MasterChef Junior season 6 episode 3 review: Fruit tart troubles

MasterChef Junior season 6 episode 3 aired on Fox Friday night, and this was the first episode of the season that really started to feel like the show proper. After all, we now officially had our field of contestants, and they all took part in some traditional MasterChef competitions including a mystery box and an elimination challenge.

By and large, this does remain the show that you know so well over the years. There’s not that much that the producers are changing and we can’t say that we’re all together shocked by that. For MasterChef Junior in particular, you really don’t want to take too many big risk since you already have the wild-card factor of having contestants who are young and you want to present a fairly stable environment around them. Otherwise you’re running the risk that you’ll have a little bit of chaos and you’re experimenting with something that the kids aren’t familiar with from past seasons. This show is stressful enough!

At least with this episode, some of the kids Had an opportunity to do some really fun things within the confines of the show’s standard protocol. For the mystery box, we saw all the kids sets compete using ingredients that were basically letters of the alphabet. That gave them a lot of opportunities to show various aspects of their cultures and to also do things that were somewhat within their comfort zone. We had everything from baking to more traditional cooking, from sweet to savory. The results of this were fairly fun, but Remy who was the contestant who emerged victorious and got immunity. Meanwhile, your sister Olivia had to compete during the elimination challenge. (We love that there are dessert components showing up rather frequently so far this season.)

The elimination challenge was even one that we specifically enjoy just because it gave the kids just a specific challenge, while still enforcing some sort of creativity along the way. The challenges for this show that we really don’t like are the ones that just have contestants copy and paste the recipe that the chefs give them that doesn’t allow for any room or imagination at all. Then it just seems like we’re watching a rinse and repeat session and that’s not exactly interesting.

Here, the kids had to recreate the fruit tart, the sort of thing that majority of people out there don’t actually eat on a regular basis outside of the occasional office party. They had a lot of great food options to choose from, but that didn’t seem to be the thing that actually messed some of the kids up. The main problem that many of them seem to run into was the simple fact that the ingredients were challenging, and trying to assemble a pie crust in the right way prove difficult. Some were burnt, some were flimsy, and some just didn’t look great. Juelz Bugg and Zia Nelson were the two contestants eliminated; we were especially bummed out over Zia because it felt like we were getting a little bit more invested as to her character on the show.

CarterMatt Verdict

MasterChef Junior remains, well … MasterChef Junior. Having Joe Bastianich back this season is a nice touch, but otherwise it’s basically the same show that you’ve seen over the past few years and this episode was a prime example of that. It was still fun and inspiring, but it’s going to take a little bit of time to get completely invested in the remaining kids left. There’s just so many left in the field.

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