I didn’t expect Masterchef to be the thing that restored my faith in humanity. I mean, how life-changing can a cooking show be?
But two moments in last night’s finale had me blubbering like a baby and feeling all could finally be right with the world.
Make no mistake (as George Calombaris would say. Maybe a few times.). The grand finale is high-pressure stuff (as Gary Mehigan would say. Maybe a few times). We’re talking a dessert that took five and a half hours to create. It’s like if you dropped the kids at school, then went home and did just this one thing. A thing that ended up looking like something you could give it to the kids when they got home, with Vegemite soldiers. This thing:

The final dish of Masterchef 2016, the Verjus in Egg. Image: Channel 10
This is a Verjus in Egg (capitals theirs, but seriously, I would have done them anyway, because this is a dish with gravitas at least the equal of Brexit or the Democratic National Convention).
Sure, it looks like a boiled egg, and you'd think Masterchef finalists Elena Duggan and Matt Sinclair could have whipped it up in about the standard three-ish minutes it takes for soft.
BUT.
It turns out the VIE is NOT EVEN AN EGG, unless you have a magical hen that lays tempered chocolate shells with white panna cotta stuff in the middle and a yellow yolky thing that tastes like mandarin and thyme because of some chemical that's in mandarin or thyme or something and then at the bottom there's coffee goo that somehow appears when you mix instant and ground and some kind of granule and you think it's not going to work and then it suddenly does and your eyes nearly pop out of your head, and the hen has carefully plopped this head-screwing marvel on curly-whirlies of stretched honeycomb (and who even knew you could stretch honeycomb - probably not you, and definitely not me, but an essential piece of equipment if you ever want to do it, FYI, is the sunlamp your uncle used to fix his dicky knee in 1974).).
Anyway, I believe them when they say this egg tastes like the blessed excrement of the gods.