The Great British Baking Show Recap: A Raw Deal

The Great British Baking Show
Bread Week
Season 17 Episode 4
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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Bread Week always makes me a little angry because everyone sits around talking about Paul Hollywood and how they can’t disappoint him, but this season I disliked it even more than usual because they disappointed Paul. And Nigella. Remember she counts, too. Though the challenges are mostly great, the bakers struggle to rise to the occasion, to be the best thing since sliced bread, to eat and leave no crumbs, and all the other bread puns that are still in Noel’s drafts folder.

I thought the signature challenge was especially inspired, tasking the bakers with updating garlic bread. Mmmm. Garlic bread. Do you think Paul and Nigella would have been upset if I just ordered up a dozen Domino’s Garlic Bread Twists to the tent and called it a day? Could you even do better than that? What’s great about this is that the brief is very specific but opens it up to all sorts of interpretations. Both Tom and Paul’s twin brother, Gary (who is giving out counterfeit handshakes and will soon be detained by Scotland Yard), make “Chelsea buns” with garlic and cheese that look like savory versions of cinnamon rolls. Dear Joe Jordan, brand-new CEO of Domino’s Pizza, please steal this idea. You can thank me with a free lifetime supply. Connie makes this magnificent-looking braided star. Yannis’s garlic bread looks like it’s tied up in a cage of string. Mo gets the most creative award for a garlic bread that looks like Welsh cartoon character SuperTed.

Wait. What’s that rumble? What is that falling from the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it SuperTed? No, it’s just hail. Yes, there is just a random hailstorm while everyone is trying to bake. Need I remind you that this show is filmed in summer? The best reaction is from Tom, who says, “Is this summat that happens down south?” You don’t get hail in Yorkshire? Oh hail no!

The other crazy thing about this week is that everyone now has a big white proofing box on their work surface. What kind of contraptions are these? Didn’t there used to be proofing drawers built into the workstations? Did those all short-circuit because of the hail? Why is no one using the drawer? Does Paul have a deal with the proofing-box company? 

As it turns out, we don’t need Gary to give out any fake handshakes because Paul and Nigella aren’t impressed with any of the bakes, no matter what shape they may be in. In fact, they’re all in the same shape: rough. Gabe’s, which is filled with pizza-inspired flavors, is raw and the judges don’t eat it. Yannis put so much butter in his garlic cage that it didn’t bake through and is also raw. They say Molly’s, which looks like a giant focaccia and quite appealing, has no flavor and the consistency is too dense. They have similar criticisms of nearly all the bakers, either not enough proofing (maybe the boxes just suck?) or not enough garlic or, in the case of Mo’s bear, too much pickled chile hiding the garlic flavor. The closest we get to good reviews are Clara’s buns (teehee), which look a little ugly, but they love the flavor and the bake, and also Tom’s Chelsea buns, even though Paul tells him to roll out thinner next time so that he can get more swirls and therefore more flavor. 

If the signature was “meh,” then the technical is an unmitigated disaster. This is the first week this season where the bakers get something vaguely resembling a recipe, but it’s a recipe for roasted grape and blue-cheese flatbreads, something that sounds entirely made up. They might as well bake a Xanadu pie, which is an imaginary dessert shaped like a roller skate that sings like Olivia Newton-John when you cut into it. (It tastes of glitter and the late ’70s.) No one knows how to make the things because no one knows what they’re supposed to look like. It’s not like saying, “make garlic bread,” which everyone understands. These look like naan, but with cheese and grapes inside of it somehow. Paul also gives the bakers only an hour, which is clearly not enough time, so everyone makes something resembling an English muffin (which, in England, they just call muffins), and they’re not nearly flat enough. Connie just chucks some of the filling on top of hers. Gary puts a whole mess of it on top and bakes it like a pizza, and I don’t blame him. If you told me “flatbread,” I would assume it was something like a pizza. The only one who comes close at all is Gabe, who ends up winning the challenge. Everyone else’s is just raw and terrible. Good on Nigella for not being afraid of whatever disease you get from eating raw bread dough (I believe it’s scurvy) and sampling some of them. 

If every one of these bakers failed and it truly is the worst technical in Paul’s 17 seasons, then that is the fault of the challenge, not the bakers. They’re all competent, and that they all fail in the same way shows that producers should work a little bit harder at testing these challenges. Even just putting the dimension of this flatbread at ten inches would have gotten everyone to roll them out flatter, fry them up better, and have a fighting chance of doing well. That’s the thing about Baking Show as opposed to other reality shows: We watch this to see the people succeed. We want them all to triumph, and not giving them enough direction or time and them all crashing out is not fun to watch. If you want to see people falling flat on their faces, I’m sure there are seasons’ worth of Wipeout on YouTube.

Finally, the showstopper offers us at least a little bit of triumph, but even that is in short supply. Nikki bowed out in the middle of the technical for “family reasons” (based on the memorial at the end of the episode, I would guess that her mother died or fell ill and she went to go be with her), so she’s not competing. I was worried that usual Baking Show rules would apply and that they wouldn’t send anyone home, but after they saved both bakers week one, they’re going to have too many bakers if they keep making these excuses. Paul says that, due to the quality of the overall week, someone needs to go home. Looks like Nikki has immunity this week, but there’s still a question of whether she comes back at all.

Anyway, the bakers are tasked with making a celebration centerpiece out of “enriched bread,” so something that is sweet and heavy like brioche, milk bread, Stollen, or panettone. Tom is making something called “Julekake.” “You’re a car key?” No, you’re the car key. Take that. If I were going to make a bread centerpiece, it would also rhyme with bukkake. That’s just how I roll. (Sorry. Noel’s folder was full of more bread puns than I anticipated.) 

Some of these creations look fantastic. Mo, who says he hates bread, makes a very impressive crescent moon to celebrate Eid, but Paul says that there is not enough of the pistachio and white-chocolate filling. Yannis makes a Christmas bread stall inspired by his childhood in Austria, but he overcooks his brioche, because he’s trying to make sure it’s not raw like his other creations, but also so that it would be structural enough to make into a stand. Gary makes a Christmas star that looks like it could be on the cover of a food magazine, but both judges say that the texture of his bread is too tight and chewy. Connie’s Easter basket is very cool and overflowing with buns, but Nigella says the bakes are all too compacted and Paul says there’s not enough flavor. Gabe’s very cool-looking Maypole, much like one of his drag outfits, has far too much going on for the judges. It’s clear just from looking at Molly’s harvest basket that it’s spent a little bit too much time in the oven, and Paul says the pumpkin purée in her buns doesn’t have nearly enough flavor. 

Review after review is similar, all near misses, or maybe near hits, depending on if your glass is half-full or your crust half-browned. Only two come close to something good. Clara makes a Bolo Rei, which is what the Portuguese eat on Christmas Eve. It translates to “king cake,” and it sounds very similar to the version that is served in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, except it’s packed with booze. Paul says that the textures are a bit off, but Nigella says that it’s the perfect cross of cake and bread that you would expect from the enriched bread they asked for. The real winner, however, is Tom’s rhymes-with-bukkake Nock, which is a Christmas elf. I hate to say it, but it might even be cuter than SuperTed. He made three different doughs, including more Chelsea buns to Paul’s updated specifications, to create this Nordic-looking gnome. It’s absolutely wonderful. While Paul says it’s a little too cakey (he’s never happy on Bread Week), Nigella says Tom’s full-on flavors make her want to make the Yuletide even gayer than Gabe’s throuple. Tom wins Star Baker for the second time in a row, and Molly, who has struggled consistently, is sent back home. What do you think she’ll do now that Bread is over? Probably loaf about. Sorry. There will be no more bread puns next week.