Master Chef

• Mystery Box Challenge: Chefs are each given a box with the same ingredients and must use only those ingredients to create a dish within a fixed amount of time. The judges will select three dishes based on visual appearance and technique alone to taste, and from these three select one winner that will gain an advantage in the Elimination Test.
  
• Elimination Test: The judges take the Mystery Box Challenge winner to the pantry and explain the theme of the Elimination Test in private. This chef is told of one or more advantages. The most typical one is selecting the specific ingredient to use or dish to recreate, but judges can include automatic advancement to the next round (a standard since season four), assigning certain ingredients to specific chefs, or even creating teams as to challenge their competition. The rest of the chefs are then informed of the decision, and given five minutes to collect any ingredients from the pantry they need and a fixed amount of time to complete the dish. Judges evaluate all dishes based on taste and visual appeal (although only some of them are featured, at least in the first episodes of a season), and select two dishes as the winners of the competition to become captains in the Team Challenge. The bottom three (or more) dishes are criticized, and the judges select one of those chefs to leave the competition; those that are eliminated must remove their apron and place them on their station before they leave.
  
• Team Challenge: The cooks are taken to an off-site location where they are split into two teams by the team captains, typically through a schoolyard pick. The teams (colored red and blue similar to another Gordon Ramsay competition show, Hell's Kitchen) will typically have to prepare a meal for an odd number of diners (in case of a tie) in a limited amount of time. Diners will sample meals from both teams and will later vote as to which meal they preferred; if a diner does not get a meal from a team due to food not being ready on time, that team automatically forfeits the vote. The losing team will participate in the Pressure Test once they return to the MasterChef kitchen. One such challenge involves a "restaurant takeover" which involves the cooks taking the place of the staff of a particular restaurant.
  
• Pressure Test: Members of the losing team compete against each other to make a standard dish within a limited amount of time that requires a great degree of cooking finesse, such as a souffle. Some of the losing team members may not have to participate determined by the judges or the team captain, and they are sent to watch the challenge from the balcony along with the winning team members. Each dish is judged on taste, visual appeal, and technique, and the losing chef is eliminated from the challenge; that chef must remove their apron and place it on their station before they leave the competition.
  

newto wrote:Thought this is on the FOX network, or at least it is in my area.

This is quoted from an internet article about the program:
“MasterChef” U.S. airs every Wednesday at 8:00 pm EDT on FOX.

WidderWoman4 wrote:Good suspicions, SLA.  My, how jaded we've all become over the years. 

Sad but so true - I think I liked it better when I was naive to the goings on behind the scenes of these programs.  

SLA44 wrote:
Sad but so true - I think I liked it better when I was naive to the goings on behind the scenes of these programs.  

singlyme wrote:WW- cont'd from AGT:

Katrina.  I've enjoyed watching her confidence grow.  She's still uncertain.  I think the pouty face comes from concentration and fear when she's cooking. 

She just strikes me as someone who's been managing the mess hall for farm hands and is now living "A Star is Born."  She doesn't have style and she doesn't have looks, but boy, can she cook!