Masterchef Canada Recap, episode 7: “I wanna like it, but it looks like barf”

Masterchef Canada Recap, episode 7: “I wanna like it, but it looks like barf”

Masterchef-Canada-Contestants-7

After last week’s fancy catering gig, it was back to the kitchen for the 11 remaining contestants, who struggled to cook the less popular bits of an entire Alberta cow. Here, three takeaways from episode seven.

Lesson #1: From humble beginnings come great chefs
The teasers kept talking about this episode’s “extra-emotional” mystery box, so we were dying to know what was under those crates. Piles of raw onions? The butchered corpses of the contestants’ prized pets? The reality was a little less exciting: a bunch of framed photos of the contenders as kids. (Best one, obviously: pre-teen Dale in a white trench giving a sly tip o’ the cap to the camera.) As the contestants cooked nostalgic comfort food, the judges reminisced about their own totally telling childhood snacks: homemade caramel, licked off a teaspoon (Bonacini), raw bananas wrapped in bread (Aprile), and oodles of instant ramen (Leung). Marida’s curried shrimp earned the most extravagant praise, but grumpy Eric took the win with his grandfather’s pork and noodles.

Lesson #2:
On Food TV, saddling your mortal enemy with a difficult protein is the tele-culinary equivalent of shooting yourself in the face. Eric couldn’t resist sticking Kaila with cow brains. His punishment? Having to watch her whip them into a towering heap of elimination round-winning brain McNuggets. Meanwhile, Mike learned some harsh truths about iron oxidation—namely, if your liver turns green, Claudio will not touch it—and Dora struggled with the nose-to-tail concept (“If it was lips and assholes, I know I’d be making hot dogs”).

Lesson #3: There’s nothing worse than a bad attitude (except food that resembles vomit)
In keeping with Lesson #2, the contestants with three of the simplest cuts of cow—rib eye, cheeks, liver—ended up in the bottom three. Dale’s sassy back-talk earned him a stern reprimand, but ultimately it was down to the food. It was Dora’s murky beef-cheek medley—likened by Aprile to throw-up—that saw her out the door. She said it best herself: “You don’t make it past getting your food called barf.”

Images courtesy of Bell Media