After last night's double elimination, and the twist which changed literally nothing, five teams have been eliminated. That means there's, I dunno, about a hundred teams left. I don't even remember most of these people, as they were on the show back when it was going head-to-head with Punky Brewster in prime time. There's some guy who looks like Anthony Callea, and one team which I think is actually the remnants of Hanson. Oh, and Gianni and Zana, everyone remembers them. I hope Zana gets in a fight with Lauren.

Anyway, all these teams gather in Kitchen Headquarters and are told that they now have to leave Kitchen Headquarters in sponsor's cars, and go to the sponsor's supermarket, to buy ingredients for an RSL buffet. They are divided into two teams, called the black team and the white team, although currently they're all in their regular clothes, so there's no way of telling which team is which and god only knows who's on which team. Oh look there's that sideburns guy, I remember him sort of. His wife looks like she fell asleep in a wind tunnel.

To a soundtrack of Aussie pub rock hits, the teams proceed to the North Ryde RSL, which is either paying a lot of money to be featured on TV, or being paid a lot of money to compensate for the reputational hit. Here, they put on black and white aprons, so thankfully we now know which team everyone's on. Who everyone is, that's a different matter.

The white team is making an Asian buffet. Mike and Tarq are contributing with pork belly. Mike notes that making a perfect pork belly in 90 minutes is going to be extremely difficult, so it's a fairly stupid decision on their part to try.

On the black team, JP and Nelly have a plan: whenever anyone gets stressed they'll start a singalong of Ain't No Mountain High Enough. By this means they plan to convince the other members of the team to murder them, which will prove a marvellous release of tension. Everyone joins in with gusto, except for Lauren and Carmine, which is the first time this year I've felt admiration for them. Also for some reason JP and Nelly are referring to the black team as a "family", which is completely inexplicable and extremely ill-advised given that, firstly, they don't know these people at all, and secondly, pretty soon they're going to be trying to destroy their dreams.

"Cooking for the public adds a little element of danger," says the black team's Gareth, who recognises that the more diners, the greater the chance of his horribly unsanitary methods resulting in a death. Meanwhile Lauren and Carmine are making spinach and ricotta rotolao, following the old dictum: if you've proven yourself to suck at making pasta, just keep making it.

Colin Fassnidge enters the kitchen to yell that there's one hour to go, while Pete stands next to him grinning insanely, weighing up which of the contestants he will eat first. Pete explains to Colin that today the teams are working in a group. Colin nods, his keen chef's brain immediately able to comprehend this concept.

Anna and Jordan are making satay beef, and clashing over how long to cook it – the first cracks begin appearing in their hitherto idyllically disturbing mother-son relationship. Meanwhile Laura has put seven thousand vegetables in a blender and turned them into a chilli sauce that is fairly obviously way too hot. But Laura is young and feckless and cares not for your calls for moderation.

Incidentally, if you're not quite clear on who any of these people are: don't worry, it doesn't really matter. The important thing to keep in mind is that the white team is definitely the best team, because it includes Rosie and Paige, the best people in this series, and Laura and Mitch, writers of MMMBop. Also the white team does not include Lauren and Carmine, who are awful. Speaking of awful, Gianni and Zana aren't there because the top-scoring teams from the three instant restaurant groups were excused from the first challenge, which is why Zana and Lauren aren't wrestling on the kitchen floor yet.

Over on the black team, JP and Nelly are getting stressed by their teammates' incompetence and letting their ongoing impersonation of the cast of Full House slip a little. They are particularly worried about Tasia and Gracia, who are suffering from a rogue pressure cooker. They argue over whose fault it is that the pressure cooker wasn't closed properly, illustrating their arguments with increasingly agitated hand movements. In a way, the pressure cooker is a metaphor for the whole situation, but in another way, it'd be awful if we said that.

Diners begin arriving at the RSL, little suspecting what digestive nightmares are about to be unleashed upon them. Pete notes that this is a very difficult challenge, because they are making food for people to eat and the people who eat it might not like eating it. Pete really has a handle on this analysis thing. Meanwhile members of the two teams trash talk each other's menu selections, and Mike and Tarq notice that JP and Nelly have misspelt their menu, which refers to "Mediterainean" cuisine and "crumed prawns". But then, spelling is not JP and Nelly's forte: their training is in singalongs. Also, Mike refers to the "crumed prawns" mistake as "pretty crummy", so who's the real monster?

On the white team, Anna and Jordan have made a total balls-up of the beef, but luckily they don't care. Eve and Jason have finished preparing their prawns, and now all that's left is for Jason to rub them on his sideburns. Colin notes disapprovingly that Eve and Jason are using a lot of store-bought stuff out of jars, but if you were going out to lunch, would you rather something from a jar, or to take a gamble on Eve and Jason's skills? No-brainer.

Meanwhile Rosie and Paige are having a lot of trouble with their duck, which is fine, except Paige calls it a "ducksaster", which is disappointing because we know Paige can do better than that.

With fifteen minutes to go, Laura hasn't been on screen for a while, so she pops up to get Rosie to taste her curry. Rosie thinks it's great. Laura hugs her. For some reason the hug is shown in slow motion with inspirational music. Either someone thought that Laura's ability to make Rosie-pleasing curry was a high point of triumph in the series, or they're trying to manufacture an on-set romance between them.

Jordan is panicking. Anna is wandering aimlessly around the kitchen. Carmine and Lauren are still refusing to acknowledge anyone else's existence. Nelly is shouting for the first time in her life. In the white kitchen everyone is putting their filthy hands all over everything and you can be pretty sure that if the people in the dining room could see this they'd throw up and go to Nando's.

It's service time, and the good people of North Ryde brace themselves for an epidemic of food poisoning and explosive diarrhoea. Everyone lines up to grab some food and meet some people who might be starring in a dishwasher commercial someday. Pete and Colin begin tasting the various dishes and Colin bitches and moans about Eve and Jason using bottles and jars like the snob he is.

At the counter, Paige has met an extremely tall man, and his amazing height has her imagining a future filled with comical scenes of standing on a box to kiss him and breaking into stately homes by having him throw her over the gates.

Back at the judges' table, Pete and Colin are extremely unimpressed with a succession of white team dishes. Jordan's home-made egg noodles are surprisingly edible, but lose points for his dishonesty in calling them home-made: he actually made them in the RSL.

Time to taste the dishes of the black team, AKA the bad team full of bad people. Kell says the challenge is right up her and Nev's alley, but she immediately puts the lie to this claim by pronouncing the t in "buffet". Like "buff it". "Who doesn't like a buff it?" she asks, rhetorically/annoyingly. Anyway the answer is: lots of people don't like a buff it, because it includes a crappy dish by Nev and Kell that tastes like crap.

Carmine and Lauren are very proud of their dish and also of the fact that they have made no friends today. Also they have redeemed themselves in terms of pasta, though not in terms of personality. Meanwhile Alex and Gareth are enjoying the sexual attention of several schoolgirls, and if they spent more time focusing on food and less time on making themselves look hot, maybe they wouldn't have made the garbage dish that they did.

The winning team will be that which receives the most money from the patrons who can pay whatever they think their meal was worth. It's a miracle that anyone pays anything at all, but somehow the diners are guilt tripped into offering something, however pathetically small. The standard is so low that one woman says, "Fifteen dollars – worth every cent", like she's being incredibly generous. What a pack of cheapskates. The only defence of their penny-pinching behaviour might be that they have been forced to choke down the shame-sodden barnyard detritus that MKR contestants typically concoct.

It's time for judgment. Official judgment, that is: as viewers we made our own judgment of these people weeks ago. "I'm so proud of everyone," says Nelly, expressing a powerful emotion that is absolutely one hundred per cent unjustified. She breaks down in tears as she explains that "I've never met a group as passionate as this one". Does this mean she often meets groups of amateur cooks, with less passion than her current group? Or is she comparing passion across non-parallel groups: is she saying that this group has more passion than the fire brigade she met last week? More passion than her mum's bridge club? Look, it's probably not important.

The judges critique the white team. They tell Anna and Jordan that making their own egg noodles was crazy and that their maverick recklessness will kill us all. They then tell Eve and Jason that using ingredients from jars is worse than Hitler and they need to be ashamed of themselves. Mitch and Laura were great, Paige and Rosie were rubbish, and Mike and Tarq are inconsequential.

On to the black team, which in a just world would receive a twenty per cent penalty for having hearts the same colour as their aprons. Alex and Gareth cop a pasting for not tasting their dish and therefore not realising how untalented they are. Carmine and Lauren are lauded for their marvellous pasta, proving in the traditional MKR way that there is no god. Tasia and Gracia also did really well, which everyone seems to find amazing because they're Asian – as if nobody on this show ever cooks outside their own cultural cul-de-sac.

The dish of the day was created by Mitch and Laura, which is fantastic because Lauren and Carmine thought it would be them, and seeing Lauren and Carmine disappointed is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Also, the white team was the people's choice, which means double disappointment for them. Oh god it feels good.

JP and Nelly are shattered. JP puts his head in his hands and weeps. Maybe you could try singing Ain't No Mountain High Enough, see if that helps. Nelly is distressed and confused by this new emotion you mortals call "sadness".

Tune in tomorrow to see the black team compete to impress well-known hobo Curtis Stone.

• Episode 23: Round 2 at the MKR Corral
• Episode 22: Vicious snipes in the dining room
• Episode 21: The police finally do something about MKR
• Episode 14: The one with the spaghetti in a bag
• Episode 13: The not-so-shocking mystery judge
• Episode 12: The one we've all been waiting for
• Episode 11: 'True blue' couple burn chances
• Episode 10: JP and Nelly do 'tea-riffic'
• Episode 9: The great spice dilemma
• Episode 7: Introducing Group Two's villain
• Why Zana is Seven's best new talent
• Episode 5: Confusion about Malta
• Episode 3: Cougar couple disastrous meal
• Episode 2: Dirty shows and a perfect 10
• Episode 1: Meet the new batch