John Torode makes life tough for the cooks in the palate skills test with his gnocchi and mushroom chicken dish in the fourth quarter-finals of MasterChef.

The Australian chef cooked poached and fried pepper chicken, herbed gnocchi, mushroom and tarragon sauce, a dish with three different types of mushrooms to identify and which requires a high level of technical skill.

Theo, Joe, Anna and Luke are this week’s quarter-finalist and without seeing how John prepared his dish, they are given just a few minutes to taste the food before being asked to write down exactly what is in it, using their palate and sense of smell. They are then asked to recreate the chicken dish without a recipe in just one hour and fifteen minutes, selecting from ingredients that may or may not belong in the dish.

For their second challenge, the four must go head-to-head to cook their own show-stopping dish for John and Gregg, as well as a surprise judge. This week the guest judge is the respected food critic Jay Rayner.

Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster, and regular food critic for the Guardian and Observer newspapers.

At the end of the day’s challenges in the kitchen, it was Luke and Theo that the judges declared the winners of the fourth MasterChef quarter-final 2014. The two cooks have taken another step closer to the MasterChef champion 2014 crown as they head to the semi-finals.