22. Apr, 2018

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This overheated kitchen competition, where a wrongly placed tuile can crucially nettle your touchily zealous judge, has been going for some years and winning dishes seem to have become something of a format.  For starters, you have some crackersly outlandish taster dish, maybe baby octopus tentacles draped over crumbed sweetbreads, say.   For mains, there's your smear on the plate side of rendered down 'jus', 'confit' or 'glaze', perhaps with a froth that looks like cuckoo spit, or more unpalatably, something coughed up on it; your minute but perfectly formed caremalised vegetable (baby artichoke, maybe); your dab of pureed tuber exotica; your piece of fish or meat, either flash pan fried or cooked 'Sou Vide' (boil in the bag to you and me) and your aforementioned tuile of summat or other, perched precariously aslant the little wigwam of food like an ice-cream wafer.  For pud, there's a miniature bonne bouche of something exquisite.  Woe betide you if one of these smatterings is deemed overcooked, underdone, or even worse, disappointing.  Poor Greg comes over all gruff then, because they've not just let him down, they've let themselves down.

Call me old fashioned, but these gobbets of gastronomic offerings don't to me spell a meal, more a feeling that the nursery class has been at the play dough again.  The entire ensemble, contestants and judges alike are, by the final, teetering on the brink of an overtired wobbler and should have been put down for a nap some time ago.  I felt this particularly when the Aussie judge was undone by the perfect complexity of a teensy weensy apple crumble - permatanned face working in petulant delight, stern blue eyes woebegone.  It was all going to end in tears, and it did.