MasterChef – Tales of food trucks and tortellini

Heading into a showdown among the Top 12 on MasterChef, a food truck team challenge greets the contestants.  3 teams of 4 hopefuls cooking different cuisines: Team captain Stacey oversees Tali, Frank and Becky on Mexican food — beef tacos, to be precise — with Captain Anna directing mortal enemies David and Monti with Tanya stuck in the middle to deal burgers and chips and, finally, Captain Josh with Felix, Christine and Mike currying Indian chow.

Stacey’s taco truck is the winner with Anna’s burgers ending up at the bottom of the ladder because of raw meat, inefficient direction and quibbling between all the team members.

Here’s the thing I have to say about the burgers: With David on the grill, this is the second time in as many team challenges he’s “futakeed” the meat, putting it out raw instead of prepared properly. Conclusion: David is not a team player. He stumbles in these challenges, he doesn’t perform well under pressure when he has to work with others and he definitely likes to point fingers at anyone but himself. I liked David from the get-go and still do, but his whining and accusations have got to be put to bed.

On the other side of the coin, the dude’s got it going on where the pressure tests and individual challenges come into play. Because, even though he prepared pasta on a stainless steel surface, he came through with flying colors with his tortellini against the other three contestants Anna, Monti and Stacy.

Now … let me tell you something about tortellini: I don’t like it. Never have. And that’s because I haven’t been served proper tortellini, made correctly, freshly prepared, tasteful. I know for a fact there are brilliant tortellini dishes out there, but I am of the sort it’s going to have to seek me out, because there isn’t a chance in hell I’m going to go looking for it. Yes … my experiences have been that bad. And, because of them, I haven’t had the faintest desire to try tortellini in over 25 years.

Yet … here we have this Chicagoan who basically comes from the projects, who has never before made this pasta dish and he pretty much knocks it out of the park regardless of his unconventional methodologies in preparing it and unwieldy manner in doing so. And that, boys and girls, gives me confidence: Sooner or later I’ll run into tortellini that doesn’t make me wince.

Unfortunately, someone has to leave this episode. And it’s going to be the person who couldn’t get her stuff together and served undercooked, raw pasta that Gordon called her out on. Anna — the better half of the husband and wife competitors from early on and Top 12 contestant — got nixed this chapter. And not because of the fact her tortellini, but because of the the dish being raw. Still, she held her head high, there were smiles all around and Gordon even told her he expects to see her cooking when he comes to visit in some way, shape or form.

Quotes:

“How did such fat fingers make such pretty tortellini? They’re beautiful. Perfect.” — Joe to David

“That’s a very weird looking tortellini. How’d you get the shape? Sit on them?” — Gordon to Tanya

Clacked by Michael Noble
on Jul 03, 2012 @ 00:35 EST5EDT