could learn from.

Sofia and Andy come over to Vinnie to quiz him about his John Dory, which is an unnecessarily intimate line of questioning to say the least. He is making smoked butter, which makes Sofia and Andy think less of him. Andy explains that all of his weird butter ideas are stupid and ugly. Sofia says that she is so goddamn sick of Vinnie’s shit. Vinnie sees their point and agrees to do whatever they want as long as they don’t yell at him. Walking to the side, Andy offers the provocative opinion that if Vinnie cooks his fish well, he will probably have a well-cooked fish. Sofia nods intelligently.

Luke is excited to use the Hibachi, as he hasn’t failed on it for a while now. “There’s this amazing Indonesian dish called sate kambing,” he says, which doesn’t seem relevant to anything. It is a goat dish, but there is no goat in the Masterchef kitchen unless you count Jean-Christophe, so he uses lamb instead. This is unbiblical and may lead to Luke’s excommunication. He tells Poh of his plan, and she fights to restrain her instant urge to scream in his face. Jean-Christophe says he loves it, but he mentally checked out weeks ago and doesn’t have any idea what Luke just said.

“Time flies when the coals are burning!” yells Sofia, which…I mean, that isn’t…it doesn’t even…you know…what does she…you know?

Anyway, Petro is charring some corn because when he was a kid he used to eat charred corn and he’s been chasing that high ever since. He shows some photos of himself as a child eating corn, apparently believing that he is Aaron. He tells Andy and Sofia that he is making corn ice-cream, which is utterly mental, and he already did a weird unpleasant dessert yesterday, so why does he feel the need to repeat himself like this? Earlier on I was going to make a joke about how, told he could only use a Hibachi, Petro would probably try to make ice-cream. Not so funny now, is it.

Pat is doing something with a squid that is illegal in many countries. He explains the difficulties of making jam over coals, an explanation which is even more tedious than you’d think. “He knows his way around a coconut,” says Annabel, who seems unable to stop thinking about sex for even a minute.

The judges gather to discuss how demented Petro is and Vinnie’s weird multiple-butter plan. They agree that both men are out of their minds, but will still do better than Luke, who is working with the disadvantage of being Luke.

However, Luke is gutsy and determined, and is pushing through all his doubts. He has been shaken by Poh telling him that his dish has to be better than the original, because it’s unclear what the original even is. He is creating a curry paste, his hubris knowing no bounds. Meanwhile Petro drops a major bombshell about his dessert. “I want to make this work,” he says. We’ll need some time to process this revelation.

Vinnie has his flatbread cooking, his butter smoking in a deeply sinister manner, and decides it is now time to put some oil in the fire and nearly burn the building down. He starts small, burning his bread. He tries again. He burns it again. Unsure of what to do, he pivots to Plan B: spill all of his sauce on the floor.

The judges and the watchers on the balcony gasp at Vinnie’s sudden disaster, but you can tell that on the inside they’re laughing. Vinnie is stressed. “I don’t think I can serve floor sauce to the judges,” he says, but he shouldn’t be so hasty. Look at what Petro’s beein serving to the judges: you can pretty much serve them whatever the fuck you feel like. However, he decides that instead he will make some more sauce, and also clean up the sauce he spilt so he doesn’t slip on it and lose the use of his legs. He tastes his new sauce. “Yum,” he says, in much the same way you or I might say, “well, the cat is dead”.

With ten minutes to go, Petro doesn’t have a finished dish, on top of which the dish he is trying to finish is awful. “I’ve had success using cornflakes in this kitchen,” he says, which by any standards is an odd sentence. He toasts his cornflakes, covers them in honey, puts them in a bowl and acts for all the world like this is some kind of achievement.

“You’re on fire!” Sofia shrieks, which the amateurs take as a figure of speech with tragic consequences.

Oh, Aaron is still there. Good for him. Not only is he going strong with his dish, but Annabel is still shouting advice to him, which he undoubtedly appreciates. You start to wonder how human even managed to cook food before Annabel existed to tell them how. At this point there is a profoundly unsettling moment when Pat uses the phrase “mise en place”. Just did not see that coming. He follows this by telling Annabel to shut up, which is rude but understandable.

Five minutes to go and it’s hard to believe we are still watching this episode, which began sometime last week. Petro tastes his ice-cream and loves it, but then he made it so his judgment is hardly impartial. And yet the pineapple isn’t zingy enough, so in many ways his life has been a farce. “Looking at my dish evokes all these memories,” he sighs, thinking back to all those times in his youth when his pineapple wasn’t zingy enough.

Meanwhile Luke forms a series of small slabs of rice. “That looks great,” Annabel lies. “Don’t let it go up in flames!” Sofia shouts, her warnings again going unheeded.

Finally time is up, and it really does feel like we have all survived something awe-inspiring and dull. It is time for the judges to be disappointed. The first to serve is Luke, who for the first time ever is hoping that his dish is good. It is sate kambing with lamb and satay sauce and rice cakes. “Luke, you really are a bit like a box of chocolates,” says Poh, “you generate so much unnecessary litter.” Anyway his dish is good so yay.

Next is Pat and barbecued chilli jam squid, the much-loved double act. It is good except for the young coconut puree, which Poh finds incredibly offensive. “Pat, I applaud you,” says Jean-Christophe, and then applauds him, being a man of his word.

Next is Vinnie, who claims he is still believing in his dish, which is very much the kind of thing someone who does not believe in his dish would say. The dish is John Dory with a smoked butter and tomato sauce, and I think it looks great but I’ve never written a food blog so what do I know. “It’s a beautiful, delicate fish,” says Andy, “how dare you take it from its home and butcher it like this. Animals deserve life as much as we do.” He runs from the room, sobbing. Also, the dish is no good, as Vinnie has not cooked his fish enough, further insulting the majestic beast that he has sacrificed for his appetites. But at least the flatbreads are well done, which must come as a real fucking comfort.

Next is Aaron, with charred coral trout, pipis and seafood sauce. His sauce is great, but his trout is undercooked, an idea he got from Vinnie. We move on quickly, as it’s too painful to dwell on.

Next is Petro who has made charred corn ice-cream and pickled pineapple and dark rum caramel and “toasty bits” of some substance that remains suspiciously unknown. The judges ask him what the hell he was thinking. Petro explains that he thought that since life has no fundamental meaning anyway, why not? Obeying the ironclad law that the judges have to claim to love every single ice-cream anyone makes on the show, the judges claim to love it. Why anyone ever makes anything except ice-cream on Masterchef I have no idea: it’s guaranteed to get you a great reception.

In the end it is decided that Petro and Luke are good and everyone else is rubbish. But Luke didn’t make ice-cream, so Petro wins. He gets immunity and the rest must be hurled into the giant pig machine to be devoured.

Tune in tomorrow when someone will suffer the ultimate punishment for their sins.

Masterchef Recap: In The Chilli Bin

Ben Pobjie — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:10:46 GMT

Heat Week continues, with the producers surreptitiously raising the temperature gradually each half hour until by the end of the week the contestants will be suffering from fatal exhaustion The amateurs enter, with Casper heading to the balcony as befits his official status as Handsome King Of Everything.

Once more, the top dish will earn its maker immunity for the week, and today they will be cooking with chillies. The judges reveal that the Masterchef garden contains four types of chilli: birdseye, jalapeno, red cayenne and green cayenne. Poh informs them that each variety has its own flavour and characteristics, but she’s probably just saying that. They’re chillies, you know? Whatever. They must use the chillies to make their dishes hot, and whoever causes the judges the greatest amount of gastric ditstress wins.

The amateurs run to the garden to pick chillies like they’re freaking Amish farmers or something, god have we not progressed past this point in western civilisation? Is there anything more degrading than picking your food from a garden? It disgusts me.

Anyway they pick some chillies and run inside. “I am loving the energy in the room,” says Poh, giving thanks to Origin for supplying it. Andy explains that chillies can be used to give food the taste of chillies. “There is no limits,” says Jean-Christophe, who hopes to see the contestants break the surly bonds of earth and kiss the face of god.

Poh visits Annabel, who is not only the only woman left, but also has nobody beside her at the bench. The producers are working hard to isolate her and damage her mental health, just for a laugh. Yet to understand just how much they delight in her suffering, Annabel smiles and tells Poh that she is making Thai red curry paste and putting it on a fish. Poh thinks this is a great idea, because she stopped listening ages ago. “I don’t want this to be a curry,” says Annabel, making her decision to use curry paste a bit curious.

Meanwhile Pat is using three varieties of chilli in his dish, so LA DI FREAKING DA. He is making patatas bravas, in honour of his heritage as someone who once saw a picture of Spain. Patatas bravas of course is Spanish for “brave potatoes”, and the key to a good patatas bravas is to fully test the potatoes’ courage. Pat makes sure to threaten the potatoes and tell them that he plans to kill their families, before putting them on a communist blacklist.

Luke is having visions of the time he was a child and ate a chilli and woke up three years later on the back of a llama in Peru. He is also cooking a fish, and is concentrating on removing the bones from it in such a meticulous manner, while emphasising how crucial it is for the fish to have no bones, that it seems basically inevitable that when he serves his dish it will have bones in it.

Aaron shows us some pictures of himself as a child, of which he seems to have an inexhaustible supply. I don’t think any Masterchef contestant has ever shown as many family photos in a single series. There must be some kind of contractual arrangement going on here. I don’t know what he’s cooking, but it’s something to do with his grandparents as always

Vinnie reveals that his first introduction to chillies was at his nonno and nonna’s house, much like his first introduction to meat, vegetables, fruit, sauce, fresh air, carpentry, underpants, spoken language, the visible light spectrum, the works of Nietzsche and nipple cripples. I don’t know what was happening to Vinnie when he wasn’t at his nonno and nonna’s house, but it must’ve been deathly dull.

“I want to do something really creative today,” says Petro, unwisely. “What’s going on here?” asks Sofia. Petro answers that he’s going to do a dessert, with chilli in it, reasoning that what is needed at this stage of the competition is something that nobody on earth will ever want to eat. “Good,” says Sofia, before walking off muffling her laughter.

Andy pulls the judges together to tell them for the second time today how excited he is. He fills everyone in on what they can see for themselves. Poh is thrilled by the news that Pat is cooking potatoes, the highest of all callings. Jean-Christophe brings up Aaron and his mud crab and Andy goes berserk, acting out a strange little improv skit about the judges fighting over a claw. It has been a long season and it’s taken its toll on Andy.

Luke continues to pick bones out of his fish, and the editor continues to leave it all in the final cut, and the certainty that this fish is going to have bones in it grows ever more solid.

Annabel is also mutilating a fish, and admits that the reason she entered the medical field was her love of cutting into flesh, a piece of footage that may be used in some kind of official hearing in future.

Up above, Casper looks with utter disdain down on his inferiors, hardly believing that there was a time when he was like them: sweaty and desperate and pathetic. He sees Aaron telling Jean-Christophe that he plans to lightly crack his crab and put the sauce inside and make everyone get sticky fingers. This is what is known in the culinary industry as “barbarism”.

Pat is finishing his fiery red sauce, having put his potatoes in the fridge to make sure they understand the danger they’re in. Suddenly, horribly, it occurs to me that you can’t spell patatas without Pat. That’s going to come back to hurt us later on.

Luke is making a sauce, as if that will help. “This dish is all about balance today,” he says, wrongly: it has been made clear that the dish is all about chilli. Put more chilli in. Burn these fuckers. As if listening to my pleas, Luke’s frying pan bursts into flames, which apparently was not his plan. He quickly adjusts his plans, deciding to centre his dish around the flavour profile of ashes. “What is that?” says Sofia, after seeing an enormous column of flame shoot into the air. The other judges explain that it is a thing called “fire”. Sofia gasps in wonder.

Luke decides that he should cook his fish again, rather than burning it. He regrets spending so much time taking bones out of it, and also his entire life more generally.

Meanwhile Vinnie is thinking about the consistency of his nduja, which is a word he just made up to describe a brown paste that he has inexplicably found in his pan. He is cooking prawns on the Hibachi and has put pickled chillies in his salad, to make sure it is in no way refreshing.

Pat is happy with his sauce, which is nice and smoky, much like Luke’s fish. “At this point of the competition, immunity is everything,” he says, which is at best a wild exaggeration.

Aaron, meanwhile, is carefully cooking his crab. “There’s nothing worse than overcooked crab,” he says, apparently never having heard of the Black Death. He admits he won’t know whether his crab has been cooked properly until the judges eat it, and even then he won’t really know because they will lie to him.

All of the judges gather to watch Annabel cook her fish, having run out of all other entertainment options. She cooks it by putting it on the Hibachi and then putting a manhole cover on top of it, so it gets a real rich, smoky, gravelly flavour to it.

“I am thinking maybe I should go with pineapple,” says Petro, who has gone completely rogue and no longer cares what anyone thinks. He’s following the whims of his wandering mind, running to the freezer, running back, burning his pineapple, staring into the middle distance, sacrificing a frog, shaving his legs. “Petro you’ve got to hustle,” says Casper, amused by his pain. “Shut UP!” Petro doesn’t scream because I never get what I want.

Luke is running out of time, because once you’ve established a brand you really have to stick to it. “I’m trying to work on my sauce but I realise I’ve completely forgotten about my fish,” he wittily quips. The fish has been in the deep fryer too long, as Luke keeps on finding innovative new ways to ruin protein. As the judges count down he throws a bunch of stuff on a plate, but doesn’t actually finish his dish, and once again wonders if he should give learning from his mistakes a try one day.

Time to shove these chillies down the judges’ throats. First, Awun. Awun? Oh no, Jean-Christophe means Aaron. Aaron has served a Malaysian style chilli crab, using his sauce to draw a tiny picture of himself with his grandpa on the plate. The judges all get crabs from Aaron and find it delightful. They all get disgusting sticky fingers and it’s frankly an indictment on our culture. The judges show how low standards have fallen by saying Aaron’s robbing of their dignity was pleasant. Aaron is overjoyed to have corrupted four more souls.

Next is Vinnie and his so-called nduja-glazed prawns, and brazenly acts as if that’s even a thing. Andy says he likes the concept, meaning he thinks it sucks. He finds the pork coarse and unsuited to polite society. All the judges are agreed: Vinnie is a disgrace.

Next is Pat with his brave potatoes. They certainly look very neat and tidy, lined up in parallel lines. I…I kind of want to eat it…I’m sorry, I don’t like it any more than you do, but I do. “Colours are so beautiful,” says Poh, and she’s right - in fact one of the great privileges of being human is the ability to see in such a broad spectrum. Sofia responds to the dish by saying she wants to be in San Sebastian with, quote, “a really textural white wine”. What the frigging hell does THAT mean? A TEXTURAL wine? Why are we not interrogating this? Does she put croutons in her wine? Anyway Sofia loves the patatas bravas but Andy finds it confusing - there is too much in it and it makes his head hurt.

Next is Luke, as the chimes of doom sound above. He has served a big mess, which is allegedly a fish but looks like the dried-out corpse of the xenomorph from Alien. Luke explains that he spent so much time butterflying the fish that reality ceased to have any fixed meaning, and he could no longer remember a time when he wasn’t removing bones. His sauce suffered, as did the viewers. Poh tells Luke that she appreciates what he tried to do today, but has less appreciation for his completely inability to do it. She tells him that he is a cowboy playing Russian roulette, which is a dreadful combination of tropes. “Only do a technique if it’s worth it,” says Andy. Luke nods wisely and walks away, already planning what he’s going to run out of time to finish tomorrow.

Petro serves a chilli ice-cream and coconut and tapioca pudding and the soundtrack becomes bizarrely emotional, as if he’s a Disney character rebuilding his father’s house in a climactic montage. Sofia says it’s the most refreshing chilli dish she’s ever had, which isn’t saying much because chilli dishes are not refreshing. “It’s different, it’s interesting,” she adds, going on to say that it’s nice and unusual and that Petro should look at her. “That is probably the best granita I’ve had,” says Andy, recklessly making unverified claims as usual. “But I couldn’t get my head around the pear,” he says, which is a pretty damning admission. It’s not hard to get your head around a pear: you literally just put it in your mouth. “It’s a shame about my pear,” says Petro, looking sadly down at his chest.

Here is Annabel! She has made a delicious King George whiting with pipis and Thai red curry sauce, a fish dish that is colloquially known as an “Anti-Luke”. The judges think it’s great, and that’s that. Pretty boring really. Petro applauds with tears in his eyes, wishing that he had been more like Annabel, who cannily did not put a pear in her dish. “I think putting the fish and the curry together was a risk,” says Andy, but thankfully, by the grace of God, everyone has survived.

There are no surprises in the judging. Annabel wins immunity and Luke wins the title of Luke Of The Day. Annabel therefore will join Casper on the balcony, where he will bend her to his will.

Tune in tomorrow when Luke will try to do too much for the time available, Aaron will show some photos of his childhood, and Vinnie will reveal that something reminds him of his grandparents’ house.

Masterchef Recap: Just Like Fire Would

Ben Pobjie — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 02:47:32 GMT

PREVIOUSLY ON MASTERCHEF: Alyona’s unfortunate reception of a cursed recipe caused her to fail to effectively construct a seaweed-flavoured sex toy and sent her home amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

This leaves only one woman among the final seven cooks in the competition, as Masterchef leans increasingly into its new place as the number one cooking show in the manosphere. Under the increasingly oppressive climate of misogyny in the kitchen, can Annabel triumph against the patriarchy?

But anyway, a new week has begun and it is “Heat Week”, the week in which all of the amateurs must evade the LAPD as they carry out a series of audacious bank heists.

As the amateurs enter, they see that their mystery boxes are lit from within by a mysterious light, as if the fires of hell itself were shining forth to spread evil across the land.

The top dish each day this week wins immunity, leaving the losers at the end of the week to claw and backstab each other. The first challenge has been set by Masterchef legend Marion Grasby, who appeared on the show sixteen years ago, since when she has built a global empire of food, recipes and content that is certainly not a front for an exotic reptile-smuggling business.

Marion comes into the kitchen and delivers the news that she has been quite well of late, shocking all. She tells the story of how she risked everything for success in the culinary world, and achieved all her dreams, hammering home just how unlikely it is that any of this year’s contestants will ever do the same.

She then makes some dumplings so that everyone is clear on how you make dumplings. As it is Heat Week, she makes sure to emphasise that when making dumplings, you should use heat. She also uses “ingredients” to make a “sauce”. Casper is inspired and decides that he will be using ingredients in all his cooking from now on.

And now on to the challenge…wait, no, Marion isn’t finished. She’s going to make a Bombe Alaska, which she makes with pepper and chilli so that it will hurt anyone who eats it. It’s a great lesson in how even with traditional desserts, you can use spices to make nobody want to eat it. She also sets fire to the dish as a demonstration of how setting fire to things is a good way of burning them.

And now…can we get to the challenge? Sure you don’t want to make anything else, Marion? Is it OK if we have the actual point of the show at this point? Anyone have any objection to getting on with Masterchef, or shall we continue with the Marion Grasby Arson Hour? No? OK then.

Opening their mystery boxes, the amateurs discover the truth about the eerie glow within: the boxes contain their souls. Also some green leaves and some pork and some mushrooms and ginger and peppercorns and probably some other things for all I know. They can cook anything they like with these ingredients, but it must be spicy and it must, in some way, recreate a scene from the film Backdraft.

Pat is very happy as he is a chilli veteran: at his work, they have “Chilli Club”, where once a month everyone brings in some chilli and rubs it in a co-worker’s eyes. He is looking forward to making someone cry today, with a hot and sour pork soup based on his ex-girlfriend. Andy and Poh come over to emphasise how important it is for Pat to impress a reality show contestant from sixteen years ago, the ultimate challenge.

Less happy is Annabel, who has no idea what she’s doing, having only heard of chilli for the first time this morning. She runs to the pantry for a dictionary.

Meanwhile Aaron has got his family photos out as usual, deciding on a fusion menu combining Italian and Asian elements. Sofia and Marion love the idea, because they are not Poh, who becomes incandescent with rage any time anyone tries to mingle different cultures. “Hopefully the fusion is fusion and not confusion,” says Aaron, auditioning for a role as judge next season.

“I feel good,” says Annabel, proving it via the frozen rictus of panic on her face. “I want to do something fun,” she says, which is a shame because this is Masterchef and that is just not an option. Finally, she decides. “I’m going to do mushroom and pumpkin skewers,” she says, and everyone watching sighs sadly: the pressure has gotten to her. She’s lost her mind. “I don’t think my heart’s in it,” she says, and she’s right: that was not in the mystery box. She’ll have to make do with the mushrooms.

“I forgot how much clapping there was,” says Marion, the first ever guest judge with the guts to call out the show’s fixation on empty applause. “My hands are calloused,” says Sofia, her eyes pleading with Marion to rescue her from this nightmare.

“This is such a fun cook,” says Luke, “I’ve got no idea what half of these even do.” So now he knows what it’s like watching Masterchef. He goes on: “The plan for this dish is to make it quite spicy.” Where he got this idea is a mystery. Poh and Andy visit his bench and demand answers. He makes vague allegations regarding pork belly and air fryers and tofu and roti. Poh and Andy back away slowly, preferring not to get involved.

Vinnie thinks he needs to be a bit more creative, so uses the pork belly to build a Wicker Man. He is also making spiced pumpkin gnocchi, basing his dish heavily on his Italian heritage in a major departure from the norm. Meanwhile Poh and Andy bring their Discouragement Tour to Petro, who confides in them that he is anxious and insecure and wishes he understood his place in the world. He says he wants to play around with tofu cream. “Once you cream it, it turns out into something very rich,” says Poh. “I want you to think about that.” Petro agrees to think about it, and deliver a report by the end of the week. Now what’s he going to do with his tofu? There’s always the bin. The bin could be an option.

“Be precise with your spice!” Poh calls out. Really, Poh? That’s what you’ve got today? “Be precise with your spice”? That is genuinely the best you have to offer us? Jesus Christ. What has happened to this show, man?

Jean-Christophe returns from a skiing holiday in Switzerland and asks the other judges what’s beein going on. They tell him, but he finds it surprisingly dull and is sorry her ever came back. They are excited about Pat’s broth, however, and all are complimentary about Pat’s ability to bring delicious flavours out of his bodily fluids.

Aaron is using chilli oil in the dough of his pasta, which is so crazy it might just work. He is also making a tuile for reasons nobody has been able to figure out. He wants the tuile to look like coral, so he covers it in waste outflow from a nickel smelter.

Vinnie throws his peppercorns in his pan, tastes and declares it “bangin’”. But “bangin’” is not enough - he wants this dish to be genuinely violent. He decides to add some more chilli, so the judges will fully understand how much he hates them. Watching Vinnie manipulate his spices, Casper decides he needs to push himself more, and spices up his own dish with a nice mix of pepper and malice.

“Spice up your life!” Sofia yells, disappointingly. Standards really have plummeted. Annabel is doing the opposite, though. “This dish isn’t something I’d be excited to eat,” she says, catching the public mood beautifully. Jean-Christophe comes round to tell her that mushrooms and pumpkin cook at different rates and so her entire plan is dumb as hell. Annabel already knew this, but forgot because she was concentrating so hard on being underwhelming. “I’m just trying to get a dish up on the plate,” she says, dreaming big, “and I’m just making silly decisions along the way.” To emphasise the point she staples a live mink to her forehead, and tries again with the mushrooms.

There are only ten minutes to go, although after that they’’ have to come back to the kitchen again tomorrow. It just never ends. Life really is pointless when you think about it, isn’t it? Such an empty, futile existence. Oh well. On with the spices.

Annabel’s pumpkin hasn’t cooked. She can’t serve it. She feels sad, as do we all when our pumpkin doesn’t live up to our hopes for it. But still, she carries on and plates up what she’s got, feeling that she has, in a very real sense, earned God’s contempt this day. Time is up and Annabel delivers a heartfelt address to the camera about how much everything sucks.

Petro serves up his dish first. Chargrilled pork belly with Szechuan salt and silken tofu salad. “What you’ve created here is absolutely stunning,” says Andy, meaning this in a vaguely positive way. “This tastes like something I might find in a modern Asian restaurant in Singapore,” says Marion, demanding to know which restaurant he has stolen the dish from. Sofia disagrees, saying the dish is like walking through a smoky street in Bangkok. Restaurant in Singapore or street in Bangkok? The women cannot agree and begin throwing punches.

Vinnie is next. Pumpkin gnocchi with Szechuan and pork sauce. “I like it when people do bad things to traditional food,” says Marion, glorying in her dark side. Vinnie’s dish is extremely hot and makes everyone cough. “Bloody hell,” says Jean-Christophe, which is French for “fuck”. Vinnie has achieved his primary goal: he has ruined the judges’ day. “I actually like the level of heat,” says Marion, as her hair goes up in flames. What she does not like, however, is the bitterness of the dish and of Vinnie’s general outlook. “I kind of like it,” says Poh, lusting for pain. “There’s something that’s nearly happening there,” Sofia chips in, intent on saying nothing of significance. Andy just lies on the floor, frothing at the mouth.

Next is Aaron. Braised pork belly tortellini on whipped silken tofu sauce, with a tuile on top so you don’t see the horrors. “My pasta was really lovely,” says Andy, but has nothing to say about Aaron’s pasta. Everyone really loves Aaron’s dish except for the sauce so who even cares. Marion says that what let him down was balance - if he hadn’t been swaying so violently from side to side as he cooked, he’d have made a better sauce.

Next is Annabel, who hates life and herself. “Marion is someone who I really look up to,” she says, shattered that her dish is basically a slap to Marion’s face. She’s made mushroom skewers with spices and stuff, and seasons it with her tears. “I really want to be here,” Annabel says, but she kind of sounds like she doesn’t. “All right, we’re going to taste your dish,” says Sofia, successfully making this sound like a threat. And they do. “Annabel, that is not as bad as you think,” says Marion, overjoyed that she’s not even vomiting right now. The spice is overpowering, but the judges agree that with hard work and determination, Annabel might one day deserve happiness.

Up steps Pat, or as I call him, “Teacher’s Pat”. You see? Clever, isn’t it? Anyway he’s done a barbecue glazed pork belly with a hot and sour soup, garnished with beard trimmings. The judges reckon it’s all right, but as Poh says, “the broth has let you down”. Pat has learnt a valuable lesson: never trust a broth. Marion asks if he added any sugar to the broth, but she knows the answer, she’s just trying to humiliate him in front of his friends. Behind him everyone sniggers and whispers “can you believe Pat didn’t put sugar in his broth? I can’t believe I used to think he was cool.”

And now, Luke. “The dish doesn’t blow your head off,” he says, talking himself up big. He’s made crispy roast pork with whipped tofu and water spinach roti whatever the hell that is. It is the first dish in years to make Marion feel that life is worth living. “The roti is fire,” says Andy, a nice variation on “the floor is lava”. Luke has made a dish so delicious that there should probably be an official investigation into how this happened. Jean-Christophe reflects that when Luke was three years old watching Marion on TV, he never would have dreamed that one day he would serve her a delicious pork dish and flirt shamelessly with her.

Hey it’s Casper! Braised pork belly with pumpkin and lime puree, pickled shiitakes and god knows what else. There’s heaps of things. “This salt makes your tongue dance,” says Marion, shocked at Casper’s dark magic. “There’s a spicy discotheque in my bush,” says Jean-Christophe, and is promptly arrested. Overall, the judges agree that not only is Casper’s dish supernatural and sexual in a sinister way, but it tastes OK too. Annabel gives Casper a hug of pure hatred.

The dish of the day is to be determined now, with its maker given immunity for the week. But first: more clapping. Christ. The three best cooks were Luke (!), Petro and Casper. Any one of them would be a worthy winner, but only one of them makes the judges fear for their lives if they cross him, and so Casper wins dish of the day and can now stand on the balcony spitting on everyone for the next few days.

Tune in tomorrow when the back of my neck gets dirt and gritty.

Masterchef Recap: Tarty Supreme

Ben Pobjie — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 03:39:54 GMT

It’s cold and damp in the Masterchef garden, as the final eight amateurs arrive. “Eight’s a lucky number, so I like it,” says Aaron, making clear his joy at the departure of Emily yesterday. Then something extremely strange happens: Sofia rides into the garden on a bicycle with a big box on the front. Everyone is worried, as Sofia’s behaviour has been becoming more and more erratic lately and this is the latest manifestation of her deteriorating state of mind.

The big box contains Connoisseur ice-creams, which are today’s sponsor’s product. Everyone turns the labels to camera and promotes them as hard as possible in accordance with their contractual obligations. Andy asks each person what flavour they’ve got. With each answer, everyone shouts out in wonder as if ice-cream flavours are stunning revelations of cosmic secrets.

Finally, the point of this exercise is explained. Well, the point of this exercise is to sell ice-creams, but the thing we’re pretending is the point is explained. The amateurs will make a dessert inspired by the ice-cream they chose, and the best four will be safe from elimination tomorrow. The only problem is that all of the Connoisseur ice-creams are nice flavours that people like to eat, which is the opposite of what Masterchef judges like, so the amateurs will have to work hard to make their desserts as unpleasant and off-putting as possible.

Alyona reveals her shameful secret: before she came to Australia, she had never had Rocky Road. It’s something she’s had to overcome to build a life for herself, but today she is going to make Rocky Road in honour of her best friend, who she has photos of which she shows us for no obvious reason.

The judges have an irritating conference. “I think now is the time for another dessert challenge,” says Sofia, an assertion which in many ways is borne out by the fact that there is a dessert challenge going on right now.

“I think there’s no other way for me to go than an ice-cream sandwich,” says Casper, who doesn’t have a hell of a lot of imagination. He carefully adds a few drops of his lethal green mixture to the dish. They will pay. They will all pay.

Vinnie is feeling regretful over the dish he cooked yesterday that was a disaster, but not as big a disaster as Emily’s dish which was much better than his. He shows his remorse by means of old photos of him roasting meat, so we know he really means it. He can’t believe he pulled the almond biscotti flavour, which is the flavour most appropriate to him and his heritage: both of his parents were almond farmers. Today he is determined to prove what he failed to prove yesterday: that Italian food can be good.

Poh visits Luke to find out what kind of insanity he’s planning. What he is planning is a whole mess of pistachio: postachio sablee tart, pistachio frangipane layer, candied lemon and pistachio caramel, white chocolate mousse and tempered chocolate glaze. This is clearly much too much for him to do, and Poh tells him so. She advises him to have a Plan B for when everything inevitably goes tits-up. “I know Poh’s right,” says Luke, before ignoring her. “This could be the dish that puts me into a pressure test,” he goes on, apparently not understanding that this would be a bad thing.

“Cook to your full potential, you have forty-five minutes to go!” Poh yells, having run dry of inspiration for any more horrible puns. Aaron, wondering what his full potential might be, is bent on making a flourless chocolate sponge with vanilla and black pepper ice-cream. This is very smart: he was given classic ice-cream flavours but knows that those won’t wow the judges: what he really needs is something awful and inappropriate, and black pepper is it. Nobody on earth wants black pepper in ice-cream, so it’s a guaranteed winner for Masterchef.

Annabel explains to Andy that she wants to make an ice-cream bombe because it’s been ages since she’s set fire to something and the urge is getting out of control. “There is not enough time to make two ice-creams,” she notes, so she decides to make two ice-creams. She is going to use liquid nitrogen, which still hasn’t killed anyone in eighteen seasons, but you never know when our luck will turn. Annabel is racing against the clock: she needs to get her fig jam cooled down, which is good advice for all of us. It is ironic that it’s Annabel making fig jam, something that seems more fitting for Luke.

Petro and Alyona are both making eclairs and engaging in extremely passive-aggressive banter about it. “I feel like I’m doing it the old-fashioned way,” says Alyona. “Yes, you are,” Petro replies, sick of her bullshit.

The judges gather to discuss what an idiot Luke is. They all agree that he is trying to do too much for the eightieth time this year and they will laugh their heads off when he fails. Jean-Christophe drops the bombshell about Petro and Alyona’s eclairs and all of the judges gasp in amazement, never having imagined such a thing was even possible.

Luke is panicking. He knows he has to pivot, but there is no way to pivot. So he doesn’t pivot. Good plan, Luke.

A quick montage reveals that the amateurs are whipping up some really disgusting-looking stuff today. Vinnie’s tart shells are in the oven. Andy looks at them. “They’re very blonde,” he says, judgmentally. Vinnie knows there is no greater stain on a human soul than to have blonde tart shells, so immediately begins dyeing them a rich auburn. “I crank up that oven, I let my tarts do their thing,” says Vinnie, dreaming of hip-hop stardom. As he works frantically to rescue his dish, Andy stares at him with burning intensity and - yes - hatred.

“Fig jam’s cooled,” says Annabel, which is a perfectly normal thing to say in context but sounds really funny. But then she adds, “My meringue has yet to be made”, and it becomes obvious that this is a woman on the edge. She makes a snap decision: the meringue’s out. This kind of wild caprice is why we have all been warning that Annabel is out of control.

“Alyona, how do your choux look?” says Petro, snidely. “Mine are rising, are yours?” Alyona shoots back bitchily. “Yeah, wanna look?” Petro snaps. Alyona looks. Petro’s choux are rising more than Alyona’s. Alyona mocks them for being fat and unwieldy and boasts about her own petite, sexy choux. Petro seethes silently, vowing that Alyona will not get away with this. Jean-Christophe intervenes seconds before Petro and Alyona begin hitting each other with pastry.

Poh asks Aaron what the hell he’s up to. He says he’s tasted his ice-cream and it tastes every bit as repulsive as he wants it to. She asks if he’s tasted it after it’s been churned. He has not. She points out that’s pretty dumb of him. He tastes the churned ice-cream and finds it hardly tastes of black pepper at all - in fact it almost tastes nice. He realises that if he’s going to make this a truly, epically dreadful dessert, he really needs to get some more pepper in.

Vinnie’s shells are no longer blonde and ready to receive his diplomat, whose name is Edward. Meanwhile Luke assembles his dish but realises everything is too warm. He doesn’t have time to cool them down so just has to go with it. The judges watch as his mousse begins to drip, turning his dish into a Daliesque nightmare. Once again one tiny mistake costs Luke: he planned everything so meticulously but his ignorance about the effect of heat on mousse has laid him low.

One minute left and Annabel is blowtorching her ice-cream because she can’t get it out of the mold. It is a very confusing moment as everyone watches in rapt horror, wondering what the hell is going on. “I’m trying to get this bombe out!” Annabel wails, like an emotionally fragile disposal expert. The tension is almost noticeable as she pokes and prods and cajoles and finally gets the bombe out of the mold, only to discover that it’s all soft and gooey. Annabel joins Luke in the “wow, I didn’t realise things melt when you make them hot” club.

Anyway time is up and everyone is ashamed of themselves as they should be. “I just didn’t get it done in time,” said Luke. If only someone had warned him, or he had had some kind of prior experience in running out of time due to attempting to do too much, to act as cautionary example. Ah well, live and learn. Well, not learn - it’s Luke.

Vinnie serves his dish first and looks very smug indeed. It’s an almond biscotti tart. It’s good. Vinnie is going to be insufferable after this. Poh is very happy, but it’s all downhill from here.

Next is Aaron. It’s flourless chocolate sponge with whisky and white soy black pepper vanilla ice-cream. It’s absolutely vile, so the judges love it. “I don’t think I’ve ever consumed pepper in that way,” says Sofia, delighted to find that life has so much more possibility than she’d dreamed of.

Petro serves his eclairs before Alyona serves hers, which gives him the advantage in their savage vendetta. His eclairs are salted caramel and macadamia, and are good, according to informed sources. Jean-Christophe says they are “quite decent inside”, which is mind-blowing praise. Alyona looks on, loathing etched on her face.

Now Alyona gets to come up, her hands shaking as she tries to restrain her violent feelings for Petro. She made a Rocky Road eclair. It’s not good. Too much dark chocolate. Too much raspberry. Soft choux. None of it is free from sin. You come at the king, you best not miss. Alyona has missed. Petro is triumphant.

Pat has made a toasted coconut and white chocolate cremeux, for what it’s worth. Anyway, moving on.

Casper has made river mint ice-cream sandwiches. The judges eat them, not even realising how much closer to death it brings them.

Annabel brings forth her burnt honey ice-cream bombe, which I was going to say is more like a puddle, but before I could say that, Annabel calls it a puddle herself. Good on her. Failed dish, but she gets an A+ from me today.

Luke serves his pistachio tart with caramel and white chocolate mousse and tempered white chocolate, featuring an Annabel-esque puddle element. It’s a big mess and Luke knows it’s a big mess and everyone else knows it’s a big mess and Luke hasn’t felt this bad since Kevin O’Leary spanked him in public. Poh really feels for him, because there was so much good in his dish, the only thing that let him down was not being able to make it.

The judges announce the top four dishes, which is hard because most of these were crap. But the four that didn’t completely suck were Vinnie, Aaron, Pat and Petro. This means that Luke, Casper, Alyona and Annabel will be in tomorrow’s pressure test, risking elimination and inflicting deep mental scars on each other.

Tune in tomorrow when some guy nobody’s ever heard of is on the show.

Comedians should not work for politicians

Ben Pobjie — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:01:04 GMT

So it turns out I’ve actually got a lot to say about Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying he’d like to shag Kylie Minogue on a podcast - that is, saying, on a podcast, that he’d like shag Kylie Minogue, rather than saying he’d like to shag Kylie Minogue and have it recorded and made available on Spotify.

In fact I’ve got more to say on it than I should have, and more than is objectively justified by the importance of the story, but heigh ho, that’s what has been on my mind, so let’s get into it.

The first thing to say, obviously, is that it doesn’t actually matter very much, and anyone who thinks it’s incredibly important or says something very significant about the state of the world or gender relations or politics or everyday misogyny are likely to be people who just have too little to occupy them and a greatly impaired sense of perspective.

The second thing to say, just as obviously, is that it’s not actually very offensive for a man to say, in the context of a joke discussion on a joke podcast, that he’d like to shag a famously attractive woman, and that I suspect nobody really thinks it is, but they’ve seen something in the news that is vaguely the same shape as an actually offensive thing and so their sensors have gone off.

But I’ll say a bit more, because even though it doesn’t matter much, there are elements of it that do bug me, and what is Substack for if not for yammering on about whatever pisses you off on a given day?

OK, so firstly, I don’t know much about Nikki Osborne or her podcast, but if this is normal procedure she needs to pull her socks up, because what the fuck is “Shag Marry Date?”

“Shag Marry Date” is not a thing. It has never been a thing. The game you’re thinking of is called “Fuck Marry Kill”. It’s bad enough that you’re not willing, on a podcast - on a PODCAST, for the love of God! - to say “fuck” when nobody is stopping you. But where does “date”? come from?

Fuck Marry Kill. Those are the options. You choose who you want to spend your life with, who you want to have hot sweaty consequence-free sex with, and who, ideally, you’d like to see dead. It’s fun!

But no, Albo got to play “Shag Marry Date”, which is…what? You choose who to have sex with, who to spend the rest of your life with, and who you’d like to go to dinner with but refrain from intimate physical contact and hopefully not see again?

What the hell is THAT?

Look, you don’t have to play Fuck Marry Kill with the prime minister. Honestly nobody wants you to, and the whole country would prefer you didn’t. But if you’re going to play Fuck Marry Kill with the prime minister, play Fuck Marry Kill with the prime minister. Don’t water it down and bowdlerise it and turn it into something that is both weak and moronic. Unless you did that on purpose to make some kind of allegorical point about Albanese’s prime ministership.

I’d also like to say that prime ministers going on comedy podcasts sucks on general principles. In fact, unless the podcast is a political interview podcast in which the host is actually going to conduct a proper serious interview, prime ministers going on any podcasts sucks. It’s not what prime ministers are supposed to do, it’s a big fat waste of time, and it basically shows that we are paying Anthony Albanese to not do his job.

There are people, I know, who think Albanese is destrotying Australia with his radical and brutally transformative leftist agenda. Which I think is pretty funny, because as far as I can see, Albanese really couldn’t be bothered destroying Australia with any kind of agenda, what with all the podcasts and panel shows and music festivals he has to get to.

As far as Anthony Albanese is concerned, the point of being prime minister is that you get to go on TV, and stand next to famous people, and pal around with comedians and actors and rock stars, and be photographed. All he wants in life is for the kids to think he’s cool, and his ultimate political aim is to rub himself up against celebrities hard enough that some glamour comes off on him.

And that is why he is an annoying little twat. Essentially harmless, but incredibly annoying.

But even more annoying than Albanese going on a podcast is Nikki Osborne INVITING him on a podcast. In doing so, she has added herself to a long and extremely shameful tradition of comedians doing the worst thing a comedian can do: allow themselves to be used for the purposes of political campaigning.

Political guest stars on comedy shows are shit. They’re always shit, they always will be shit. Yes, it was horrible when Donald Trump was on Saturday Night Live, but it was also horrible when Hillary Clinton was on Saturday Night Live. Just like it was horrible when Clinton was on Broad City, and when Nixon was on Laugh-In, and when Pauline Hanson and John Hewson were on Frontline, and when Obama was on Between Two Ferns, and when Craig Emerson was on The Chaser, and when OUR OLD MATE ALBO was on Spicks and Specks.

This is not about which side of politics you’re on, or what the merits of a particular politician are. This is about the fact that active politicians only go on comedy shows for two reasons: firstly their massive egos, and secondly and most importantly, to campaign.

They’re not there because they want to pursue a career in comedy. They’re not there because they enjoy the banter. They’re not there to polish their acting chops.

They are there to tell the audience, “Hey, look at me! I’m a good sport! I’m having a laugh! I’ve got a great sense of humour and am extremely relatable! Any impression you had of me being otherwise was erroneous, because WOW am I having fun on set with my goofy friends! I’m not a dumb, out of touch, stiff, inhuman sociopathic monster - I am FUNNNNNNN! I don’t even mind if you make fun of me on TV! Ain’t I a corker!”

Now I don’t blame them for wanting to convey that message. The general image of politicians are that they are awful, selfish, boring people who you’d hate to spend ten minutes talking to, and it’s only natural that for career purposes they would like to find a way to convincingly pretend that’s not true.

But comedians do not have to assist them in this. In fact, comedians should NOT assist them in this, and no matter how great a comedian is, and no matter how brilliant their show may be, once they’ve let a politician come on to burnish their image, they’ll always be just a tiny bit tainted.

Because the fact is, when a politician is on your comedy show, you are now working for them. You’re part of their campaign team. Your job description has shifted from “make the funniest show possible” to “help this dickhead win elections”. And that is, frankly, a very undignified position to be in.

There are a lot of ways to do comedy, but this is not one of them. If any comedians, comedy writers, comedy producers or general content makers are reading this, I implore you: resist any temptation to get a pollie on. It might boost your profile, but it will diminish your soul - and make you less funny. It just isn’t worth it. If you want to work for a politician, go apply for a job in their office. I’m sure they’ll be happy to have you.

And if Anthony Albanese is reading this: leave the apologies, just go do your job, loser.

Masterchef Recap: International Injustice

Ben Pobjie — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 01:57:35 GMT

PREVIOUSLY ON MASTERCHEF: Casper showed off his big glistening mussels and wowed the judges, thereby earning immunity from elimination and feeling his rising sense of megalomania begin to grow out of control.

NOW ON MASTERCHEF: A bunch of amateur cooks in black aprons enter the kitchen to discover their loathsome fate. They see displays of five ingredients representing five countries: Italy, Japan, Portugal, Vietnam and Sweden. Their task: correctly identify which of these countries has terrible food (Sweden).

The Italian ingredient is bottaga, which is disgusting fish eggs. The Japanese ingredient is sansho pepper, which is a kind of pepper that nobody has ever eaten. The Vietnamese ingredient is banana blossom, which is a flower that looks like a lobster. The Portuguese ingredient is alheira sausage, which is an orange sausage basically. The Swedish ingredient is juniper berries, which the Messiah Brian caused to grow miraculously in AD 33.

None of the amateurs have ever used any of these ingredients, which the judges obviously knew and are deliberately making the cooks feel bad about themselves. They have to cook with at least one today, however, with the least weirdly pretentious dish sending its maker home. Also, the maker of the best dish will win a $10,000 travel voucher “to taste the world”, or at least as much of it as you can get on $10,000. Casper, having immunity from this elimination, does not have the opportunity to win the voucher…OR DOES HE?

Andy offers Casper the chance to risk elimination, for the chance of winning the prize. Casper has a big decision to make, and he agonises over it just as much as he agonised over his decision to wear a pastel purple cardigan today. But in the end he remembers he’s not an idiot, and chooses not to cook.

Emily is leaning towards using the banana blossom, because she ate it once and didn’t die, which is more than she can say about any of the others. Apparently the banana blossom takes on flavours really well, like a towel soaked in human bodily fluids.

The judges gather to have the same conversation about the challenge that they have about every challenge. Poh notes that today’s elimination is very different because there’s not just a bottom dish, but also a top dish, and she’s right except for all the other episodes in which this has been the case.

“This is a cool challenge,” Annabel lies cheerfully. She has chosen the bottarga, which she plans to whip and add to an octopus tentacle, creating a kind of edible representation of the unknown horrors of the human soul. She’s never made this dish before, but she’s feeling confident because of her lack of training in risk management.

Alyona is going to make ice-cream and a tuille with juniper berry powdered sugar on top. She knows it’s difficult: “If I push it too hard it’s going to be bitter,” she says, which is just one way in which desserts are like classical music prodigies. Alyona remembers how many lives she’s ruined in the past and is determined not to make that mistake again.

Petro is pairing alheira with octopus, bringing land and sea together in the way that the ancient rulers of Portugal did. It’s Petro on a plate - eight hands and a huge sausage. Vinnie, on the other hand, is using the bottarga, which he hopes to incubate and hatch before time is up. He is putting it into pasta, as he has decided that today is the day he finally embraces his Italian heritage. He tastes his dough and finds he cannot taste bottarga. Win-win, you say, but no, Vinnie apparently wants his pasta to taste like fish eggs. And that is lose-lose.

Emily is making a Filipino fresh spring roll, which as she explains, is a spring roll that is fresh and Filipino. It requires a flat kind of pancake, and some photos of the chef’s holiday to the Philippines for flavour. Emily wants to put as much flavour as she can into her dish, something that she has wanted to do with every dish so far in the series. You’d think she’d change it up a bit, or at the very least say something different on camera.

Pat is excited about the new sauce skills that he has learned, like pouring an entire bottle of wine into a saucepan and setting it on fire. He burns his face, but he is coated entirely in asbestos and it has no effect.

Meanwhile Vinnie is shoving bottarga into everything he can - prawns, oil, his underpants - in a desperate effort to get the judges to say, “Mmmm, I can taste the unborn mullets!”

Luke is making a dish inspired by gin, as he was raised to believe that juniper berries are good for nothing but alcoholism. He’s making a sherbet and a sorbet and a granita and all kinds of wacky ginny things, when really all he has to do is fill a tall glass with gin and pour it down the judges’ necks.

Emily has chopped up the banana blossom and cooked it and dear god this is dull isn’t it. This episode could really do with some kind of serious injury. Poh comes over to Emily to see if she can induce one. Emily tells Poh the story about her spring rolls that she’s already told us twice. Poh asks her if she’s featuring the banana blossom enough. Emily says she is. Poh gives her a look which makes it clear that Emily will pay for her insolence. She has to learn that when Poh asks you if you’re featuring the banana blossom enough, what she means is YOU ARE NOT FEATURING THE BANANA BLOSSOM ENOUGH AND YOU WILL PUT MORE BANANA BLOSSOM IN THIS DISH OR YOU WILL SUFFER.

Meanwhile Aaron is busily doing something or other. He still has to make his pasta, which will be incredibly riveting television. Not as riveting, though, as Petro, who announces his intention to pickle his octopus. God knows what he means by this, but it promises to be a fascinating perversion.

Back to Emily, who is trying to put more banana blossom into her dish so that Poh doesn’t bite her legs. This while Poh is telling the other judges that she’s really worried about Emily, or to put it another way, she’s excited to see Emily fail. Andy thinks that by now the amateurs’ dishes should “firm up”. “Yes,” says Jean-Christophe, indicating agreement.

Annabel has opened her pressure cooker, thus releasing all the woes of mankind. Her octopus looks cooked, which is all that a young woman can ask for in today’s world. Meanwhile Alyona has her coulis and is opening up a mysterious powder that grants anyone who consumes it the ability to see all possible timelines simultaneously. In a bold move, Alyona reminisces about her homeland, where the juniper berries grow free and abundant and everyone drinks gin all day.

“Kangaroo loin can be extremely hard to cook,” says Pat out of the blue, completely unprovoked. It is suspected that he deliberately chose kangaroo loin to make everyone feel uncomfortable. There are so many other parts of a kangaroo that he could be cooking, but he went with the loin. He is disgusting.

Ten minutes to go, and Vinnie is feeling overwhelmed. He is trying not to let it show, but above him is Casper, who sees all. Eyes boring into Vinnie’s soul, Casper questions Vinnie’s life choices. Andy comes round to slow Vinnie down and prevent him finishing his dish. Vinnie explains that he is making pasta and putting a sauce on it. Andy tells him he took too long to figure out bottarga - Andy himself is famous for figuring out bottarga in less than eight minutes, still a Commonwealth record. Vinnie is running out of time and has even less after that little HR meeting with Andy.

Five minutes to go, and Annabel is so stressed she’s being filmed in disconcerting close-up. Emily is much calmer, having made her pancake, rolled up the banana blossom, and made a large contribution to a charity of Poh’s choice in order to avoid her wrath. Meanwhile Pat looks at his sauce and feels that finally, he understands what it is to be a father.

Time is up, and everyone is relieved except Vinnie, whose pasta dish appears to have turned into a plate of microwaved pikelets. He admits it’s not his finest dish, and says bottarga is deceptively hard to make shine. He’s wrong: there’s nothing deceptive about it, it’s horrible little yellow fish eggs, it was quite obviously awful from the start.

Anyway time to serve. Alyona is first, bringing forward her dish as the voices of her ancestors echo through the juniper bushes as the wolves grow nearer in the dead of night on the steppe. The dish is called “juniper ice-cream with blackcurrant coulis, blackberyy and raspberry, macerated berries and tuile dusted with juniper berry sugar”, which is much too long. She needs to edit that name down. She claims to have brought the judges “a little taste of Scandinavia”, but there appears to be no fermented shark or mead. Anyway the judges love it. “I feel like I’m in the forest,” says Sofia, “like I’m covered in dirt and being bitten by bugs and screaming for help. It’s so great.” All the judges are agreed that Alyona’s dish is exactly like being a contestant on Alone.

Next is Annabel, who frankly looks tense. She serves a barbecued octopus tentacle with whipped bottarga and salsa verde, a dish that the soundtrack seems to believe is very menacing. “This is an interesting one,” says Sofia, in defiance of the reviews. Annabel’s salsa verde is too powerful, and it has overwhelmed the bottarga. The judges are angry: they wanted to feel like there were baby mullets erupting in their mouths and they didn’t. Poh could taste the bottarga but didn’t enjoy it. Everyone thinks Annabel should be ashamed of herself, and she is.

Next is Pat, who is super excited to bring the judges his filthy immoral kangaroo loin with a pomme puree, barbecued asparagus and juniper sauce. He calls it “Juniper roo”, which is a hell of a lot better than Alyona’s title. Jean-Christophe slams the table with both hands, driven to uncontrollable rage by the deliciousness of Pat’s marsupial crotch. “Thank you for making juniper jus on roo a thing,” says Poh, in the belief that she’s said something incredibly witty somehow. Sofia fans herself, Pat’s sauce having caused something to awaken within her. She feels like a woman for the first time.

Next is Emily, who fresh spring rolls banana blossom travel to Philippines nostalgia etc etc whatever. “What is the sauce?” asks Andy, the nosy sod. The judges eat it and find that it is excellent except that it doesn’t taste like banana blossom. This is what Poh warned Emily about, and Emily has not obeyed her instructions, and Poh has put Emily on her list. It’s a humiliating moment for Emily, and proves that all she’s capable of doing is making a really delicious plate of food, which is obviously not what you’re supposed to do, as a professional chef.

Next is Aaron who has made pasta with bottarga but is of very little interest today so his bit is over fast. Then Petro, who has cooked a sausage as his right. There are too many things on Petro’s plate: he’s paired the sausage with octopus and salad and vegetables and an apple pie and a glass of mango lassi and a clockwork puppy and a Little Golden Book about One Direction. It’s just too much and Sofia scolds him, the lucky boy.

Next is Luke, who wants to get everyone pissed. It’s a dessert: basil-gin granita, blackberry and juniper berry sorbet, basil tuile with cucumber cubes and raspberry sherbet. Dunno how anyone could bitch about Petro having too much on his plate when Luke has presented this freaking cornucopia. Poh thinks his sherbet has gone over the edge, a problem that also afflicted Daryl Braithwaite. Sofia, on the other hand, is delighted by the sherbet and loved going over the edge - she’s been chasing that high ever since Pat brought her inner goddess to life.

Next is Vinnie, who is embarrassed by his plate of dreadful food. I think he’s been crying. Poor Vinnie! I’m sorry I made fun of you Vinnie. Come here. I’ll give you a hug. He made a prawn and bottarga ravioli, which is even worse than it sounds. “Do you feel like this is the last dish that you could have cooked in this competition?” asks Andy. Vinnie does feel like this. “For your sake, I hope this isn’t as bad as you’re making it out to be,” says Andy, indicating that he really really wants Emily or Annabel to go home. Sadly though, Vinnie’s dish is not good. Andy loves his fried bottarga nuggets, in a purely platonic sense. He likes a lot of other things about the dish, just not how it tastes, which all of a sudden is something the judges care about.

Crunch time arrives, and we are to learn who has a reason to live and who doesn’t. Pat wins the travel voucher, which means Alyona doesn’t get to go home and walk beneath the Northern Lights. More importantly, the worst cooks were Emily, Vinnie and Annabel. And the worst of all was…

Emily!

Jesus.

It seems slightly harsh that making a brilliant dish that didn’t taste of banana blossom - an ingredient of which there is no evidence of its existence in any official record - puts you lower than making an actual bad dish. I think Emily has been done dirty here. I will be petitioning FIFA to reinstate her.

But for now, it’s goodbye to Emily, whom we shall all miss horribly. I’m already finding it difficult to go on.

Tune in tomorrow, when standards slip even further.

Masterchef Recap: Wish You Were Here

Ben Pobjie — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:01:06 GMT

It is the spectacular climax of Knockout Week, the week in which contestants must slip powerful tranquillisers into every dish. Today is the day on which yet another of the people we’ve grown to love far more than our own families will be sent home to the unimaginable horror of family life.

“Knockout Week has been a wild ride,” lies Poh to the black apron-clad seven - Alyona, Emily, Casper, Luke, Hannah, Pat and Petro. There are three cloches at the front of the room, and the judges lift them to reveal…nothing. That’s right, today the amateurs will be heroing air, the greatest cooking challenge of all.

Haha, just kidding! Goodness we have fun! Actually the situation is this: the three immune contestants - Vinnie, Annabel and Aaron - will choose the key ingredients, by going to Coles, where you can get the best food at the greatest prices every day. “I’m excited to see what ingredients they pick for you,” says Jean-Christophe, admitting he needs to get out more.

The trio head to Coles, a thrilling experience. “It’s like the Masterchef pantry on steroids!” Annabel exclaims, which…I mean…it’s a supermarket. Has Annabel never been in a supermarket before? She seems so utterly enthralled to discover that there is a shop where you can buy food, having apparently previously believed that the Masterchef pantry was the only place such wonders could be found. Bit worried about Annabel.

As Aaron looks carefully at some meat, a Coles employee approaches to see if he’d like to participate in an extremely poorly-executed skit. With stunningly naturalistic performances, the Coles lady and Aaron undertake a serious discussion about what food is both versatile and delicious and suitable for both western and eastern cuisines. Sure, it seems manufactured and artificial and insulting to all our intelligences, but it’s genuinely something that happens every day, thousands of times, in Coles stores across the nation! Go to Coles today, you won’t be in there more than five seconds before a friendly staff member will walk up to you and ask if they can help and then recommend a product that perfectly matches your vague and ill-defined requirements. They’re just that committed to their sole passion: customer service and/or great local produce.

Anyway, eventually they have to leave Coles, with Annabel swearing she’ll do whatever it takes to go back there, someday. Back at the kitchen there is a bizarrely jocular atmosphere, as everyone acts like a trip to Coles is a three-day circus arts course. They’re all chuckling and joshing with each other about the wacky adventures they’ve just had at the supermarket. It is goddamn exhausting. But in the end Annabel picked leeks to honour her Welsh heritage, Vinnie chose mussels because he simultaneously misunderstood and misspelt the brief, and Aaron chose short ribs because the gourmet expert in the meat aisle said they were the best. The three then retreat the balcony to enjoy the mayhem they have wrought.

Poh tells the judges that “today is a little bit unusual”, and never have the words “a little bit” been more apt. The judges all agree that it is absolutely unprecedented for the amateurs to be given ingredients that they have to hero in their dish: indeed, such a challenge has not been set since yesterday. “To me, heroing means your dish can’t do without it,” says Andy, which is interesting, because to me, heroing means you are bad at language.

Anyway back to the cooking I guess. Luke is cooking short ribs and saying something about getting a gentle hit in the back of your throat, which is very saucy talk from such a young lad. Meanwhile Petro has no idea what to do. Should he cook short ribs, or mussels or leeks? They all have their pros and cons, except for the leeks, which have no pros. So obviously he decides on the leeks. “I’m going to do a tofu cream with leeks and scallops,” he says, as if that’s a perfectly normal thing for an adult human to say. “I’m most worried about balancing the flavours,” he says, reading off Page One of “101 Masterchef Cliches To Repeat Ad Nauseum”.

Emily is making a curry and showing photographs of her friend and her friend’s mum. Old photos are always a warning that someone is either about to do something wonderful, or about to humiliate themselves. Beware, Emily: when they leave your reminiscing in the edit you’re on a knife’s edge.

Alyona is living her dream: cooking with mussels. “Today I’m going to lean into my travels,” she says, deciding to cook while cycling. “I really love fusion,” she adds, as she dips her mussels into a nuclear reactor. She tells Jean-Christophe and Sofia that she plans to combine French, Japanese and Russian flavours in a process she likes to call “the fuck is this?” The judges warn her that when making something ridiculous, one should always be careful not to let one’s urge for self-destruction get in the way. Sofia is worried that the mussels might get lost, because today’s cook isn’t like cooking at home: today she actually wants people to taste the mussels, as counter-intuitive as that might seem. Alyona rethinks her flavours and decides to just do a spag bol instead.

Now Alyona is showing photos. Last year she and her best friend went to Japan. Amazing, you will agree. Not only that, but while in Japan they ate food.

Hannah has also chosen Vinnie’s muscles. Sorry, Vinnie’s mussels - got confused because of the look on her face. Hannah is a late bloomer when it comes to mussels: she used to think they were the worst kind of filth, until she went to Italy and discovered that giving in to some nice big strong mussels can really make you feel like a woman. “I’m going to try new things that I haven’t done, which might be a bit silly,” says Hannah, in a slightly on-the-nose piece of foreshadowing.

Another mussel man is Casper, who is doing Tom Yum Mussels, a dish named after the magical sprite from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, who rescues the hobbits from the barrow-wight and serves them mussels to restore their health. Andy and Poh pop by to make sure Casper understands that as much as he might think he knows how to cook mussels, the judges want him to fail. Casper ponders carefully: should he change his flavour profile, or should he follow Andy home tonight and shiv him in the shower?

Back to Petro and his leeks. “I’ve got a silken tofu and miso cream,” he reveals, hoping the doctor will arrive soon to treat this. “I’ve also decided it kind of needs a fat element,” he adds, heading to the pantry to find an asthmatic child to add to the recipe.

Hey, it’s Luke! “What are you serving with the curry, Luke?” asks Aaron. Luke answers him but you wouldn’t be interested in what he says. It is to be a massaman curry, to which he will add a pomme puree (French for “Cirque du Soleil”). Sofia and Jean-Christophe visit to tell him that, like every other contestant, he is wrong. You can’t have massaman curry with pomme puree, you idiot! Pomme puree is French and massaman curry is, like, Mongolian or Egyptian or something! It’s culinary miscegenation! You fool! Luke thinks that maybe it will work, because his theory is that if you have something that tastes nice, it will be good to eat. Sofia and Jean-Christophe scoff at his idiotic naivete.

Casper suddenly loses his mind and puts clams in his mussel pan, apparently no longer caring whether he lives or dies. Andy is shocked. “Has he just put clams in it?” he asks Poh, as if he’s just been told that the government has compulsorily acquired his mother’s house to build a dogfighting stadium. Poh replies that yes, he has. “That’s going to distract from the mussels!” Andy cries, unable to believe that he has lived to see the world crumble into such foul decay. He’s seen a lot of evil things in his life, but never did he dream that he’d see a man distract from his mussels.

There are only five minutes to go. For the cooks, that is. For us, there’s, like, weeks. Alyone is focusing on her Japanese broth. She has to make sure it’s delicate and clean, so she adds a dash of Toilet Duck and brushes it lightly. “Even though these buns are Russian buns, they do remind me a bit of milky Japanese buns,” she says, which is quite a funny thing to hear out of context. Meanwhile Hannah is panicking over pasta.

Casper has gone completely rejected all social mores, and is now blending up some pipis and adding beer to his dish, something that wasn’t even legal until 2021. “I’m really happy with the flavour of my tom yum,” he says - but at what cost?

Luke makes a late decision: he doesn’t want to put rice in his dish. Figuratively shouting fuck you to the judges, he goes all in on mashed potato and whips out his meat. Meanwhile Annabel tells Petro that his scallops look sick, just to mess with him. “Needs some tweaks,” he replies. He’s worried about the dish. “It’s not what I thought it was going to be,” he says. “I thought it was going to be a bath towel.”

Hannah is working frantically to do something or other, mussels, pasta, whatever. She has to cook the pasta and cook the mussels and her sauce is missing something and she knows that if she mucks this up she’ll have to see her kids and she just is not ready to face that.

Time is up, and an air of doom settles over the kitchen. All are cursed. All are punished. All will die. The cooks settle down in the waiting area to contemplate the death of God.

Alyona serves first and says “hero the ingredient” like an obedient Masterchef drone. Her mussels and buns are “so tasty”, according to Andy. He embarks on a detailed description of what it’s like to eat a mussel, and it’s almost poetic in its total lack of entertainment value. Sofia is thrilled that the mussels taste briny, like the sea, and what is more delicious than sea water? Nothing, we are informed. “The best mussels so far,” says Jean-Christophe, which is high praise given they’re the first ones they’ve had.

In comes Petro who has tried his best to hero leeks, a difficult task in that leeks are leeks. He’s made leeks and scallops, with leeks and scallops and some leeks. “As soon as I set my mind on leeks, I knew I had to do the best that I can,” he says with amazing self-awareness. It’s true that once you set your mind on leeks, there’s no point in thinking of tomorrow. He tells the judges that being on Masterchef makes him happy, which everyone finds a bit weird. Eating his dish, the judges are agreed that Petro has really heroed the leeks, and for the first time in history this is considered a positive. Andy thinks that Petro is the one to beat. Or he might have said “The Wonder Pete”. Hard to be sure. But one to beat or Wonder Pete: either way it’s a compliment.

Next comes Hannah, who enters with a black cloud hanging over her head, two vultures sitting on her shoulders, and Satan sitting in the rafters laughing maniacally. She has made mussel pasta with a mussel and tomato sauce, along with a pangratatto and an Italian chilli oil, and to finish, a glass of tears. Jean-Christophe asks Hannah what she’s learnt in this competition, emphasising that his question is very much in the past tense. Hannah explains that she keeps waking up thinking about cooking and becomes more unhinged with every day. The judges eat her doomed dish and find the pasta is great but the mussels are dirty and some of them aren’t cooked. Poh wonders if the sauce really heroes the mussel, and it’s hard not to notice how the word “hero” becomes exponentially more obnoxious with every usage on this show. Andy says it next, and who knows how many people are kicking their TVs in by now. Anyway Hannah is screwed.

Luke brings in his massaman curry with racially insensitive mashed potato. The judges eat it and agree that it is very good, which is devastating because they really hate Luke. You can see how much by the way that, when confronted with an obviously brilliant dish, they keep saying things like “it’s quite tasty” and “he did a good job” in voices of surprised disappointment.

Hey, it’s Pat! He’s made food! It’s nice! Moving on!

Emily is next. She comes in. She leaves the room. Brilliant.

In comes Casper, who you’ll recall recently had a psychotic break and put clams in his mussels, or possibly mussels in his clams. He describes how he blended his pipis, and how much that hurt, but he refused any kind of anaesthetic. Poh demands why he corrupted his mussels with such blasphemy. Casper explains that he did it because he’s awesome and the judges can shove it. Poh asks if he’s worried now. Casper says he is, as he tensely fingers the hunting knife in his waistband. “But at the end of the day I was pretty proud of this dish,” he says, secure in the knowledge that he has been true to himself and that he knows all the judges’ addresses.

The judges eat Casper’s mussels and find that actually they were wrong about literally everything. It’s fucking fantastic. Turns out the judges know nothing about cooking and should all lose their jobs. Poh finds that it is full of mollusc flavour, but doesn’t know where it’s coming from, although “the food” is a good bet. “Are we heroing molluscs or are we heroing mussels?” asks Sofia, committing fully to her project of meaninglessness.

It’s time for judgment, and Petro and Alyona are informed that they are the cat’s meow baby. The judges then pretend that Casper is in any danger whatsoever in order to falsely generate tension. Given we’ve already heard that Casper’s dish was incredibly delicious and that Hannah’s tasted bad and wasn’t even fully cooked, nobody is fooled for the merest second. Hannah is going home.

This kind of sucks, because Hannah is really nice and it was fun having her around. We will miss her and I will try to email her and ask if she knows where I can get her pie because my Coles was sold out when I tried to get one. Pantry on steroids my foot.

Hannah cries a bit and Andy tells her that he knows her kids will be proud of her even though he doesn’t know her kids and cannot possibly know this. Emily is in torrents of tears because Hannah is her best friend and everyone else sucks balls.

It’s a sad day. There’s very little point in going on. But tune in next week, when we go on.