It's the MasterChef quarterfinal...
..and this week's six best cooks are back.
Every time we're back in the kitchen,
the pressure just seems to hit you like a ton of bricks.
I never thought I'd get this far.
I'll be happy to just get through today.
My tummy's rumbling because I really want to go out and cook what I love,
and it's got to be the best food I've ever cooked.
My plan today is to make sure
all my elements are absolutely perfected.
There's no second chances.
It just keeps getting harder.
I know that my knees are going to be buckling.
I definitely don't want to go home.
Yeah, I really want this.
Tonight, they will face just one challenge -
to cook an exceptional dish
from a brief set by renowned restaurant critic William Sitwell.
We've got six quarterfinalists
who've battled really hard to get here.
They're all fighting it out for a place in knockout week.
It's a big day in the MasterChef kitchen.
Can I welcome you to your quarterfinal?
We've seen a huge amount of surprising foods so far,
but today you're going to have to truly impress -
and you're not cooking just for Gregg and I,
but you're also cooking for the formidable Mr William Sitwell.
My brief is to delve deep into your childhood,
but specifically those unpleasant memories of school food,
and today cook something fabulous.
I want to see some transformative dishes, some fantastic food
based on your childhood school memories.
At the end of this, three of you
will be going through to knockout week.
Three of you will be leaving the competition.
School dinners. 90 minutes. Off you go.
I think that terrible school food is something that unites all of us.
Terrible mince, horrible carrots, nasty, thick, gloopy, cold gravy
and cabbage that I can still smell today.
I'm looking for some great originality -
to possibly see a bit of humour.
Maybe it'll be a packed lunch that's been reinvented.
Fish and chips.
It could be something from the tuck shop.
It could be a sweet dish.
But I don't want bland.
I want food that I shan't forget.
Olivia is taking us on a culinary journey around the world.
It's my first-ever kartacze.
I quite like them.
She's young, she's eager, and she is calm under pressure.
In the last round, her lamb dish was truly loved -
me, you and the guests.
Now, that's a main course and a half, for me.
Really amazing.
Cooking for a food critic is going to definitely be different.
Usually it's just my mum and dad,
and they're happy with whatever I give them,
but I think the pressure does me well.
So, hopefully today I create a diamond...!
SHE LAUGHS
A diamond in the rough. Yeah.
What's your dish, please?
So, I went to a Catholic school and they never eat meat on Fridays.
They always have fish.
So it always used to be like this breaded fish that was always dry,
soggy chips and cold mushy peas.
So I thought I'd take that
and kind of make it into something that I enjoy.
So what specifically are you doing to really elevate this,
to get rid of that trauma?
So I'm doing a semolina-crusted cod with mint pea puree,
fried potato skins with rosemary salt,
hot tartare sauce. Fish and chips,
everybody loves. So yours is going to have to really deliver, right?
Yeah, I know. As long as the fish isn't dry
and the chips aren't soggy, I'm doing something right.
Olivia is very much on the brief, revisiting her childhood trauma
of fish and chips,
and she's going to elevate it with a semolina crust.
Love the idea of having a bit of crunch.
The star of the show seems to me to be the sauce.
She's making us a warm tartare sauce with a hollandaise base.
I think it's inspired.
Three of us going. It's a bit... It's a bit nerve-racking.
Brin does things which are technically challenging.
He pushes himself really, really hard.
He loves interesting combinations around the flavours of Sri Lanka.
Brin, do you know what this is?
That's an impressed face, that is, Brin.
Once again, I'm doing quite a few elements.
There's a lot of flavours in my dish today.
If I get it right, if I balance things properly,
I think it's a dish that can get me through to the next round.
I'm making a tiger prawn curry with some tiger prawn bonbons,
a courgette, leek and coriander puree, a mango salsa
and a broccoli salad.
Based on stories my dad used to tell me
when I would moan about the curries that we'd get at school.
He also hated the curries he received,
even though he was in Sri Lanka.
So my grandma used to fry fish, wrap it in some parcels for him.
He'd sneak that in and that's the only thing
that got him through eating his school meals.
So you're cooking your father's childhood memories
that were therapeutic to the terrible food that you had.
Sri Lankan food is full of big flavours,
and I want to show you that I know how to balance that on a plate.
I want this to taste as good as it smells. Yeah.
A good curry has got to have some spice.
I want to have a flavour bomb in my mouth.
I really don't want to be let down.
I want to come away thinking, "Wow, I need to eat more Sri Lankan food."
30 minutes gone, guys, please. Thank you.
Hope likes to play with ideas,
and they are interesting and exciting.
She goes the extra mile.
She actually makes her own plates!
She's got a melting pot of styles.
It's been glorious.
The baba ghanoush was so lovely and creamy.
I love this dish.
More of the same, if she's got it.
This isn't an anything I'm taking lightly.
If anyone knows me, they know how much food is my life.
I'm quite obsessive.
So when I have something that I'm doing,
it's no half measures.
What are you cooking? What's the childhood school memory?
So I mostly had packed lunches, not cooked dinners.
So as soon as I heard your brief,
I thought about sweaty, soggy sandwiches
filled with dried, leftover meats,
and I wanted to make that better,
and do a focaccia sandwich, and it'll have some pesto in it,
some roasted chicken, peppers, sweet onions,
and then there'll be chicken-skin salt crisps
and bourbon biscuits,
and that's got some miso peanut butter, some salted peanuts,
miso buttercream, encased all together in a chocolate bar.
Wow. Wow.
Have you practised this, the timing's all OK?
I've done it eight times, so I think I'm OK.
I'll fight you for the chocolate bar.
LAUGHTER
I love what Hope is doing, which is to reflect a poor lunchbox,
but heightening everything around it
and doing a lot of quite skilled cookery.
This could be an absolutely stunning thing.
Jerome, he is very creative with his food.
Creative, actually, bordering experimental.
He has technique, but he also wants to be different.
Tuile very well made.
That pickled cherry, for me,
is just like putting malt vinegar in your mouth.
I was trying to think of my favourite
iconic elements from school dinners.
Turkey twirls were quite a famous food from the mid 2000s.
I'm doing my take on that, which is turkey sausage,
which I'm putting into a twizzle shape.
Sorry about the raw turkey on the floor!
Also, I'm making burnt pasta bake.
Charred hispi cabbage.
I'm going to take those elements and then elevate them
into an amazing plate.
I remember school dinners being bland and they had no texture -
but the one texture you did have was a burnt pasta bake.
I remember loving those edges of pasta bake.
You're not burning it, or are you doing some clever way
of burning it? Burning it in a nice way. Burnt cheese is nice. Yeah.
Do you like burnt cheese? I love burnt cheese.
I like inventing, doing different things.
I've had to develop my own emulsified turkey sausage recipe.
We're going to poach that, fry it to give it a bit colour,
make it into spirals.
I love that you've taken this brief in just the sort of way
that I would hope for. Thank you. Thank you.
Lasagne is always nice the next day
when you've reheated it and you've burnt the cheesy crust.
So I think it could work.
But these terrible turkey twirls.
Obviously, he's going to manipulate them
and hope to create something rather special.
Louise, our rare breed farmer. She's got real style, John.
Based on old-fashioned classic cookery.
Little touches of French elegance,
little bits of Italian technique,
and always bursting with flavour and near-on perfect.
Boom!
Absolutely ace.
The feedback's been extraordinary.
I can't quite believe it, but it is pressure.
It's terrifying and nerve-racking -
but I love everything about the competition.
What's the terrible memory that you're trying to resolve?
Staffordshire lobby. It's a dreadful concoction.
Dishwater with stuff floating in it.
So it's like a stew? It was like a stew.
The original recipe is onions, beef, carrots,
swede, pearl barley.
Essentially, I'm using all the same ingredients
with a couple of luxury additions.
I'm going to do a steak with bone marrow sauce
and a sort of crispy stuffed bone marrow on the side,
swede fondant and some pearl barley.
It won't be a stew at all.
So, the pearl barley will be served separately,
the sauce will be served separately.
and then you can hopefully pour the sauce over
and make it all taste as a oner.
I think it sounds intriguing.
Love the sound of your lobby.
We've got the deconstructed stew.
This is actually a classic dish -
and Louise has got nowhere to hide.
We've all had a fillet steak before.
We've all had carrots and swedes before.
This is going to have to be really special.
You have 20 minutes left, everybody.
20 minutes, please.
It could all go so wrong.
It could be spicier.
Fateha is really proud of her Bengali heritage.
Food with real flavours, nicely spiced, intriguing
and with different ingredients.
The mukhi is cooked really lovely.
Absorbs all that lovely flavour from the sauce.
She's making us two desserts, inspired by a jam tart
and a good old-fashioned sponge cake and custard.
But instead of getting jam inside the tart,
we're getting a spiced Bengali rice pudding,
a phirni tart.
If that rice pudding is really well spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg,
that could really work.
Next to that, we're going to get a piece of sponge cake
served with custard.
Very, very comforting -
but it's got to have a sense of elegance about it.
My dad was a chef and he had his own restaurant business,
so I couldn't have free school meals.
I had to go home for dinners. OK.
So I kind of envied the school kids who had, like, school dinners
because I never knew what school dinners were.
So I used to save up my pocket money
just to have a school cake and custard.
My mum never used to make, like, cake and custard and stuff.
We had Bengali desserts.
So I'm going to do a bit of both for you today.
British-baking desserts is not my strength,
but I just hope to show the judges I don't just cook Bengali food.
I do have other skills and techniques.
We've got ten minutes left!
Just getting the final bits ready now.
Hopefully we'll have a nice dish.
My sausages are falling apart a bit in the pan,
but I'm just going to quickly try and whip up another batch.
You have just five minutes.
Five minutes, please.
Look, your fish is done. Yeah.
Bit of crispness on it? Yeah.
It was so good in practice!
Just 30 seconds. That is very last touches, please.
Too runny.
Oh. This is sad.
That's it. Your time's up.
HE EXHALES
HE LAUGHS
What happened?!
Olivia, come on, let's dive in.
As an homage to her Catholic school fish Fridays,
bartender Olivia has cooked semolina-crusted cod
on a mint and pea puree
with crispy fried potato skins
seasoned with rosemary salt, a chicory radish and fennel salad
and a hot tartare sauce.
Good-looking dish. Thanks.
Your fish is cooked perfectly.
Your mushy peas are really silky and sublime.
And then you've got this lovely, light, spring-like salad
of the radish and the lettuce.
What you've done here is be faithful to that original food,
your inspiration, and you've put on a plate
what I think shows quite a serious degree of accomplishment as a cook.
I love it. Well done.
Your fish is cooked really, really nicely.
You've got a really thin veil of semolina, enough to be able to give
you a small amount of crust, but it's still nice and crisp.
And I really like your hot tartare sauce. Showing a lot of skill.
A bit of hollandaise first, then mix it with the flavours of the tartare,
I think, is brave and really, really delicious.
Your little skins instead of chips, crispy, really addictive.
The almost woody flavour of rosemary in there and a lot of salt.
It's nice. It's good cookery.
I'm just in shock.
To impress William, like, a critic of his standard...
He said "sublime". My jaw dropped.
Veterinary surgeon Brin has created a dish
based around school dinner curries
and served pan-fried tiger prawns on a chilli and soy broccoli salad
with a tiger prawn bonbon, mango salsa,
courgette, leek and coriander puree
and a Sri Lankan prawn curry sauce.
If you had a bad curry at school,
well, I'm really sad, but this is a pretty good one.
The cooking's very, very good.
The sauce, I think, is great.
Lots of turmeric in there.
Cumin, the coriander. I like your bonbon. I think that's good.
I can taste the prawns.
Lots of coriander chopped all the way through in the potatoes.
Great.
There's lots of very nice texture here.
I think the prawns are cooked pretty well, the broccoli nicely al dente.
But I think you could have put more chilli on the prawns.
You know, I'd like to be sweating a bit now -
But you've enthused me about, you know, the cuisine of Sri Lanka,
and I could eat more of that often.
That sauce you've made,
it's like a French bisque,
but you've put some heat in there as well.
You get relief from the heat with a little bit of mango salsa on there
and, of course, your vegetable puree.
I think it's a lovely dish.
Thank you so much.
I wish I could have given William a bit more punchiness,
but I'm glad it's opened a new door to him for Sri Lankan cuisine.
Inspired by soggy sandwiches, digital project director Hope
has made the ultimate packed lunch.
Her own sourdough focaccia bread filled with roast chicken mayo,
red peppers, sweet onions and pesto,
chicken-skin salt and paprika flavoured crisps,
a salted peanut and miso buttercream chocolate bar
and an orange and rosemary cordial-infused kombucha tea.
Your focaccia sandwich, the chicken is delicious.
There is that lovely spiciness to the pesto.
The mayonnaise is nice and creamy. Onions and peppers
just making that a little bit more special.
Like a grown-up deli sandwich. Using the chicken skin
as the flavouring for your crisps, fantastic.
It's indulgent, it's exciting.
A huge amount of work. I think it's great.
I think it's exceptionally good.
The focaccia, I mean, it shouldn't have worked.
It's supposed to take six hours. You did it in an hour.
I can't fault it.
Your kombucha is delightful, slightly peppery.
It's quirky, it's creative and it's memorable.
So, thank you.
Thank you so much.
I've got a little chocolate bar that is just superb.
Beautifully worked chocolate, saltiness of nuts and miso.
I'm amazed you got it all done in time.
I think that's quite incredible.
Oh, I had so much fun. I had so much fun!
Oh, my gosh. Can I get a voice clip of what William said?!
I need to have that on repeat.
Musical director Jerome
has made his version of the infamous turkey twirl -
a turkey meat sausage
with a four cheese and tomato burnt pasta bake
and grilled hispi cabbage,
topped with flaked almonds
and dressed with a honey and mustard vinaigrette.
I'm impressed you made your own pasta,
and the concept of burnt pasta bake I liked.
That lovely idea of the sort of crispiness,
the edges of the lasagne, which we all like. Yes, yeah.
It didn't quite work out. Your turkey sausage,
because you blended it so much,
the heat has cooked the protein, so it's split, unfortunately.
I'm not going to tell you anything you don't know.
It sadly hasn't worked. Yeah.
It's not often we criticise people for not burning their dish.
I have to say, Jerome.
Funnily enough, I like your pasta,
because it does remind me of a bad pasta bake.
I love the tang of the cheese -
but that's not the dish you intended. No.
The turkey twirl makes the original something that we would celebrate
and want to put on the national curriculum.
The cabbage is really good.
This dish is almost rescued by the cabbage.
I've only eaten this because I've been paid to come here and eat it.
Trust me, I would avoid this like the plague.
Well, probably one of the least appetising dishes I've ever done.
But I'd rather go out doing my best, crashing and failing
than have not felt that I gave it my all.
Farmer Louise has elevated the traditional budget-friendly beef stew
Staffordshire lobby and cooked pan-fried fillet steak
on malt beer pearl barley,
topped with salt-baked carrots
and served with fondant swede,
bone marrow with a parsley and thyme crumb
and a bone marrow sauce.
Your steak's cooked beautifully.
Nice colour on the outside, nice and pink on the inside.
Carrots beautifully cooked as well.
The beer through the pearl barley is really good.
I've actually poured all my sauce onto the plate...
..because I want the comfort of the stew that you're talking about.
But I can't criticise your cooking at all.
I'd actually love to have tasted this stew that was then elevated -
but I think you're clearly a very good cook, Louise.
I like the way that you've sort of dressed the bone marrow
and given it some crunch. Very good jus.
Bone marrow floating in it.
It's really moreish and lovely. Big fat glass of red, you know,
and I'm having lunch in a country pub and I'm very happy.
The swedes cooked in the beef are just delicious.
I mean, they're just melting
and they're leaving their sweet pepperiness. Pfff! What can I do?
I mean, you've given me beef, you've given me bone marrow,
you've given me great sauce.
Mate, I think it's...I think it's cracking.
To hear William say nice things, kind things about my food,
yeah, that...that's great.
But I feel a bit cross with myself because I had the idea to serve them
a traditional lobby on the side and I didn't.
Fateha, please.
Thank you.
Inspired by classic British school puddings,
IT teacher Fateha has made a tart filled with phirni,
a Bengali sweet rice pudding,
topped with an almond crumb and served with raspberry coulis,
and an iced sponge cake with vanilla custard.
Your baking skills here are very, very good indeed.
Your sponge is light, moist. Well done.
But flavours, I'm not particularly sure.
I don't get a great deal from the phirni,
just a little bit of nuttiness.
And I would like a little bit more sweetness in my custard, please.
The tart case is really lovely and fine.
The crumb across the top, lovely and nutty as well
with all those toasted almonds. I think that's delicious.
I'd just like a little bit more to this -
more vanilla through the custard,
cardamom or nutmeg through that tart
and loads more icing on my cake.
I love the idea, but I think it's slightly off skew
because the joy of those school dishes
was the lashings of that very thick, yellow, sweet custard,
which you've refined and sort of taken the fun out of.
I wish I did more.
Maybe I should have made it a bit sweeter.
And I think that's where I've let myself down.
Pretty good, right? Yeah.
I was really impressed by the originality.
There's a couple of amazing standouts -
but generally speaking,
you know, you've got a very creative bunch there.
Lovely to see you. Thank you so much. Thank you, boss. Take care.
I had a big smile on my face through most of that, John.
I thought it was wonderful. Some very, very clever cookery.
Absolutely brilliant -
but you and I have to make a decision.
We have just three places in knockout week.
That does mean three of them are going home.
And there's a couple, I think, stood out from the crowd.
Hope - a sandwich, a chocolate bar, a packet of crisp.
Really complex in the way in which they were put together.
William loved it. He thought it was fantastic.
A wonderful combination of creativity
and really good cookery.
Hope's got herself a place in knockout week.
The next one who really surprised me was Olivia.
All the flavours you expect from good fish and chips,
but with a sense of style.
And it also showed technique.
The whole thing tasted really good.
If we're agreed, Olivia's got herself a place in knockout week.
Jerome had an absolute disaster.
His turkey twirl didn't work at all,
and all he could do was smile and go with it.
I really enjoyed the flavours of the pasta bake -
but you look down at that dish, you could clearly see the errors.
Sadly, Jerome's competition is over.
Now we've got a conversation about Louise, Brin and Fateha.
Fateha was the only person in the room today to do a dessert.
For me, it just needed more.
More cardamom, more sweetness across the top of the cake,
more vanilla through the custard.
We marvelled at Fateha's baking skill, John,
but we all picked out little errors.
Fateha's time on MasterChef is done. There's just one place left.
Louise made for us a dish
inspired by what she called Staffordshire lobby.
I poured all my sauce across the top
because I wanted it to be sort of more stew-like.
But I really enjoyed the flavours,
and I think her cookery skill is sound.
Brin took the idea of a curry that he said he used to get at school,
and we had big prawns.
They could have done with a bit more spice, but the sauce was fantastic.
It had the first taste of a very good shellfish bisque
and it finished like a hot curry sauce.
And I thought that was very, very, very clever.
And that's why my decision right now I'm finding very, very difficult,
because we've got cooks with real imagination,
real skill, real technique.
Who joins Hope and Olivia?
Is it Brin or is it Louise?
Butterflies are doing butterfly leaps in my tummy.
I'll be very sad if my name doesn't get called out today
to stay in.
I'm really enjoying myself in this competition.
I'd love to go further and learn more and become a better cook.
Well done, all six of you.
Some really, properly outstanding dishes there.
The first person going through to knockout week is...
..Hope.
Congratulations.
Well done.
Thank you.
Olivia - you, too, today were a superstar.
Congratulations, you're going through to the knockout.
Thank you. Thank you.
Jerome...
..Fateha, thank you very much,
but, sadly, you're leaving us. Thank you.
I do feel a little bit sad,
but I can call myself a MasterChef quarterfinalist.
No-one's ever going to take that away from me.
It's amazing.
I'm never going to cook again. No...!
It's a shame, always, not to go further,
but I've really enjoyed my time here. I've got no regrets.
Louise, Brin, you two are great cooks.
And that's why the decision was so very, very tough.
We've decided...
..that you're both going through to knockout week.
Oh, my God.
You cruel people.
LAUGHTER
I'm staggered to be here.
It's a pretty nice feeling, but it's incredibly tough.
I'm over the moon.
Great day. Great day today.
I'm definitely going to celebrate.
I'm loving it so much. I really am.
Loads to learn. Loads to prove.
Knockout week's going to be fun.
Next time, six more home cooks
compete for the right to wear a MasterChef apron...
Race against the clock, isn't it?
I can't serve that.
I think you may have sprinkled salt on there instead of sugar.
..before battling for a place in the quarterfinal.
I'm so happy. I just want to dance to this dish.