Lee is focusing not on avoiding elimination but on making the top dish, which seems like a good strategy. He's working on a ravioli that will apparently be filled with eggplant and half his body weight in garlic. Tracy still hasn't started on her pasta -- she's focusing on a meat sauce for a lasagna Bolognese. Joe seems to think that can't be done in 90 minutes if the tone of his voice is anything to go by. And what is Mike making. "I don't know, actually," he tells the judges. Well, it sounds delicious!
After having some trouble with her pasta-making equipment, Tracy calls an audible and decides to turn her lasagna into a ravioli dish. The meat sauce will go on top and inside, she'll stick some ricotta that she'll "flavor up a little bit." Jake's dish centers around stuffed squid. If you're wondering what in the hell that has to do with pasta, the judges share your confusion. If it's any consolation, his sauce apparently tastes good.
Joe counts down the final seconds, and Battle "Cook Us A Good Pasta Dish or It's Arrivederci" comes to a close. The winning Red Team waits upstairs -- man, I hope they didn't have to stand for the entire 90 minutes -- while the judges wait inside the MasterChef restaurant to taste the Blue Team's dishes. Tracy's up first with a ravioli Bolognese. Gordon asks if she thinks the dish is worthy of her staying on the show. "I'm not super-proud of this dish," Tracy begins, because she really knows how to sell herself apparently. The judges taste the dish and make a few faces that I wouldn't exactly describe as "lip-smacking." Once Tracy leaves to ruminate on the wisdom of leaving that medical career behind, the judges complain that she focused too much on the sauce and treated the pasta as an afterthought. A bright side? The sauce may not be a true Bolognese, Joe says, "but it may be the best Sloppy Joe I've ever had." That... doesn't sound too bright, actually.
Jake's turn: it's stuffed calamari with marinara over fresh fettuccini. "I think I'm presenting you with a great dish," Jake tells the judges, who taste his plate wordlessly before dismissing him. Joe thinks the fettuccini is quite good, but laments the fact that Jake didn't use rings of calamari that he poached in the tomato sauce. Instead, his pasta wasn't tossed with the sauce and got caked together. "A really clumsy dish," Gordon concludes.
Mike brings in his mystery dish, which turned out to be fettuccini with roasted peppers in a mushroom cream sauce. He, too, gets the silent treatment from the judges, who wait until he's out of the room to talk about him behind his back. The sauce has been over-reduced to the point of being greasy. "But at the end of the day," Joe points out, "this is the first one in three tries that's a complete pasta dish." So congratulations, Mike, on being the best so far of a fairly sorry lot. Gordon and Graham are less enthused.