Where would we be without table sauce? We've been using it for thousands of years: the Romans even made one from pickled, rotten fish guts that makes Marmite look positively palatable in comparison.
However, from the panicked behaviour of the candidates throughout this week's condiment-making task you'd have been forgiven for thinking they'd never heard of relishes, mustards and chutneys before. This was odd, given the enlightening dockside lecture about the history of the spice trade they'd been treated to at the initial briefing:
"One of the commodities that used to come into these docks, was things like cinnamon and saffron."
Well, that's cheating really; Lord Sugar practically did the work for them. On you go, teams, one lot of you can make saffron jam, the other - cinnamon ketchup.
Delicious.
In order to mix things up a bit (or create candidate chutney, if you will) Lord Sugar sent Nick and Duane over to Team Sterling, who have lost every task to date. Katie went over to Team Phoenix and was welcomed by a guffawing Adam:
"We do things differently here. Like winning. Ahaha."
Adam has clearly never been introduced to the concepts of a) hubris b) foreshadowing c) the phrases 'pride goes before a fall' or 'famous last words' and d) not being a smug git.
Over in Team Sterling, perennially frustrated 'food professional' Jane was quick to jump into the fray with a lecture on healthy eating; telling her team mates that the chutney market in the UK is very crowded and also any product with more than 73g per 100g of salt wouldn't be allowed on sale.
The result? Sterling decided to make a 'luxury' (read: gloopily unhealthy) chutney. Luckily for her, Jane had already set her expression in a droopy pout before finding out she'd been overruled, so at least she didn't have to waste any energy changing it.
In contrast, Team Phoenix decided to go with a 'Mediterranean' inspired tomato sauce (read: ketchup with flecks of basil). Instead of playing it safe and calling it 'Foreign Sauce: Tastes A Bit Like Abroad', they decided to name their product Belissimo, which means absolutely nothing at all in Italian.
Bellissimo, on the other hand, means something along the lines of 'very very beautiful'. But - and apologies if you're someone who is physically attracted to sauces - that wasn't a particularly sensible name either, so it's possibly for the best that they misspelled it.
Possibly.
For all that Phoenix weren't terribly good at creating a brand, they were quite good at creating a product: even if it did look a little bit like bottled scrapings from a slaughterhouse floor.
Team Sterling weren't quite so fortunate, partially because whiny-faced Jane wasted a lot of time wrangling over the recipe ('I'm a food professional') and partially because they put so much chilli in their pineapple chutney that it was reclassified as a chemical weapon and confiscated by UN inspectors.
Ok, that's an exaggeration. But they certainly couldn't take it to the trade pitches Lord Sugar had 'laid on' for them (is there anything in the UK that he hasn't reclined against?), leading to an extremely entertaining scene that saw Team Sterling attempting to pitch an invisible product to a deeply unimpressed panel.
Emperor's New Chutney, anyone?
Despite that - fairly massive - setback, they rallied and managed to produce some spicy yellow goo to sell to the general public. And they were fairly successful, despite their repeated assertions to buyers that they 'only used locally-sourced, British ingredients'.
Apprentice Chutney: pick up a jar from your friendly, neighbourhood pineapple farm today.
At the same time, Team Never-Lose were struggling as they hadn't made enough of their congealed tomato-cement product. The solution? They increased the price to £3.95 a bottle.
Unsurprisingly- as the sauce didn't come with a free car- they failed to sell enough, handing Team Sterling a fairly easy win.
As team leader, Katie was in a bit of a jam. Looks like she picked the wrong week to join the boys. Luckily for her, Lord Sugar couldn't forgive Michael's poor efforts on the sales sub-team so he got the chop.
A bit unfair really: the other team had far more to sell in the first place. Michael would never have been able to ketchup (sorry).