MasterChef SG Appreciation Post + Season 1 Episode 7 Recap PART 1 of 2

 TLDR: SWTGH Rocks/ Fuck Empire

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Okay guys, I've just had 1 hour of breathtaking angina, can we please give some credit where credit is due and congratulate Channel 5 (or rather the kickass outsourced production house) on giving us the most gripping hour of reality TV produced in Singapore since the Phua Chu Kang episode of The Amazing Race.

This episode gave us everything: angina, laosai, stomach cramps, asthmatic episodes, deep crying, and one of the most ignominious anti-climaxes of the series so far.

PART ONE

The contestants are blindfolded and made to cha-cha out of the Masterchef kitchen like a schoolyard game of Chicken & Eagle. To add to the humiliation, they're thrown for some reason into a party bus, complete with strobe-lights and I assume Top 40s EDM. Considering what they're about to face, i.e. a trip back to 19th century colonial Singapore, down to its racialized divide-and-conquer labour policies, this is really crass and stupid, and very Mediacorp.

Blindfolds off, and the kids are in some dodgy looking museum-piece of a restaurant called The English House, run by the most English of chefs, Marco Pierre White! He's so white, it's in his name, and he's even got Italian and French ones to cover all his bases. Turns out it's a Restaurant Takeover Challenge, and MPW is gonna lead, or "conduct" as he says, this team of amateur cooks in pushing out a small menu for his restaurant's opening night. I have so much to say at this point:

1) As if any chef would actually let this happen on OPENING NIGHT.

2) I'm not sure what it means that one of the crowning challenges of this competition which has hitherto focused on heritage cooking and "fusion" cuisine takes place in an establishment called The English House, and revolves around a frankly very stodgy looking menu of barely elevated pub grub. Actually a kind of disturbing theme running through this competition so far has been the inadequacy of Singapore food on its own. These guys are junkies for "elevation," and that "elevation" is always moving somewhat in a mod-European direction. But then MPW gets away with a rustic chicken & leek pie and fish & chips and calls it a SWISH NIGHT OUT.

2.i) Here it's time for Total Recall to Queen of Home Cooks, Diana, whose cooking, she was told, simply did not cut the mustard for this competition. Justice for Diana! I mean, excuse me, if MPW can fuck around with this half-assed rustic Ratatouille-the-Movie Fantasy, please, Diana, you go sell your Nasi Lemak for $70.

3) I'm still gagged over that menu, but more ridiculously how imbalanced the distribution of work is. Basically, each of our campers is tasked with making one dish: Shams gets a delicate mushroom tart, Gen the fish & chips, SWTGH the Negima pie, and Zander some creme caramel bullshit. Basically, all Zander has to do is make a couple of large tarts that later get sliced up. Shams, meanwhile, has to make and roll out a bunch of delicate tart shells, gently cook a gazillion eggs and peel them, make a duxelle, AND some kind of emulsified sauce. SWTGH has to de-skin and de-fat a bunch of chicken, crisp the skin, make a velouté, make a flaky pastry, and then bake these primitive Chaucer-era pies in what seems to be The Medieval English House's sole, communal oven. This village oven soon gets over-crowded, and leads to an epic showdown between SWTGH and Sambal Shams over the opening-and-closing of the oven door. This tore my heart up, I swear I cried, 'cuz sisters we gotta stick together against this white nonsense!

3.i) Paragraph break! Omg, this intensity. So Gen has to fillet a bunch of fish, which is painful to watch at first because if a girl can turn protein into mush, she be doing it. Thankfully, Miss. Culinary Institute of America In Waiting gets into the groove and really turns it around, RIP first few fish. But does she get a little smug with her "oh I like to be able to take my time" and "oh I even managed to go help other people"...? I think so. Kumbaya, sis, it's just fish and chips. Cut to Shams dropping a bunch of tarts and SWTGH swearing like a Eurasian sailor, and I'm beginning to wonder if there's not something a little fishy about this distribution.

3.ii) Meanwhile, our Italian Stallion Zander has blind-baked some of the ugliest tart pastries in the world, but hey, he's only got to make 5 good ones, turn out a decent custard, and make sure it doesn't burn. Cut to SWTGH during her service literally turning out dozens of these massive medieval pies (are these seriously single servings?!). Anyone else thought it was like a segment on the President's Star Charity: "HOW MANY CAN SHE FIT IN AN OVEN? 再来一个！/ONE MORE! 1900-112-8888!"

4) My big question during this entire challenge is WTF is MPW even doing there apart from a literal period re-enactment of the colonial viceroy. I mean he just saunters up and snarls at the contestants with well-penned bons-mots he's clearly had a lot of time to think up. Is he providing ANY guidance at all? When he screams "HOW LONG FOR 8 PIES" at SWTGH, is he asking a rhetorical question? When her pies later come out under-baked, and he screams 15 MINUTES MINIMUM, is he just being a cunt? My favourite moment is when he says something like "you could kill a horse with the amount of seasoning that needs," I'm actually floored by the syntactic dexterity of that insult, but still a cunt.

4) i) Side note here to that super delicious Ah Beng head chef who turns up mid-cook to troubleshoot. I don't know anything about him but I will assume he is Hainanese, and that as usual behind every white colonial viceroy is a hardworking FOTB Hainanese man.

5) Anyway, summary: this is stressful as fuck to watch, mildly enraging, and full of colonial PTSD. Gen coasts through her Fish & Chips challenge, Zander makes 5 decent creme caramel tarts, Shams barely noses it through with some help from Gen, and SWTGH's pies are under-seasoned and under-baked. At this point I'm not really sure what this challenge is doing. These are clearly un-trained cooks, and a condition for being on the show is that contestants can't make a living from food-preparation. Why they're judged on their ability to survive in a professional kitchen is not completely beyond me, but I find it suspect. Surely not all professional kitchens are made the same. Why this one? Why this food?

6) So here comes the crushing news: it's time to say goodbye to Sharon With The Good Motherfucking Hair. A toast, please, to one of the most badass contestants on this show, with a beautiful gravelly voice that's evidence of either a lot of fucking cigarettes or a lot of post-potluck karaoke (or both). This woman has turned out some killer dishes on this season, has proven her heritage mettle against #hipstercafefood, and always comes out with million dollar hair. Someone needs to get this woman a Pantene endorsement deal because Masterchef SG sure did her a stinker. Let's look at that anti-climactic elimination moment, where the show didn't even bother to give her a rousing In Memoriam. It was over in 10 seconds, and it cuts to commercial just as my chest is heaving and my nose is full of snot. And even then SWTGH managed to give one of the most rousing speeches on the show: DO WELL, GUYS, DO YOUR BEST. I'm like, SWTGH, are you in fact my PE Teacher from Primary School cheering me on during the Shuttle Run? Are you all our primary school PE Teachers? I'll never forget you.

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Part 2 to come, and MAN is there a lot of shit to throw.