MasterChef recap: Hologram Ottolenghi drops flavour bombs and one team goes up in smoke
Superstar Week continues with the appearance – via spooky screen – of Yotam Ottolenghi, known worldwide as "the master of the kind of food that Yotam Ottolenghi makes".
But first, the titles! Which, compared to previous years, don't seem to show a lot of cooking. Most of the contestants are just smiling at the camera. One seems to be sitting in a field. Some focus group has clearly found that MasterChef suffers if there's too much of a focus on food.
Once Katy Perry is out of the way, Yotam appears, looming like Supreme Leader Snoke over the kitchen. "It's so good to be here," he says, presumably referring to the place he's actually in as opposed to the MasterChef kitchen, where he's glad he's not. He goes on to explain how he has a deep and abiding passion for vegetables that frankly crosses the line into disturbing. Sabina speaks up to asks Yotam what he'd eat if he knew he was going to die tomorrow. Everyone laughs nervously, knowing that Sabina is genuinely threatening him.
Today's challenge is the year's first team challenge. Three teams must create a three-course meal, with each course featuring one of Yotam's three "flavour bombs", by which is meant "stuff in a jar". One jar has "numbing oil", a special oil that you spread on someone before an amputation. One has chipotle peanuts, which are technically a weapon. Then there's fenugreek marinade, which is an acclaimed prog-rock band.
One team is in grey aprons, to represent stormy weather. Another team is in orange aprons, to represent Protestantism. The third team is in a sort of unpleasant brown, to represent diarrhoea. It is a tag team challenge – one half of each team will hand over to the other half halfway through the challenge, with the team captain liaising between them. It will require great communication skills, committed teamwork, and the setting aside of the contestants' intense loathing for each other. While the three teams cook, Yotam will also be cooking, so that at least one decent meal will be created today.
The cook begins. Amateurs wander aimlessly around the pantry. "Flavour is at the forefront of my mind," says brown captain Elise, setting herself apart from her opponents, whose minds are mainly focused on choreography and leatherwork.
Grey captain Aaron, meanwhile, has adopted a leadership style that can be described as "ignoring the people on his team as much as possible". The grey team's Therese reveals her revolutionary strategy: "to impress Yotam". Her first step is to fail to make ricotta, which seems counterintuitive, but hey, she's the expert.
On the orange team, captain Conor is taking a positive reinforcement approach, telling his charges that they are doing a great job instead of giving them the harsh negative feedback that they really deserve. The judges visit Conor to gently imply that he's rubbish and will fail miserably, but Conor has complete confidence in his not-really-doing-anything strategy.
Brown captain Elise is basing her team's plan on the question "What would Ottolenghi do?" Accordingly, she quickly writes nine bestselling cookbooks and opens several critically acclaimed restaurants in London, inspiring the brown team massively.
Halftime comes and the teams' first groups retire to the balcony as the second groups rush in to rescue and/or destroy what the first groups have done.
Aaron has wandered back into the pantry, where he finds ignoring his team easier. "If I was skewers, where would I be?" he asks himself, his descent into ponderous existentialism sending the grey team into a panic. Tom is concerned that Therese has left him with too much to do and too few peanuts in the dish. He takes out his rage on the peanuts, crushing them to feel powerful.
Meanwhile on the big screen Yotam is earning thousands of dollars every minute.
On the orange team, Depinder is thinking of a zesty orange crumb, which were Irving Berlin's original lyrics for White Christmas. Conor tells her that's a great idea, then has a little rest because he's exhausted from all the meaningless compliments he's been giving.
On the grey team, Pete uses his hibachi to generate a major fire hazard, knowing that the key to all Ottolenghi dishes is burning them to ashes. With five minutes to go, Yotam has finished his three courses and is now being paid just to look smug, while Tommy confesses that until today he never even heard of "dumplings".
Tom is whipping the ricotta in an attempt to fix the terrible mistakes made by his nemesis Therese. There is only one minute to go and the brown team's ice-cream is too soft, as is the orange team's captain. The grey team's chicken has been resting in the hot pan and Aaron fears that it might resent them for it.
Time is up. "The flavours are good," the brown team reassures itself, with the usual catchphrase of the failure. Before judging, everyone has to listen to Yotam bang on about his own dishes and pretend to be interested.
In the end, Elise's strategy of neurotic obsession and Conor's strategy of not really bothering about anything triumph over Aaron's strategy of selective deafness, and the grey team are into the elimination tomorrow, when they will be cooking for their lives, but only in a figurative and relatively unimportant way.
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