July 3, 2012 | Posted in REALITY TV | By sockii
Food Trucks and Tortellini
The MasterChef Ultimate Cookbook, featuring recipes from the television series. Get it today at Amazon.
The remaining twelve contestants now have to complete in a team challenge running food trucks to see which team can tempt the most diners – and earn the most money. Shades of “The Great Food Truck Race“? In any event, Stacey won the last challenge so she gets to not only pick all of her team members, but divide the other teams as well. For her own team, she chooses Tali, Frank and Becky (Tali because, she says, if she loses she’s fairly certain she can beat him in an individual challenge. Hah!) She then puts Monti, David, Anna and Tanya on a team together, choosing such because she knows Monti and David will clash. For the third team, she picks Josh, Christine, Felix and Mike.
Next she must pick one of three colored food truck, each which will be preparing a different kind of food. She picks Red, which turns out to be Mexican. Team leader Anna picks Yellow, which is American. Team leader Josh picks Blue, which is Indian. The teams then have to plan a single dish they can serve for $7 and get enough prepped in time to serve eager customers. They have 90 minutes to prepare before the customers will start arriving.
The Red Team is arguing between doing meat, vegetarian or both styles of tacos, and eventually go for meat. The Yellow team wants to serve hamburgers two ways with fries, until Gordon tells them that’s too much work – just choose one and stick to it. The Blue Team makes a Chicken Tikka Masala with a purple cabbage salad.
When service begins and people are lined up waiting, it turns out Yellow Team hasn’t fired a single burger yet – apparently David’s fault? And when they do start serving, Gordon finds some of the hamburgers are being prepped to go out undercooked (“Raw!!!” as Gordon exclaims.) The Blue Team is moving pretty swiftly and seems to be in the lead, until Stacey goes out in a last minute attempt to bring in more customers. At the end of the day, the Red Team collected the most money, followed by the Blue Team. The Yellow Team was in third place and now must face an elimination challenge.
Their challenge is to make tortellini in a simple broth in 60 minutes. For once we see a small amount of a demonstration by Joe on how to properly prepare the dough, the filling, and how to fold the tortellini just so. Comments are made about whether David will be able to do it with his “fat fingers” and he seems anxious. Tanya is struggling and when questioned about her technique seems to be doing everything wrong. Anna starts cooking too late and worries her tortellini will be raw. Monti seems fairly confident in what she’s doing, but now it’s time for the judges to decide.
At judging, Anna’s tortellini is indeed not cooked nearly enough – the dough is still raw. Monti’s dish looks good and she doesn’t get any criticism from the judges. David gets great praise for his tortellini, making “beautiful” filled pasta that is perfectly executed. Tanya’s dish is as much of a mess as she’d feared it would be, and sure enough her and Anna are the two who are up for elimination. In a somewhat surprising (to me at least) choice, Anna is the one sent home. Yes, she messed up in this challenge but I thought overall her performance has been better, but then again it took several weeks for her to even stand out as a real contender at all.
Tonight we’ll have another round of competition and the final twelve will likely be down to ten, unless there are any surprises in judging and elimination.
For more on Season Three of MasterChef US including polls and background information on all contestants, check out my full season hub!
MasterChef US 2012: Season 3
MasterChef has been a hit television sensation all around the world. Learn about the contestants from Season Three, which aired in the summer/fall of 2013 on the FOX Network.
Share this:
sockii
sockii is just your typical Jane-of-All-Trades who never has enough time in her day for all of her projects. She has written for many websites online including Squidoo, Zujava, Yahoo! Contributors Network, HubPages and Wizzley. She has been attending and vending at science fiction and media conventions for over 15 years, and for several years ran an art gallery and jewelry store in Philadelphia. Today she is happy to be living in South Jersey with her partner David and their 6 cats. Sockii is a member of several affiliate sales programs including Amazon Associates and Viglink. Products from these services may be advertised on her posts and pages to generate sales commissions.
Leave a Reply
*
Be the first to comment.