MasterChef Australia (2009–…): Season 2, Episode 8 - Celebrity Chef Challenge 1 - full transcript
Last night on
MasterChef Australia.
Welcome to the
MasterChef kitchen.
The pressure was on for the
top 24 amateur cooks
in their very first
challenge.
It's exciting but it's really
nerve-wrecking as well.
And Alvin blew the judges
away with the best dish.
This day is gonna stick with
me forever.
Tonight it's time for the amateur to cook
off against the professional.
Welcome to the very first
celebrity challenge of the year.
Does Alvin have what it takes to beat
award-winning chef Luke Nguyen
at his own signature dish?
We're not just cooking one dish, we're gonna
be cooking a Vietnamese banquet.
[silently] Three.
With immunity up for grabs the stakes
are higher than ever before.
If you don't study the recipe and manage
your time, you're pretty much screwed.
Bloody hell.
Waking up this morning
I feel really nervous.
This is the first week
for goodness's sake.
The first week and
I'm cooking against
a celebrity chef.
Yesterday I won the childhood
memory challenge.
Alvin, that's an absolute deadset
ripper of a combination,
well done.
Alvin! Look what I found!
- That's for you.
- Oh my God, MasterChef jacket.
It is just as pristine white and you know,
it feels really comfortable.
God, you look really good.
Wow, what a feeling.
Knowing what's ahead of me,
I have butterflies in my stomach.
I'm just this humble cook.
Alvin, welcome to the
MasterChef kitchen, and of course
the very first celebrity challenge
of the year.
I feel privileged, I'm excited, I am
shit scared.
I don't know if you should be scared.
You need to embrace this, you need to
to give it your best and I like you
saying you feel like a humble cook,
I think that's the best way
to go into this competition.
Alvin, last year, two contestants went up
against celebrity chefs and they won.
Nine out of ten.
An eight out of ten.
They got an express pass right on the way
through to the final week of MasterChef.
This year, it's a little different.
If you win, you get one of these.
An immunity pin.
Which you can use to avoid elimination,
should you ever face one.
How good would that be? You know,
it just amps it up a little bit,
because there's so much at stake.
The only thing standing between you
and that crucial lifeline
is one of Australia's
top chefs.
For four years, his restaurant
has been named
the best Asian restaurant
in Sydney.
The cuisine is Vietnamese,
the restaurant is Red Lantern,
please welcome chef
Luke Nguyen.
I'm Luke Nguyen, chef and owner
of Red Lantern in Sydney.
I've been in the industry and cooking
for the last twenty five years.
I've accepted this MasterChef challenge
because I really want to show
what Vietnamese cuisine
is all about.
Its complexities, its freshness,
its balance, its textures.
Luke, welcome to the
MasterChef kitchen.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Alvin although put himself down as
a very fine cook and
shares a similar ability to balance flavors,
maybe not quite as finely tuned
as yours.
- We'll see.
Alvin, you've cooked a lot
of Vietnamese food?
No, not, not really.
You're supposed to be humble.
Alvin, you get ninety minutes
to replicate Luke's dish,
whereas Luke gets
seventy five minutes.
And of course we won't know
which dish is which,
so we're just looking forward
to a nice lunch.
- Good luck both of you.
- Thank you.
After the judges have left it's time for
Luke to show me what we're cooking today.
So Alvin, you're not just
cooking one dish,
you're gonna be cooking
a Vietnamese banquet.
I turn around and a waiter
comes out with a tray.
Not one dish,
not two,
[silently] three.
Come on, guys. Three dishes?
Look at that.
I'm gonna start you with
Hanoi crisp parcels.
Hue pancake.
And barramundi wrapped
in lotus leaf and char-grilled.
Let's start and try the dishes.
So this one here's very textural, right?
Piece of lettuce leaf, purrilla,
vietnamese mint, green mint,
lots of herbs,
and it's filled with crab, prawns,
pork, mushrooms and glass noodles.
Make sure there's no moisture,
if there's moisture,
you're gonna put it in the frier
and it's gonna burst.
The second dish is a hue pancake
filled with prawns, pork and mung beans.
Rice flour crepe with turmeric, it needs
to be crisp on the outside,
nice color, but it needs to be nice and
moist on the inside,
so don't overcook anything
inside there.
Your third and last dish
is a barramundi
wrapped in lotus leaf
and char-grilled.
This is where your knife
skills come out.
You have to finely, finely chop and dice
everything, yeah?
And remember, it's gotta be wrapped
and char-grilled on both sides.
So you need to keep your timing correct.
You don't wanna overcook your fish,
you don't wanna undercook
your fish.
Your biggest challenge now
is completing them
in ninety minutes. If you don't study
the recipe and manage your time,
you're pretty much screwed.
Alvin, your time
starts now.
Rules of the challenge,
actually quite difficult,
Alvin's got ninety minutes
to recreate three signature dishes
of Luke Nguyen from Red Lantern.
The first thing I do is
to lay out the recipes.
There's four things I need to do.
The three dishes plus the sauce,
the dipping sauce. So I lay out
a game plan.
What to do first, because
multitasking is crucial.
Because I have that fifteen minute
headstart, I have...
Luke just almost lurking
on the side.
I soak the lotus leaf
for the fish.
While that's soaking, I start fine slicing
the mushrooms for the parcels.
You've got good knife
skills, Alvin.
Very good.
Alvin, you've had your fifteen
minutes head start.
I've got seventy five minutes
and I'm gonna start now.
- Okay.
- Good luck, I'm gonna stand behind you.
Thanks.
Alvin's fifteen minutes
is up,
and it's like Jackie Chan
starts.
I've never seen two knives
used like that.
I'm not looking, that's just
gonna freak me out.
I've got way too much left to do.
I've got the parcels to do,
then the pancake mix and
I'm gonna do the
what am I doing?
Multitasking is not easy,
let me tell you that now.
So, the next thing I start on
is making the rice paper rolls.
The key thing that Luke tells me
in the beginning of the challenge
the risky bit of this,
it has to be dry.
Alvin, careful that the rice
paper isn't too wet.
Probably is, Luke.
Yeah, well, it's gonna burst
in the wok, mate.
So I put one at the time.
Bits of my parcel
start bubbling up.
So it looks like this diseased parcel
with boils.
I thing, well, bye bye immunity,
but let's soldier on.
I finish my parcels
just to get something
on the plate.
And I look behind me, and I see
Luke's parcels.
I was this close to just
throwing the towel in.
It's really disheartening, I have so many
other things to do,
you know, the pancakes,
the fish, the sauce, you know,
the bloody herbs.
I've marinated the fish with the
Phu Quoc sauce
and now the lime and lotus
leaf are ready for folding.
Alvin, you've got forty five
minutes to go,
you're halfway through,
you're doing well.
So I wrap my fish and toss it
on the grill, next step, pancakes.
No.
That dish, you know, I've done
a million times, but
my pan was too hot and I had
to do it again.
It's a dish that you can stuff up. The
difficult part is getting the pancake
on the right temperature, not putting
too much oil in,
and you're getting a nice, crisp,
firm outer layer of the crepe.
Alvin just kept pouring a little bit too
much oil, I think, in his pancakes,
and wasn't quite...
wasn't quite pulling them off.
I keep looking at the bottom to see
if it's crisping up,
it looks like it kind of is,
so I took it out,
and I put it on the plate.
It looks just, just horrible.
It's horrible!
- Alvin, can you do that one again?
- Yeah, I will.
Take, take the filling out and do
the crepe again, that one looks shocking.
I really wanted to help him,
cause if he could achieve cooking
three dishes in ninety minutes,
he deserves to succeed.
Luke's just an absolute
gentleman.
He stopped what he was doing
and came around and helped Alvin
Okay, just, pour the batter in now.
Pour the batter in now.
Yeah.
- A little bit more?
- Little bit more.
Just on the sides,
on the sides.
Beautiful, stop. That should be nice
and crispy. You're putting too much oil in.
Okay. Thanks!
I try it his way. Of course
it works.
Now I had pancakes ready
on a plate,
I have the parcels
ready on a plate,
so now the fish. The fish is cooking,
we still have time to unwrap it.
It need to be cooked perfectly and timed out
right, because once it's open,
that's your end result, you can't throw
it back on the grill,
so you really need to be
precise with your timing.
I'm just cleaning up now.
- Are you done?
- I'm done, yeah.
Well!
Careful, Alvin, don't...
don't cut through the fish skin.
You know what?
I open the lotus leaf and finally I got
something right the first time.
It looks perfect.
Alvin, two and a half minutes, mate,
on the clock.
Yeah. I can do this.
- You can do this.
- I can do this.
The one thing I haven't made
is the sauce.
Alvin was under the pump.
- How is it? Balanced?
- Is it tart?
- It's tart.
Ten seconds, I just throw in
like a handful of sugar,
and just kept telling myself,
this has got to work.
Well done, Alvin,
you're almost there.
00:15:07,346 --> 00:15:08,346
00:15:08,546 --> 00:15:09,546
00:15:09,746 --> 00:15:10,746
00:15:10,946 --> 00:15:11,946
00:15:12,146 --> 00:15:13,146
00:15:13,346 --> 00:15:14,346
00:15:14,546 --> 00:15:15,546
00:15:15,746 --> 00:15:16,746
00:15:16,946 --> 00:15:17,946
00:15:18,146 --> 00:15:19,725
Yeah!
Looks fantastic.
- Oh my god.
- Well done. That's great.
Looks good. Well done.
Well done, Alvin,
you've done really well.
It's time to present dishes
to the judges.
I've decided Luke should
go first.
It's the blind tasting.
We don't know whose dishes
these are.
Hanoi parcels,
a Hue pancake,
and then from the Mekong delta, a fish
of some form in lotus leaf.
Maybe barramundi.
George.
- Do the honors?
- I think so.
Or is it rolls? Nice and crunchy,
and they've got this nice,
you can taste the cellophane
noodles in there,
and really meaty, prawny, it's just
absolutely sensational,
it's really fragrant.
I like that a lot.
For me this Vietnamese pancake,
it's really full on with turmeric,
and I sort of don't really taste much
of the pork or the prawn.
Very interesting, though.
The highlight is that fish.
That fish for me is just gold, it's just
beautifully cooked.
Well, banquet number one is
certainly an impressive effort.
It will be interesting to see, George,
if pancake number two
whether the same strength of turmeric
flavor is there,
or that maybe the turmeric
has been overdone.
- Gentlemen, shall we score?
- Yes.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
The crispy rice paper around the
outside is delicious.
It's really crunchy. And actually
that filling is lovely.
I like the flavor of the pancake.
It's so much softer than
the previous pancake.
I actually quite like that. And I don't
find those little yellow mung beans in there
quite so floury.
- Fish is just impeccably cooked.
- You know what though?
It doesn't have as much of that
beautiful garnish on
and what I really loved
about the first fish,
was it just had plenty, plenty
of that lovely garnish.
- Shall we score?
- Yes.
Well, we can confirm one thing. Alvin's done
either banquet one or banquet two.
Let's not kid ourselves. First week in the
MasterChef kitchen,
to come and cook a Luke Nguyen
Red Lantern not dish, banquet,
is an amazing achievement. We have
got a real contender on our hands.
Alvin, another fantastic day in the
MasterChef kitchen,
you've just faced off against Luke Nguyen
from the award-winning Red Lantern.
Now, what's at stake?
A valuable immunity that will
save you from elimination.
So we need to know, which banquet
was yours.
I'm banquet two.
Well, we can put you out
of your misery,
and we'll reveal our scores.
Alvin, I scored your banquet
seven out of ten.
For me those pancakes were
beautiful.
There was really lovely balance of that
turmeric. Wasn't overpowering,
it was a tough effort today, you know,
three dishes, and lots of technqiue,
so much technique. Well done. You
should be very proud.
Alvin.
I scored your dish
eight.
With Alvin getting eight, I kind of looked
at him and went, how did you get eight?
That's awesome.
Now I'm really nervous.
Alvin.
I scored your dish
seven out of ten.
So, Alvin, that's a total score
of twenty-two points out of thirty,
and what that means is Luke
has to score twenty-three or more
to win.
Luke, I scored your banquet
an eight out of ten.
What was so beautiful about it was
all those beautiful herbs
which were just alive and standing
out on the plate
as an absolute gorgeous,
gorgeous banquet. Thank you.
So Luke,
I scored your banquet
nine out of ten.
Matt needs to score a six or more
for you to take out today's challenge,
but of course he is the world's
toughest food critic.
A fair score for your
banquet, Luke,
was nine out of ten.
Luke, that makes you today's winner.
Well done.
Alvin, the scores might say that you
haven't won today,
but you have won. What you've won
is an amazing opportunity to
stand next to an amazing man,
to teach you some new techniques
and hopefully grasp all that
and use that going forward.
This has motivated me to forge ahead
and I will.
Well done.
Luke, I don't think we tasted,
we actually ate the entire banquet.
It was absolutely gorgeous. Thank you
for coming here to the MasterChef kitchen
and imparting a little bit of what
Luke Nguyen knows.
Thanks for having me, I had
a great fun, a great fun.
- Thank you.
- Cheers, mate.
The outcome today was great, because
I won the challenge, thank God for that.
Based on what I saw today, I would give
Alvin a job in my kitchen.
He's capable of being a really
fantastic chef.
Alvin, a tough day in the
MasterChef kitchen,
but it's nothing compared
to what we have in store
for all of you tomorrow.
Tomorrow night on
MasterChef Australia.
Now it gets serious. We wanna give
you a reality check.
The heat is on as the amateurs
face the pressure of a commercial kitchen.
It's game time. It's show time.
Two teams battle it out
to keep the customers happy.
We still haven't got our mains
and I'm ready to leave.
And to deliver the best
dining experience.
It's chaos.
Come on, guys,
come on, guys.
We can't run a business
like this.
The storm is coming.
And the team who makes the least money
will face the first elimination.
We have not taken one cent.
Nothing.
All I can feel is dread.
MasterChef Australia.
Welcome to the
MasterChef kitchen.
The pressure was on for the
top 24 amateur cooks
in their very first
challenge.
It's exciting but it's really
nerve-wrecking as well.
And Alvin blew the judges
away with the best dish.
This day is gonna stick with
me forever.
Tonight it's time for the amateur to cook
off against the professional.
Welcome to the very first
celebrity challenge of the year.
Does Alvin have what it takes to beat
award-winning chef Luke Nguyen
at his own signature dish?
We're not just cooking one dish, we're gonna
be cooking a Vietnamese banquet.
[silently] Three.
With immunity up for grabs the stakes
are higher than ever before.
If you don't study the recipe and manage
your time, you're pretty much screwed.
Bloody hell.
Waking up this morning
I feel really nervous.
This is the first week
for goodness's sake.
The first week and
I'm cooking against
a celebrity chef.
Yesterday I won the childhood
memory challenge.
Alvin, that's an absolute deadset
ripper of a combination,
well done.
Alvin! Look what I found!
- That's for you.
- Oh my God, MasterChef jacket.
It is just as pristine white and you know,
it feels really comfortable.
God, you look really good.
Wow, what a feeling.
Knowing what's ahead of me,
I have butterflies in my stomach.
I'm just this humble cook.
Alvin, welcome to the
MasterChef kitchen, and of course
the very first celebrity challenge
of the year.
I feel privileged, I'm excited, I am
shit scared.
I don't know if you should be scared.
You need to embrace this, you need to
to give it your best and I like you
saying you feel like a humble cook,
I think that's the best way
to go into this competition.
Alvin, last year, two contestants went up
against celebrity chefs and they won.
Nine out of ten.
An eight out of ten.
They got an express pass right on the way
through to the final week of MasterChef.
This year, it's a little different.
If you win, you get one of these.
An immunity pin.
Which you can use to avoid elimination,
should you ever face one.
How good would that be? You know,
it just amps it up a little bit,
because there's so much at stake.
The only thing standing between you
and that crucial lifeline
is one of Australia's
top chefs.
For four years, his restaurant
has been named
the best Asian restaurant
in Sydney.
The cuisine is Vietnamese,
the restaurant is Red Lantern,
please welcome chef
Luke Nguyen.
I'm Luke Nguyen, chef and owner
of Red Lantern in Sydney.
I've been in the industry and cooking
for the last twenty five years.
I've accepted this MasterChef challenge
because I really want to show
what Vietnamese cuisine
is all about.
Its complexities, its freshness,
its balance, its textures.
Luke, welcome to the
MasterChef kitchen.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Alvin although put himself down as
a very fine cook and
shares a similar ability to balance flavors,
maybe not quite as finely tuned
as yours.
- We'll see.
Alvin, you've cooked a lot
of Vietnamese food?
No, not, not really.
You're supposed to be humble.
Alvin, you get ninety minutes
to replicate Luke's dish,
whereas Luke gets
seventy five minutes.
And of course we won't know
which dish is which,
so we're just looking forward
to a nice lunch.
- Good luck both of you.
- Thank you.
After the judges have left it's time for
Luke to show me what we're cooking today.
So Alvin, you're not just
cooking one dish,
you're gonna be cooking
a Vietnamese banquet.
I turn around and a waiter
comes out with a tray.
Not one dish,
not two,
[silently] three.
Come on, guys. Three dishes?
Look at that.
I'm gonna start you with
Hanoi crisp parcels.
Hue pancake.
And barramundi wrapped
in lotus leaf and char-grilled.
Let's start and try the dishes.
So this one here's very textural, right?
Piece of lettuce leaf, purrilla,
vietnamese mint, green mint,
lots of herbs,
and it's filled with crab, prawns,
pork, mushrooms and glass noodles.
Make sure there's no moisture,
if there's moisture,
you're gonna put it in the frier
and it's gonna burst.
The second dish is a hue pancake
filled with prawns, pork and mung beans.
Rice flour crepe with turmeric, it needs
to be crisp on the outside,
nice color, but it needs to be nice and
moist on the inside,
so don't overcook anything
inside there.
Your third and last dish
is a barramundi
wrapped in lotus leaf
and char-grilled.
This is where your knife
skills come out.
You have to finely, finely chop and dice
everything, yeah?
And remember, it's gotta be wrapped
and char-grilled on both sides.
So you need to keep your timing correct.
You don't wanna overcook your fish,
you don't wanna undercook
your fish.
Your biggest challenge now
is completing them
in ninety minutes. If you don't study
the recipe and manage your time,
you're pretty much screwed.
Alvin, your time
starts now.
Rules of the challenge,
actually quite difficult,
Alvin's got ninety minutes
to recreate three signature dishes
of Luke Nguyen from Red Lantern.
The first thing I do is
to lay out the recipes.
There's four things I need to do.
The three dishes plus the sauce,
the dipping sauce. So I lay out
a game plan.
What to do first, because
multitasking is crucial.
Because I have that fifteen minute
headstart, I have...
Luke just almost lurking
on the side.
I soak the lotus leaf
for the fish.
While that's soaking, I start fine slicing
the mushrooms for the parcels.
You've got good knife
skills, Alvin.
Very good.
Alvin, you've had your fifteen
minutes head start.
I've got seventy five minutes
and I'm gonna start now.
- Okay.
- Good luck, I'm gonna stand behind you.
Thanks.
Alvin's fifteen minutes
is up,
and it's like Jackie Chan
starts.
I've never seen two knives
used like that.
I'm not looking, that's just
gonna freak me out.
I've got way too much left to do.
I've got the parcels to do,
then the pancake mix and
I'm gonna do the
what am I doing?
Multitasking is not easy,
let me tell you that now.
So, the next thing I start on
is making the rice paper rolls.
The key thing that Luke tells me
in the beginning of the challenge
the risky bit of this,
it has to be dry.
Alvin, careful that the rice
paper isn't too wet.
Probably is, Luke.
Yeah, well, it's gonna burst
in the wok, mate.
So I put one at the time.
Bits of my parcel
start bubbling up.
So it looks like this diseased parcel
with boils.
I thing, well, bye bye immunity,
but let's soldier on.
I finish my parcels
just to get something
on the plate.
And I look behind me, and I see
Luke's parcels.
I was this close to just
throwing the towel in.
It's really disheartening, I have so many
other things to do,
you know, the pancakes,
the fish, the sauce, you know,
the bloody herbs.
I've marinated the fish with the
Phu Quoc sauce
and now the lime and lotus
leaf are ready for folding.
Alvin, you've got forty five
minutes to go,
you're halfway through,
you're doing well.
So I wrap my fish and toss it
on the grill, next step, pancakes.
No.
That dish, you know, I've done
a million times, but
my pan was too hot and I had
to do it again.
It's a dish that you can stuff up. The
difficult part is getting the pancake
on the right temperature, not putting
too much oil in,
and you're getting a nice, crisp,
firm outer layer of the crepe.
Alvin just kept pouring a little bit too
much oil, I think, in his pancakes,
and wasn't quite...
wasn't quite pulling them off.
I keep looking at the bottom to see
if it's crisping up,
it looks like it kind of is,
so I took it out,
and I put it on the plate.
It looks just, just horrible.
It's horrible!
- Alvin, can you do that one again?
- Yeah, I will.
Take, take the filling out and do
the crepe again, that one looks shocking.
I really wanted to help him,
cause if he could achieve cooking
three dishes in ninety minutes,
he deserves to succeed.
Luke's just an absolute
gentleman.
He stopped what he was doing
and came around and helped Alvin
Okay, just, pour the batter in now.
Pour the batter in now.
Yeah.
- A little bit more?
- Little bit more.
Just on the sides,
on the sides.
Beautiful, stop. That should be nice
and crispy. You're putting too much oil in.
Okay. Thanks!
I try it his way. Of course
it works.
Now I had pancakes ready
on a plate,
I have the parcels
ready on a plate,
so now the fish. The fish is cooking,
we still have time to unwrap it.
It need to be cooked perfectly and timed out
right, because once it's open,
that's your end result, you can't throw
it back on the grill,
so you really need to be
precise with your timing.
I'm just cleaning up now.
- Are you done?
- I'm done, yeah.
Well!
Careful, Alvin, don't...
don't cut through the fish skin.
You know what?
I open the lotus leaf and finally I got
something right the first time.
It looks perfect.
Alvin, two and a half minutes, mate,
on the clock.
Yeah. I can do this.
- You can do this.
- I can do this.
The one thing I haven't made
is the sauce.
Alvin was under the pump.
- How is it? Balanced?
- Is it tart?
- It's tart.
Ten seconds, I just throw in
like a handful of sugar,
and just kept telling myself,
this has got to work.
Well done, Alvin,
you're almost there.
00:15:07,346 --> 00:15:08,346
00:15:08,546 --> 00:15:09,546
00:15:09,746 --> 00:15:10,746
00:15:10,946 --> 00:15:11,946
00:15:12,146 --> 00:15:13,146
00:15:13,346 --> 00:15:14,346
00:15:14,546 --> 00:15:15,546
00:15:15,746 --> 00:15:16,746
00:15:16,946 --> 00:15:17,946
00:15:18,146 --> 00:15:19,725
Yeah!
Looks fantastic.
- Oh my god.
- Well done. That's great.
Looks good. Well done.
Well done, Alvin,
you've done really well.
It's time to present dishes
to the judges.
I've decided Luke should
go first.
It's the blind tasting.
We don't know whose dishes
these are.
Hanoi parcels,
a Hue pancake,
and then from the Mekong delta, a fish
of some form in lotus leaf.
Maybe barramundi.
George.
- Do the honors?
- I think so.
Or is it rolls? Nice and crunchy,
and they've got this nice,
you can taste the cellophane
noodles in there,
and really meaty, prawny, it's just
absolutely sensational,
it's really fragrant.
I like that a lot.
For me this Vietnamese pancake,
it's really full on with turmeric,
and I sort of don't really taste much
of the pork or the prawn.
Very interesting, though.
The highlight is that fish.
That fish for me is just gold, it's just
beautifully cooked.
Well, banquet number one is
certainly an impressive effort.
It will be interesting to see, George,
if pancake number two
whether the same strength of turmeric
flavor is there,
or that maybe the turmeric
has been overdone.
- Gentlemen, shall we score?
- Yes.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
The crispy rice paper around the
outside is delicious.
It's really crunchy. And actually
that filling is lovely.
I like the flavor of the pancake.
It's so much softer than
the previous pancake.
I actually quite like that. And I don't
find those little yellow mung beans in there
quite so floury.
- Fish is just impeccably cooked.
- You know what though?
It doesn't have as much of that
beautiful garnish on
and what I really loved
about the first fish,
was it just had plenty, plenty
of that lovely garnish.
- Shall we score?
- Yes.
Well, we can confirm one thing. Alvin's done
either banquet one or banquet two.
Let's not kid ourselves. First week in the
MasterChef kitchen,
to come and cook a Luke Nguyen
Red Lantern not dish, banquet,
is an amazing achievement. We have
got a real contender on our hands.
Alvin, another fantastic day in the
MasterChef kitchen,
you've just faced off against Luke Nguyen
from the award-winning Red Lantern.
Now, what's at stake?
A valuable immunity that will
save you from elimination.
So we need to know, which banquet
was yours.
I'm banquet two.
Well, we can put you out
of your misery,
and we'll reveal our scores.
Alvin, I scored your banquet
seven out of ten.
For me those pancakes were
beautiful.
There was really lovely balance of that
turmeric. Wasn't overpowering,
it was a tough effort today, you know,
three dishes, and lots of technqiue,
so much technique. Well done. You
should be very proud.
Alvin.
I scored your dish
eight.
With Alvin getting eight, I kind of looked
at him and went, how did you get eight?
That's awesome.
Now I'm really nervous.
Alvin.
I scored your dish
seven out of ten.
So, Alvin, that's a total score
of twenty-two points out of thirty,
and what that means is Luke
has to score twenty-three or more
to win.
Luke, I scored your banquet
an eight out of ten.
What was so beautiful about it was
all those beautiful herbs
which were just alive and standing
out on the plate
as an absolute gorgeous,
gorgeous banquet. Thank you.
So Luke,
I scored your banquet
nine out of ten.
Matt needs to score a six or more
for you to take out today's challenge,
but of course he is the world's
toughest food critic.
A fair score for your
banquet, Luke,
was nine out of ten.
Luke, that makes you today's winner.
Well done.
Alvin, the scores might say that you
haven't won today,
but you have won. What you've won
is an amazing opportunity to
stand next to an amazing man,
to teach you some new techniques
and hopefully grasp all that
and use that going forward.
This has motivated me to forge ahead
and I will.
Well done.
Luke, I don't think we tasted,
we actually ate the entire banquet.
It was absolutely gorgeous. Thank you
for coming here to the MasterChef kitchen
and imparting a little bit of what
Luke Nguyen knows.
Thanks for having me, I had
a great fun, a great fun.
- Thank you.
- Cheers, mate.
The outcome today was great, because
I won the challenge, thank God for that.
Based on what I saw today, I would give
Alvin a job in my kitchen.
He's capable of being a really
fantastic chef.
Alvin, a tough day in the
MasterChef kitchen,
but it's nothing compared
to what we have in store
for all of you tomorrow.
Tomorrow night on
MasterChef Australia.
Now it gets serious. We wanna give
you a reality check.
The heat is on as the amateurs
face the pressure of a commercial kitchen.
It's game time. It's show time.
Two teams battle it out
to keep the customers happy.
We still haven't got our mains
and I'm ready to leave.
And to deliver the best
dining experience.
It's chaos.
Come on, guys,
come on, guys.
We can't run a business
like this.
The storm is coming.
And the team who makes the least money
will face the first elimination.
We have not taken one cent.
Nothing.
All I can feel is dread.