Throng

We're out of the Masterchef Kitchen this week.  Instead, our contestants are heading to the Langham hotel where they'll be hosting 100 stars from the hospitality industry.

Two teams will produce 500 canapes.  Two hot and two cold.

Nigel Anderson is asked to lead the Red team.  He picks Karyn Fisk as the leader of the blue team.  It's strategic.  Nigel isn't sure Karyn is up for leadership.

Nigel picks Brett McGregor, Rob Trathen and Sue Drummond

7:30pm Wednesday, March 17 on TV One

The top eight contestants face the daunting team challenge of preparing canapés at Auckland hotel, The Langham, for 120 VIPs and celebrities, on MasterChef New Zealand, tonight at 7.30pm on TV ONE.

The winner of the previous challenge is appointed leader of the Blue team and gets to choose the leader of the Red team, before they take turns selecting their team mates. Each team has four hours to prepare four canapés - two hot, two cold - for the guests. That's a total of nearly 500 canapés per team, and the first hurdle is each canapé must be approved by The Langham's executive chef, Volker Marecek, before it can be sent out to the guests.

"We're not giving too much away" said Mark Sainsbury tonight on Close Up "but here's a few clues:

Grab a trolley. Round up three Masterchef wannabes. Whip around the aisles. Pick up the finest ingredients. Polish, dice, slice, sizzle, garnish and serve to some very special guests."

But who are these very special diners?  That's possibly the only "can't say much" element left from the spoiler laid out before us.

From the promo, it looks like Rob Trathen, Kirsty Cardy and the first eliminee Christine Hobbs will be cooking dinner.  Tune in at 7pm to find out who they're cooking for I guess...

Kelly Young became the fourth person to be eliminated from Masterchef New Zealand last night but as she told Throng this morning, it definitely wasn't the end of the road for her as far as cooking was concerned.  However, she was a little apprehensive about watching her pie disaster back.

"I didn't actually want to watch it.  I was nervous about what was going to be said and what they were going to show.  It was the most embarrassing moment of my life I think."

Certainly not one to stay off the bike once you've fallen off it, Kelly was determined to master the very pie that got her eliminated.  "My mother went to Australia and came back with a recipe from one of her friends", Kelly told us, "so she'd obviously told them that I'd had a bit of a disaster so her Australian friend got me a really good pumpkin pie recipe. Let me tell you.. a lot different."

Bubbly aerobics instructor Kelly Young was not surprised to be the fourth contestant eliminated from MasterChef New Zealand after having a ‘nightmare’ in the kitchen.

On tonight's show, the top nine contestants faced a Mystery Box Challenge, requiring them to make their own pastry and cook two pies - one savoury and one sweet - for judges Ross Burden, Simon Gault and Ray McVinnie, and guest judge Judith Tabron of Soul Bar & Bistro.

They had two and a half hours to make their two pies with ingredients they choose from the pantry. With a wide range of ingredients on offer, the contestants used their imagination to create some truly unusual and innovative recipes. Unfortunately for Young, her idea didn't work.

Young started creating in her head and grabbed a range of things from the pantry - for her sweet, she chose to make a pumpkin pie, and for her savoury, she made a stuffed chicken breast pie with ham, mash, peppers and mushrooms.

7:30pm Wednesday, March 10 on TV One

MasterChef New Zealand tonight (at 7.30pm on TV ONE) sees the top nine contestants face a Mystery Box Challenge, requiring them to make their own pastry and cook two pies - one savoury and one sweet - for guest judge Judith Tabron of Soul Bar & Bistro.

They have two and a half hours to make their two pies with ingredients they choose from the pantry.

The winner of the previous challenge had the advantage of knowing what today's challenge would be, but can he use that advantage to cook the day's best pies.

With a wide range of ingredients on offer, the contestants use their imagination to create some truly unusual and innovative recipes. But they soon find that cooking the perfect pie is much harder than it looks - especially when they face not three, but four tough pie critics.

Being thrown in the deep end and given the executive chef role for this weeks task left Tracey Gunn feeling pretty filthy when the final outcome meant she was eliminated from the Masterchef, as Tracey tells us, without cooking a bad dish.

"They never explained why they chose me or Brett. We didn't get to choose our teams or who got to cook what, we were just told who was doing what.  That worked really well for the Blue team but it didn't work very well for us.  Brett was assigned the entrée which meant he could cook that, get it out and then just run his team while between the entrée and main, I was in the kitchen whisking the béarnaise sauce for an hour because that was the task I had been assigned."