MasterChef: the Professionals (?)

We have been watching “MasterChef: the Professionals” on BBC2. What is increasingly striking us is just how incompetent so many of these “professional” chefs are.

I can appreciate nerves can play their part, maybe causing a chef not to do his/her best but even so… Yesterday Monica Galetti set the skills task of making a langoustine cocktail with marie rose sauce. Even I, an amateur, know that for a marie rose sauce you need mayonnaise, to which you then add tomato & other flavourings.  Therefore if you haven’t got ready made mayo, & I wouldn’t really expect to find any at this level of competition, then you have to start by separating the egg yolks from the whites to make mayo. A couple of the chefs started with tomato.

It has been like this throughout the series. We’ve watched omelettes that ran off the plate, pancakes that have burnt, ignorance of what Îles Flottantes (Floating Islands) are, fish being turned into holey rags when chefs have attempted to skin & fillet them etc. etc. As I say I am only an amateur cook, but it doesn’t alter the fact I could have done a better job. These chefs, even the young ones, should have cooked more meals in their careers than I ever will in my entire lifetime.

 As for knowledge, I first made Floating Islands nearly forty years ago. It’s a great French classic dessert. I would have thought anyone with enthusiasm for cooking, even if they hadn’t made them, would have at least heard of them & understood the basic methodology of poaching egg whites & floating them on some real custard, with some garnish such as a bit of caramel (personally I prefer them with a scattering of chopped sugared almonds).

Even when it’s come to some of the signature dishes, where you would have thought the chefs would be more confident, there have been disasters. After all, they chose what to cook. They’ve had chance to practice it & refine it. Yet we still get terrible mistakes, revealing a fundamental ignorance of culinary principles. So, last night the judges were presented with warm risotto served on top of scallop cerviche (which is cold & raw). Needless to say the warm risotto warmed the cerviche, half cooking & destroying much of freshness of the cerviche. We’ve had odd combinations. I have difficulty imagining how anyone would want crunchy honeycomb with lamb. A honey glaze on lamb perhaps, but the crunch of honeycomb is for a dessert, not to be served with lamb. Equally we had duck served with a pool of honey. Again, fine to cook the duck with the honey - the sweetness can help to cut through the fattiness of duck - but not as a spoonful of honey dumped on the plate.

I’m suddenly beginning to realise why we don’t eat out that often. If this is the standard of cooking in this country - & many of these contestants work in 2-3 starred restaurants & gastro-pubs – heaven help us. I’d sooner eat in our private restaurant at home. I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I do try some odd combinations, but at least I haven’t paid through the nose for it nor have I had the disappointment of anticipating something rather special to find a catastrophe on a plate. I have more confidence of getting a good meal when the Fox cooks, even though he only started to learn to cook since I became disabled, really since we moved here in 2000.