Tonight was an Asian Street Food Challenge. The two bottom teams go into elimination tomorrow night. The contestants were divided into four teams of two and each had a different Asian cuisine to prepare. There were 200 customers coming through the popup night market outside the Masterchef kitchen.
The teams had two hours to prepare before the customers turned up.
The teams were
Red Team (Japan)
- Brent
- Renae
Blue Team (Thai)
- Laura
- Jamie
Yellow Team (Chinese)
- Ben
- Emelia
Green Team (Vietnam)
- Tracy
- Brent
The blue team were the only team to choose to cook two dishes. They were cooking seared tuna paella salad and poached chicken in coconut broth.
The yellow team cooked a spicy pork and mushroom soup and corn garnish.
Just then, Tracy from the green team burnt her hand and wasn’t sure she could continue. She was in excruciating pain, but soldiered on. They were making rice paper egg taco’s but there was concerns they wouldn’t be able to cook them fast enough for the guests, they took 3 minutes to cook. They created a makeshift grill and decided they would reheat them, but when they were cooking the burnt a fair few of them.
The red team cooked a shitake mushroom broth. They had to assemble their dish in a box in front of the guests, which was a bit slow.
The blue team went through 24 dishes in about 2 minutes.
The green team’s pre-cooked tacos were gone in minutes and they couldn’t keep up cooking new ones.
The yellow team’s spicy pork and mushroom soup were very tender, it was a comfort soup. Gary loved the texture and the tender meatballs
The red team’s udon noodle soup with chicken balls and tempura prawns were good, the crispy prawns had a good flavour but the soup was a bit bland.
The blue team needed to cook more tuna, luckily it was quick to make. braised chicken with baby corn in coconut broth was good, the judges loved it, very aromatic, good texture and perfectly cooked chicken. Their seared tuna with papaya salad was delicious, the papaya was perfect, the tuna was a little big to eat but it was tasty.
Just then, the red team ran out of elements and had to cook more noodles and more tempura prawns.
The green team’s vietnamese taco with chicken and pork was very hard to eat and kept falling apart in customer’s hands. It was very tasty, the judges loved the flavour but thought the customers won’t like the difficulty in eating it.
With 10 minutes to go, the yellow team ran out of soup. They said someone came back four times, they said they were sure they cooked over 200 dishes, but wasn’t sure that 200 indivuals each got one those dishes.
Judging
The judging for this team challenge was purely down to the customers, the judges had no influence on this judging. The customers voted on the dish they liked the most. One team was clearly the winners and one team was clearly at the bottom, but there were only 8 votes separating the middle two teams.
Blue team – 79 votes
Yellow team – 59 votes
Grean team – 51 votes
Red team – 11 votes
The contestants going in to tomorrow’s elimination are Ben, Renae, Brent and Tracy.