MasterChef recap: It's out of the frying pan and into the fire in a red hot battle for immunity

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Melbourne, Day 2 AT (After Therese). Four supposedly innocent people walk into a garden in the dead of night. Suddenly they are surrounded by fire and Christmas lights: the pagan rite has begun. Also, a big bunch of amateur cooks who failed last night are there. One cook out of Depinder, Jess, Pete and "Scott" will win immunity from Sunday's elimination.

Melissa introduces the fearsome Scott "The Flaming Ponytail" Pickett. Scott has collected 16 chef's hats over his career, and still refuses to reveal what he did with the chefs. His specialty is cooking with fire – he runs six restaurants, all of them terrifyingly unsafe. He demonstrates his technique for setting fire to various foods and how to make water taste like smoke. The challenge is for the four aspirants to cook a dish "flavoured by fire", which I assumed means "burnt". The best fire-flavoured dish wins immunity. It'll be amazing to see how they flavour ice-cream with fire.

"Scott" believes the challenge will play to his strength, since he both loves cooking seafood and is an arsonist. He will be burning a trout. Depinder, on the other hand, has not worked with fire before but wishes to prove to her husband that she can. The picture of a marriage at war over the tandoor is a bleak one.

Pete is also nervous because he has never cooked over open flames and is afraid that his habit of staring into the fire for hours while vivid fantasies explode across his consciousness and trigger dark thoughts about his fellow man might slow him down.

Jess is making tacos, but is worried that 'til now she has struggled with simplicity. This is in stark contrast to her competitors, who are naturally extremely simple. Andy asks Jess what she has planned. Jess explains that she is going to throw some stuff on a fire. Andy congratulates her on comprehending the brief.

"You know what they say: where there's smoke there's fire, one hour to go!" Melissa yells, confusing everyone as they don't say that at all. Nobody has ever said "Where there's smoke there's fire, one hour to go". Indeed nobody even knows what it means.

Meanwhile, Pete has burnt his hazelnuts, a completely unforeseeable event when putting hazelnuts in a fire. As Depinder says, "Every type of meat needs a different type of heat", but as hazelnuts aren't meat, they've just gone up in flames. Depinder is wrong anyway: you don't need a different type of heat for every type of meat; what she meant to say was, "Cooking with fire is not only difficult but pointless, why can't we just use a freaking stove?".

"Scott" pours a bottle of beer into a bowl of flour, his hope being that the powerful flavour of the beer will make his horribly burnt fish less noticeable. Meanwhile, Jess sets fire to her own head and starts her quandong salsa for lack of any better ideas.

Depinder throws her naan dough into her fire, creating a visual effect akin to a piece of chewing gum being dropped in a crematorium. Soon she becomes the latest contestant to be taken completely by surprise by the fact that things put into a fire burn. Her naan is ashes. "I can't serve this," she laments, but maybe she can. It is supposed to flavoured by fire, after all. Two attempts at naan have failed. "I need to come up with a better idea, fast," Depinder says. Suddenly the better idea comes to her: a gas oven.

Melissa asks Depinder if she's confident she's got a dish that could get her immunity. Depinder says she is. "That's all I need to know," says Melissa, not asking what the dish will get her immunity from. Depinder is actually hoping that her tandoori chicken will provide protection from mumps.

Depinder has finally made a decent naan, and decides to make a smoked lassi. Or possibly a smoked Lassie, which is a much more disturbing dish.

Meanwhile, "Scott" pulls his cured trout out of the fridge, where he had placed it in a woeful misunderstanding of the nature of the challenge. He throws the trout on the grill, but the skin is sticking to it. He panics. It won't come off. There is only one answer: serve the grill as part of the dish. Alternatively, he decides to ger rid of the skin and serve the trout in all its naked horror.

Pete is finishing his potatoes. He is worried that the hazelnut fragments might make his potato puree grainy. Many great chefs have solved this problem via a technique called "not putting hazelnut fragments in the potato puree", but Pete thinks he knows a better way: putting them in and hoping.

Back to Depinder, who declares, "the chutney's going to be the tie bow of the dish". So maybe we'll move away from Depinder again.

Time is up, and as the fire engines come screaming toward the MasterChef kitchen, the charred and sweaty warriors congratulate themselves on not being hospitalised.

Jess is the first to serve to the judges, presenting her burnt tacos. They haven't worked – the tortilla sucks and the meat is barely burnt at all.

Next is "Scott" with his burnt trout without crispy skin. "Tell us about your dish," says Jock, and quickly regrets it. Jock says he rather likes the trout, but wishes he'd kept the skin on. Scott explains to "Scott" that he's got a lot to learn about burning skin, but that for a dish without any burnt skin, it's pretty OK.

Pete serves his burnt beef, which also comes with burnt lettuce. Sound awful? Sure does! His steak is nice but not as nice as it would've been if he'd burnt it more. Also, the potato puree is very grainy because of the nuts he put in it that he worried might make it grainy. There may be a lesson somewhere in there.

Finally it is Depinder with her prove-my-husband-wrong tandoori chicken. Of course it's perfect – that's why she's been in this episode so much. She has really mastered the art of setting fire to everything. The judges don't even need to discuss their verdict: Depinder's dish was so good, and the others' so revolting, that she is declared the winner immediately. And so she heads to the balcony, while the other amateurs head to the kitchen floor, and Scott Pickett heads back to his misty mountain realm, where gods and demons duel and fire is both best friend and mortal enemy. He will return one day.

Tune in on Sunday, when one amateur is exposed as the fraud they truly are.

• Catch up on Ben Pobjie's previous MasterChef Australia 2021 recaps