After the judges are sent away and the challenge is presented, we cut to the judges discussing their expectations and sampling an example of the challenge. I’ve noticed that they comment on the execution of those examples, as though they had been prepared from a)fully written) recipe by a third party baker.
So do the judges actually make the examples, or do they have someone else do them?
Googling, the example bakes are prepared by professional home economists. In the case of the Great British Bake Off, that is Hattie Baker. Formerly the person was Faenia Moore. (And others are listed in IMDB as home economists.)
I’ve always wondered who baked those perfect examples they show.
This was a tough week for just about everyone. It must have been a matter of very small degrees to determine who would get sent home. Paul even said the results of one part of the competition was the worst he’d ever seen!
I was blown away a couple of seasons ago when they asked for flapjacks and nobody made pancakes!
Hopefully this is a whoosh, but a UK flapjack is nothing like a pancake, more like a cereal bar.
Just look at what they call a cookie! When I want a biscuit, I expect gravy!
I’m a USAian. What the UK calls a flapjack, we call an energy bar (or oat bar or sometimes a granola bar). It’s a pancake here.
Right? What do they call a buttermilk biscuit with gravy?
That technical was a massacre, but none of the contestants were particularly good with bread. It’s a weak batch this year.
They have nothing like sausage gravy, and the closest thing to a biscuit is a scone.
By it’s proper name: Wet Flour over Dry Flour 
About the technical challenges: a recent episode had the bakers make anything they wanted from a group of provided ingredients (a la Chopped). I didn’t like this as a technical challenge since the purpose is to see how they all succeed making the same thing. Giving them all the same ingredients and letting them go seemed more like a signature challenge to me.
I couldn’t believe that none of these supposedly accomplished amateur bakers even KNEW what flatbread is! I watch a ton of cooking shows and YouTube videos and I knew that the ingredients needed to be incorporated into the dough and then rolled out very, very flat. Most of them left the FLATbread too THICK… it’s not called THICKbread, ya know. Didn’t Paul even say roll them out to a “TEN INCH CIRCLE”? Damn. This group was really dumb on the technical.
And the old guy (who presumably has more life/cooking experience than some of the young-ish contestants in the group) piled the FILLINGS on top of his creation as if it were pizza.
Yes, I could forgive the contestants not knowing to incorporate the roasted grapes into the dough; but surely they’d have known that a big slab of dough wasn’t going to cook by pan-frying. Like some sort of mass hysteria..
Roasted grapes? I didn’t see this episode. What were they trying to make?
Not to the contestants - the technical had no instructions. All Paul said before leaving the tent was “this is about size, colo(u)r and, more importantly, flavo(u)r.” The 10” comment was in the back tent to Nigella.
I found the recipe in question; “Paul Hollywood’s Blue Cheese & Roasted Grape Flatbreads.”
In retrospect, that was probably a mistake.
I wish Paul and Nigella would bring out a sample of the technical when they go out to judge. I’d love to see the contestants’ faces when they see what it’s supposed to look like!
Glad to know that the show is ongoing. My girlfriend and I binged it years ago before we lost interest in cooking shows.
What I liked best was the way the contestants appreciated and assisted each other, so unlike typical USA-ian competitions.
I noticed the cooperation on other UK competition shows, unlike the bitter competitiveness on the American versions.
Especially the women. They started with the usual 6/6 M/F split, and after four weeks there are only two women left. (Okay, one left for a family tragedy.)