Comments on: Tim Dunlop laments Masterchef’s return of the eliminata

By: dylwah

dylwah — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 03:41:14 +0000

Used a CWA recipe, out of the ’76 edition of the commonsense cookery book, to make Dr Honey’s B’day cake yesterday, tried to follow it to the letter, well at least as far as “beat thirty times with a wooden spoon” and it worked well. Mummycrit is right that the recipe was a bit vague, but i kind of see it as lots of room to innovate.

By: Howitzer

Howitzer — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:41:39 +0000

Eliminata was okay IMO. But Skye and Marion is better and their actions disappointed me. masterchef is really a good show. Hope they feature some sort of Asian cuisine next time some Filipino recipe perhaps.

By: dogpossum

dogpossum — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 06:22:52 +0000

I started a phd project on the QCWA (>10 years ago, mind you), and spent some time around the badass CWA ladies and their recipes. Most of the earlier recipe books in particular assume familiarity with their approaches to measuring. And that there’s a consistency in types of butter/flour/etc. And of course that the cook is a full time wife, with lots of cooking experience (as provided by mother or sister in the pre-marital home), or with a bevvy of female relatives to call on for help. So I find the earlier recipe books difficult to use.
I think I remember that each local branch used to produce its own book of recipes, and then you’d buy them from other branches when you went to the annual state meetings or when you traveled and stayed in the CWA ‘rest houses’ or visited other CWA ladies. So you’d get regionally specific recipes (eg the one I use quite often has a lot of recipes for pineapple because of where it’s from in Qld).

So I’d be surprised if a novice cake baker could make one of the more obscure recipes work. The later recipe books can be quite posh – hardbound (rather than cheap printing and ring binding) with tested recipes.

I’m a bit tired of the contestants’ whinging on about how they’ve always dreamt of a being a chef. What they really _should_ be saying is, “I’ve always dreamt of being a _celebrity_ chef,” because it is actually possible to get cheffy apprenticeships, yeah? I mean, I’m not really buying the argument that some lawyer or financial adviser would actually like to abandon a well-paid career for a hardarse apprenticeship doing shitty jobs in shitty kitchens under sweary taskmaster chefs for years until they finally score a gig making parmas in a pub. I’m thinking that what they _really_ want is to be _just like_ Jamie or Nigella (or whichever celebrity cookbook tie-in chef MC has on this week), wearing low-cut blouses or expensive tracksuits and slapping prime organic british beef about on self-branded cookware.

The return of the uneliminated is a crock because it ruins the game. There has to be limits, or else it’s just dumb. There has to be some sort of challenge and consistent set of rules or the contestants will have to acknowledge that they really _are_ just tools in a more complex marketing project and that their work is really the _least_ important part of the entire process! And then, of course, the game is broken.

By: mummycrit

mummycrit — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 09:00:28 +0000

CWA cookbook recipies are often fairly vague, but I was stunned at the total lack of ability/experience in all the contestants. It was really interesting. I’m even more pissed off about the dramatics thing after the other night’s ‘elimination challenge’ it’s all looking very very badly staged now.

By: DameMintPattie

DameMintPattie — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 03:02:51 +0000

I don’t think we should be in any doubt – the winner won’t be the best cook (in the country or the show) but the wiliest and most lucky contenstant – previously eliminated or otherwise.

By: lisa

lisa — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 06:05:18 +0000

Was gutted when Adam said he had never baked a cake. Minus hot points for that.

By: dylwah

dylwah — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:09:51 +0000

Thanks for the post Tim. And thanks to all for keeping me posted on this show. I plead two kids under four is enough to keep anyone busy without a contest-drama to obsess about.

I cooked a lot of CWA recipes in the late 70′s and early 80′s, the cakes were a lot better after we moved 40km south of Orange and 300 m up and our house came with a wood stove. At the time I claimed it as proof of my developing skills as a cook, sadly i have never made cakes that good again and it was prob the way the stove held its heat. I reckon that wood stoves are for cakes as kettle stoves are for joints of meat, they kind of idiot proof the process as long as you can get the right amount of heat to start with.

I contemplated tiling one of my ovens a decade or so ago to try to mimic the stable heat you get from a wood stove but group houses are such ephemeral things.

By: Dr Sister Outlaw

Dr Sister Outlaw — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:55:07 +0000

This goes back to the basic skills thing – Adam had never made a cake at all! Aaron did not know to treat scones oh so gently!! Jimmy didn’t know to boil the shit out of the jam!!

But then Masterchef recipes are usually about quick fix pretty food, not slow cooking or patient technique. Fruit cakes cannot possibly be done in that time frame, and I’ve never seen a Napoletan cake and I grew up in the country, so yah booh sucks to Masterchef.