MasterChef India Season 7 Episode 31 is titled ‘Blind Relay Challenge’ and the synopsis reads – The home cooks showcase their knife skills before being divided into three teams for the blind relay challenge. The teams compete in a high-stakes race for the coveted immunity pin.
The judges of the show include Vikas Khanna and Ranveer Brar, who are joined by Garima Arora, the first-ever female chef to be a judge on the show. The cooking competition show is a nationwide quest to find the best ‘home cook’ and draws out some of the most brilliant chefs from across India. The judges sample recipes from various cuisines that the contestants prepare in their search for India’s ‘MasterChef’. The show is produced by Endemol Shine India and it is directed by Neeraj Shetty.
-MasterChef India Season 7 Episode 31 Review and Recap Contains Spoilers-
After the top 10 contestants of the season were selected last week, in episode 31 we are met with only 9 contestants. Nazia, who had left the show initially, due to her daughter’s bad health rejoined and made it to the top 10 but she has left the show again due to the same reason, as told by the judges. Moving on, the kitchen is set up for another challenge as chef Ranveer whips out a cutting board, knife and a potato.
Confused by the potato, soon they are amazed by Chef Ranveer’s precise skills as he cuts the potato into a zig-zag accordion perfectly. It’s their first challenge for the day and the first three home cooks to make the similar potato accordion, will get a benefit. Soon all the 9 home start snipping and chopping and within a few seconds, Sachin calls up the judges to check his accordion for thickness between the slices and the overall length.
Luckily he passes the test, some contestants are rejected as it was not exactly the same. The second person to pass the test was Aruna and soon followed by Deepa. They are the first three winners of the challenge and they get the benefit of becoming the team captains and choosing their own teams.
Sachin gets to choose first and he picks Nayanjyoti and the third member is picked by the second member & Nayanjyoti picks Priyanka, which makes the red team. Aruna gets to pick next and she chooses Gurkirat and he chooses Kamaldeep, making team green. Lastly, Deepa chooses Santa and Suvarna – who is left last to join them and they make the blue team.
After the teams were chosen the judges reveal that they will be given 60 minutes to cook but it was a blind team relay challenge. It means that the members of one team will cook in a relay for 20 minutes each but they can’t discuss things with each other. Only the captains are asked to stay and the other members are sent to the back where they can’t even interact with each other.
The captains are then revealed that they have to make a dish by using bananas. They are presented with bananas in raw, ripe, leaf, stem and flour form; by using all the ingredients they have to make one dish. Also, it’s an immunity pin challenge, which means the winning team will further compete for the pin.
The team captains quickly fill up their baskets and start cooking as they only have 20 minutes to set up the base of the dish which can be further made by the other team members. So they had to make such things that would be easily identified by others and they can cook without any confusion. After 20 minutes, Sachin chose Nayanjyoti to cook next, Aruna chose Kamaldeep and Deepa chose Santa, while they were given 30 seconds to summarise everything, to the next person.
In haste, the captains often forgot to tell everything that they had planned and had in mind. This led to more confusion and alteration in the dish, as the members were not able to analyse everything & many were not even familiar with the core ingredients. Lastly, Priyanka, Gurkirat and Suvarna from their teams were the ones who had to assemble all the ingredients on a plate and present them.
When the other members were cooking, the captains and the members who have cooked already were monitoring everything from the screen room. After the time was over, all the members were called to the kitchen where they were finally able to express what they had intended and take a look at the final results, which may or may not look like that.
Team blue was called upon first, where they had made handmade spaghetti with unmeat balls. Spaghetti was made from banana flour and the balls were filled with banana stems. The judges commented that the plating was dull and the two kinds of sauces were very different and didn’t combine well. The episode however ended and we will be seeing the other two dishes tomorrow.
Final Thoughts: MasterChef India Season 7 Episode 31
This season has been the dullest, most chaotic and unmotivated so far. First of all, once a contestant leaves, they shouldn’t be allowed to join so easily without any test or challenge – to prove that they are equipped to keep up with the other contestants. Maybe if Nazia hadn’t joined back, the lineup of the top 9 contestants would be different too. Now, if I were to suggest, they could have competition in eliminated contestants and bring a wild card to make it top 10 again.
Other than that, in today’s challenge I expected some different pairing of contestants, but be it the judges or the cooks themselves, they all choose the same people. Nayanjyoti choosing Priyanka again was a ‘not-again’ moment but looking at the preview, it looks like a good decision – since they will probably be competing for the immunity pin.
MasterChef India Season 7 is currently streaming on SonyLIV and a new episode is released from Monday to Friday at 9 PM.
Also Read: Check Out All of Our MasterChef India Season 7 Reviews
Team Red will win Immunity Pin Contest.