Bake!

Cookery programmes, reality shows and talent competitions are pretty much the mainstay of British television these days, so whoever thought of combining all three presumably knew that they were onto a winner from the word Go!

The Great British Bake Off (hereafter GBBO or Bake Off) is now into its fifth season and thirteen other countries have or will have their own versions. On the face of it a knock-out competition comprising a dozen people baking cakes, pastries, bread and the like may not sound that promising but it seems to have captured the imagination of the public, if for no other reason than that we can salivate over lots and lots of cake. After all what's not to like about cake?

The GBBO Team (Picture telegraph.co.uk)

The first series passed me by unnoticed and the second series I only started watching by chance. One evening, flicking through the channels in the vain hope of finding something interesting, I saw a place I knew, Valentines Mansion in Ilford. I recognised the tent in which Bake Off is filmed having seen it in Valentines Park earlier in the year. I watched the programme out of idle curiosity, there being nothing better on, and that was that, I don't think that I've missed a single show since. That second series was the one which got a lot of people interested in GBBO with viewing figures of over 4 million (Series One peaked at about 3 million for the final). The current series, Series Five attracted 10 million viewers for the now notorious "Bingate" episode in which Iain's Baked Alaska was removed from the freezer. It was a quite genteel, typically British drama that  even with judicious editing, was a tiny tremor as the show glided on.

Valentines Mansion, Ilford.

The current series has, to my mind, the most consistent, evenly matched group of bakers so far. Previous series have had a few outstanding bakers, in this series the winner is difficult to predict because all are good; very good. One of the things that I notice when watching them bake and talk about their baking, is that more than in any form of cookery, baking is an art and a science. There is a lot of talk on GBBO about the action of yeast, about gluten and the structure of gluten that makes baking much more precise than some other disciplines of cookery.  Dough has to be proved for very particular lengths of time, chocolate has to be melted at a precise temperature; there is so much precision required and so much that can go wrong. Which is probably why I would not make a very good baker (just about the only thing I bake are potatoes), because when it comes to cooking I have something of a free and easy attitude. In many things I am pernickety, a bit of a perfectionist and sometimes over obsessed with detail. When I was working, one of my jobs involved testing computer software, where attention to detail is a pretty fundamental requirement. I got something of a reputation as a perfectionist, as someone who went into a lot of detail. This is not something that I carry into the kitchen, it has to be said.

One of the reasons for my somewhat laissez faire attitude to cooking is recipes. Now I will grant you that recipes are important, but I find them an irritant and tend to view them as guidelines rather than hard and fast instructions. Firstly because the number of ingredients in many recipes is excessive. For instance Shepherd's Pie is one of the simplest dishes that I know of, yet I have found on the internet a recipe for it that requires sixteen separate ingredients, including some that you know you would use part of once, then  throw the remainder away untouched. Wasted food is a bugbear of mine and I detest buying ingredients that come only in larger quantities than are required for a particular dish and then having no further use for the rest. Secondly it is annoying to have to constantly refer to a recipe; in the kitchen I like a bit of spontaneity. Whereas I like order and certainty almost everywhere else, I'm prepared to accept a little chaos and improvisation when cooking.

What this tends to mean is that if I don't have all the right ingredients I will substitute something else; if I have too little or too much of something I tend not to worry. "Bung it in and see what happens" is my philosophy. To date I haven't poisoned anyone (as far as I know) and apart from some Pork Meatballs that were a disaster and had to be rescued with some last minute inventiveness (I blame the recipe, which on that occasion I was following quite closely) most things I have cooked have turned out Ok. While this works quite nicely for stews and casseroles, chillies and curries, I have my doubts whether it would be as effective when making meringue or profiteroles.

Bake Off is a competition rather than a cookery programme; there are no step-by-step guides on how to make any of the pies or pastries. For that sort of thing there are a whole range of programmes with celebrity chefs broadcasting their wisdom. Some are good, some not so good. Jamie Oliver for instance is a chef whose recipes are generally down to earth, good, family fare. I bought his 15 Minute Meals recipe book recently and while fifteen minutes is a bit optimistic for some recipes I don't think it's meant to be taken literally. His recipes are pretty easy to follow and the results are decent. On the other hand there is Nigella Lawson. When I have watched her I have despaired at the amount of fat and sugar she uses and one "dish" she made consisted of frying garlic, adding a tin of tomatoes and poaching an egg in them.  To my mind that is just heating things up, not cooking, but what do I know, Nigella's the one on TV.[1]

Jamie Oliver cooking (Picture guardian.co.uk)

Nigella Lawson not cooking (Picture Daily Mirror)

A problem a lot of people encounter when cooking is getting everything to the table at the right time, cooked for the right amount of time and at the right temperature. Sometimes this requires a bit of multi-tasking and overall, I am not an advocate of multi-tasking. To me multi-tasking is a skill that people make a virtue of when in fact their vice is their inability to manage time and tasks properly. It is like the phrases that people use on their CV's, like "Energetic," or "Punctual," or "Enthusiastic" as opposed, presumably to "Slothful," or "Persistently Late," or "Indifferent." Saying that one has an ability to multi-task is frequently just an excuse for doing lots of things badly but simultaneously.

After four years of watching Bake Off I suppose that I ought by now to have become enthused by baking and be making cakes and pies left, right and centre. Somehow I don't think that my style of cooking is best suited to pastry, but one day, one day soon, I guess I ought to have to try.

  

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[1] Google Jamie Oliver and most images show him cooking; Google Nigella Lawson and very few images show her doing anything with food.