To think that if you want to go on Masterchef you must cook the following dishes:

[muminthecity]

Starter:- Pan fried scallops with some sort of slop puree, preferably cauliflower. For extra points add a lump of black pudding.

Main:- Pan fried duck with some sort of fruit, orange, plum or redcurrants always go down well. Serve with either fondant/crushed potatoes and a red wine jus.

Pudding:- Chocolate fondant. Doesn't matter what you serve with it, if it works you will be hailed a genius regardless, if it doesn't, you will be sent home anyway.

If you want to be the wacky, 'inventive' one, add a bit of fruit to the scallops (apple maybe?), change the fruit you serve with the duck to a less conventional one (nectarine, perhaps?) and add some chilli to your chocolate fondant.

I love Masterchef but I'm so bloody sick of seeing the same dishes rehashed all the time!

The great god Ganache slipped on some jus and ended up under the ballotine. As the blade came down a fondant of blood spewed up.

My menu is becoming clearer now.

For my starter: a simple jus (glass of orange juice from concentrate, straight out of the 1970's guide to posh nosh)

have we had fondant potatoes yet?
I just don't get the fuss about those...

Watching on catchup.

John has a severe cold today. I wouldn't want to eat his seafood ravioli thing even if it didn't look like bogies in sick.

Has anyone ever eaten a fondant potato?

Are they nice? What is so special about them?

I haven't
looks wastefull and messy cooking.
give me boiled spuds with salted butter any day.

:) @ more suitable for a wedding'

'Bibi is serving a fascinator of pommes de terre emblazoned with cuckoo spit accompanied by a sail of burned fish skin'

...SAUSAGE foam.

PSML @ 'buttery biscuit base' utter genius!!!!

Properly cooked fondant potatoes are lovely. With the emphasis on properly cooked..

I'm having deep-fryer-fried sea-haddock with boldly-crushed pea-green peas (the latter arranged artfully in snow-white polystyrene cylinder with circular lid), and a lightly-pickled last-season's earth-grown hand-picked onion from factory-produced glass jar with screw-top lid, topped with a delicate yet granular sprinkling of North Sea Salt condiment and freshly-fermented glass-bottled malted vinegar, served on a folded bed of yesterday's news complete with thin short-length wooden two-pronged fork.

Oh and chips

Hahahah" buttery
Biscuit base!!! This has made me chuckle

Loving this thread
Has anyone mentioned those sugar baskets that they make with the back of a spoon? And they nearly always burn the caramel.
And thrice cooked chips (using a whole potato for one chip to get perfect symmetry with the other two chips on the plate) don't forget to stack chips like bales of hay

Its the way they all say 'oh I've always wanted to be a chef and this is my only chance.'

So, going to catering school and working your way up is just too much like hard work is it?

Admit it, you couldn't be arsed.

Why do they mash potatoe with a wooden spoon or a ricer?

thistle coz otherwise you get John complaining about the lumps as he did last night.

How does one make a foam anyway? (And why?). In my imagination it take a lot of boiling and a straw.

Anyway, lumpy mash? Call it crushed potatoes and see them swoon over it. Fondant potatoes are ok, but I always think that there's a lot of wasted food when it is cut into shapes. Funnily enough, when I used to cut DSs sandwiches into dinosaur shapes, I used to think the same.

There isn't ally a 'star' this year is there? There usually is by now. The Scottish guy last night seemed to be doing well though.

That girl Shivi was fairly star-like I think. Plus Lawton(?) the Welsh/Malaysian solicitor.

I think there must have been a new Masterchef rule come in about 3 or 4 years ago: that only "fusion" food can win.

Larkin? Lawton?

moomins it involves a little handheld aerosol contraption. Much more mundane!

Such a good thread. My best moment this year was the one that looked like a sixth former the other night who wasn't quite sure if John's dish contained pork or beef - settled on beef for his list - then, when presented with two hunks of meat to choose from for his own effort, he changed his mind and decided it was pork, so cooked the hunk he thought was pork.

Two problems:

1. The original dish was made with beef.
2. The hunk of meat he thought was pork was actually lamb.

I was crying with laughter. Pork and lamb aren't even the same colour and how could you get confused over the taste? Although I suppose the great horsemeat scandal shows if you use enough seasoning you can pass just about any meat off as anything else.