Stress | blogging doesn't get tougher than this

“why you pursue something is as important as what you pursue”

Okay, I admit it. I like Marcus Wareing. There. I said it.

Can you fault his skills as a chef? No.

Can you fault his ability to grow an impressive beard? Maybe. But you’d be wrong.

Chef Wareing has even inherited Michel’s twinkly eyes and cheeky smile. WHAT IN THE HECKY DECK IS GOING ON? I think there must be something in the Masterchef tap water.

look into my eyes, look into the eyes, the eyes, the eyes, not around the eyes

A new series. A new scary chef. A new format. A new location. The same Gregg Wallace. Well, you can’t have everything.

Anyone fortunate enough to take a tour of the Ram brewery in Wandsworth would have walked the walk past the Masterchef studio and, yes, I totally strutted my stuff like an amateur cook on a mission. We were under strict instructions: no peeking and no photos. Sadly it’s in the process of being turned into shops, flats and all things hip but at least we got to spend some time with the wonderful master brewer, John.

The new surroundings accompany a tweaked format. We now have a VT to introduce our professional chefs which is a nice touch. I like getting to know these men and women, judge them on their hairstyles and dodgy tattoos, find a potential favourite or two then have them kicked out 10 minutes later. Oh, bye, Jogi! I’ve eaten in your place, it was quite tasty, thanks, but I’m glad there wasn’t any pasta on the menu. Read the rest of this entry »

the brain works very weird at this hour

31 Aug

Yessssss, I managed to find an obscure lyric from a song called Alaska. Get me.

OK. let’s not beat around the bush. Poor, lovely, beardy Iain was sabotaged by the most evil pensioner in Britain, Diana. Well, that’s what you would think by watching the furore unfold Wednesday evening and throughout Thursday.

After an exceedingly pleasant evening beginning with Expendables 3 (everyone needs more Dolph in their life, right?) and finishing with some yummy Chinese, we returned home and switched on Newsnight to find Kirsty donning a pinnie and introducing the ejected Iain Watters. WHAT? This would never have happened on Paxman’s watch. Read the rest of this entry »

masterchef: passing the test

02 Mar

As La Fanny notes in the previous post, the essence of cooking well is actually “IT’S GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT”, rather than “IT’S BETTER THAN SEX” — culinary excellence is not (in itself) that high a bar to clear; there are tens of millions of excellent cooks in the world, and only a very few of them wish to be high-profile chefs in the Ferran Adrià sense. Masterchef has to preserve this low-bar high-bar dichotomy: essentially it’s a very severe (and carefully calibrated) obstacle course to discover the very very very best “ordinary” cook.

(Hence the need to siphon off a different class of competitor, with Professional Masterchef, which has a somewhat different sequence of pathologies…)

The obvious ones (for Masterchef OG) are:
i: technique (not burning stuff; not undercooking it; knowing how to prep meat; a basic knowledge of what to do in a kitchen and what not to)
ii: palate
iii: timing
iv: inventiveness
v: working knowledge of the tradition
vi: dealing with pressure
vii: curiosity and ability to learn Read the rest of this entry »

6 Comments

Posted by syllabubdobdee on March 2, 2012 in BBC, Commodification, Critics, Dislike, Exotica, Ferran Adrià, Gordon Ramsay, Gregg Wallace, John Torode, Masterchef The Professionals, Masterchef UK, Meat, Michel Roux Jr, Monica Galetti, Ordinary Cooks, Reality Show Genre, Stress, Thai, The Ordinary Mouth, The Waiting Mouth