On Your Marks, Get Set, Baaaaake! A Thread for Great British Baking Show / Bake Off & all of its sundry delights

the bits at the beginning are lame but I like their general banter, it’s an extremely earnest and wholesome show, I’m not looking for something too subversive

yeah same

so between these two episodes, the technical challenge is utterly meaningless and has no bearing on the final result, cool

Oh, that's not fair. When you present uncooked bread as the centrepiece of your showstoppe, that's got to negate the good round you had before.

no arguments with the winner here

and of course it's easier to win the technical when they are only two other people

Tense final – almost too tense. Very happy with the winner. I think it would’ve been borderline sadistic if he hadn’t won – the editing basically turned the last round into The Passion of the Giuseppe. Although I had a feeling, after they had him getting verklempt about his family, that he was going to win later on.

I feel like Matt has grown on me over the season - when he’s content to remain low-key, he’s very gentle and sweet. Meanwhile Noel seems like he’s actively trying to upset the contestants, and I don’t enjoy watching it. Otherwise seemed like the nicest bunch of contestants in awhile.

noel in those first couple of challenges was every gurning man in the club who won't stop touching you and talking at you. i'd definitely like matt a lot more with probably anyone else as a partner, the shared weirdly unwholesome whimsy doesn't work for me at all.

Australian Bake Off starts in a couple of weeks.

but freya mentioned during her exit interview that they'd been watching Kenyan Bake Off and that i'd like to see.

(also, their road trip looked like fun, but i didn't see a lot of social distancing)

I actually do have a very small problem with the winner, but it might just be because I wasn't paying attention in the early rounds when they (presumably) first mentioned that their father was a professional chef and baker. I think I might have rooted a little harder for someone else, had I fully taken that on board.

They should change it so that the person who wins star baker gets the prep room of the person kicked out, so you can end up as a 7-ovened baker-god.

Just watching the final Extra Slice and Chrystelle totally comes off as someone who is in it for a media career.

Whereas Guiseppe comes across as an absolutely top bloke. "I sound like one of the Dolmio men" about finished me.

(also, their road trip looked like fun, but i didn't see a lot of social distancing)

― koogs, Wednesday, November 24, 2021 6:50 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

most of the photos were outdoors iirc?

good final, loved this group of contestants. really wish they’d let jurgen crash the final in retrospect. chrystelle really might have taken it if the focaccia hadn’t been a disaster

chigs having just started baking 18 months ago is pretty crazy, his instincts are great. gives me hope, might be my bee hobby once I’m done with my residency

That was a great final and a worthy winner. Chigs gets the people's vote for being such a gentleman.

As she brought the showstopper up, I figured Chrystelle had won but the focaccia, the focaccia... I still beat myself up for open goals I missed in five-a-side matches from 25 years ago, I wonder how you process something like that?

I still don't know what happened to it. Did she just put too much oil in and it didn't bake?

That was certainly the way they presented it. Lots of focusing on her pouring copious amounts of oil in while claiming this was something she learned in bread week.

In retrospect, the whole episode was presented as Giuseppe's via dolorosa to make his victory seem more earned and dramatic; equally, the moment where Chrystelle was poking at the oily dish in the oven was the signal for the focaccia calamity.

i feel like chrystelle was absolutely bound to win this if she didn't shit the bed, but she did. i would love an explanation about what happened with the raw focaccia and am not seeing anything online yet?

true crime podcast about what tf happened to crystelle's foccacia

— thiziri (taylor’s version) (@thizbous) November 23, 2021

chrystelle’s foccaccia i felt like it should not have been cooked in that deep ceramic dish, at a guess maybe oven too low & took on the oil as it was baking, also it didnt seem that it had risen much during prooving

Didn't she say she was only baking it for 15 min? Wtf, it's truly mind-bending.

Anyway I'm happy that justice prevailed in the end.

xpost lol i missed that, that’d do it O_o

Yeah but she’ll have practised it many times. In fact she says as much on her IG post. I can believe her that it’s a mystery why it failed on the day, but what I can’t get my head around is how she seemed to have no inkling it had happened until the judges cut the bread. I’m not a baker, but wouldn’t you be at least concerned about whether it has been in long enough or not? Stick a toothpick in or something? Maybe I missed that, or maybe it was left out in editing.

Mind you, I also couldn’t believe Giuseppe was leaving his Belgian buns in longer when even my view of them through the oven door was enough to make me remark “err, they look too brown already”.

She stuck a thermometer in and said it was hot enough, but maybe that was just the boiling oil?

Yeah the burnt buns thing was weird too, nerves I guess.

Also she appears to have responded to every single comment on that IG post (!).

that's apparently her thing, which makes sense given the brand she's building.

Chrystelle, seems nice, was a good contestant, happy for her to do whatever

I'm usually fine with whoever wins in the finale but G is probably the first baker whom I was actively rooting for.

Also, while I think I'm more fond of Noel than some people here, I think the fact that Giuseppe was the only one who kissed the spatula is only going to encourage him.

oh they'll be selling Mr Spatulas before too long

Noel did have a weirdly aggressive vibe at times this season, but Matt is so much more obnoxious and unfunny.

Noel is redeemed by a capacity for empathy which Matt just doesn’t possess, even though at times you can see he’s striving for it.

Yes otm!

really great finish imho, i was very on board for the entire final four and thought any of them would have made a terrific winner. makes it feel like one of the strongest casts of all the seasons i've seen. if it weren't for Crystelle's raw dough i do think she could have possibly taken it, but how could anyone possibly begrudge the adorable, hardworking and extremely skilled Giuseppe making his family proud??? ;_;

I'm sort of disgusted with myself for finding Chrystelle disingenuous but the feeling persists. I think Noel, not exactly the model of perspicacity, was otm when he teased her about wanting it so bad it hurts.
Can someone release me from feeling guilty about this?
Anyway, I'm team Giuseppe, all the way.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Saturday, November 20, 2021 3:34 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

i’m rewatching the semifinal and this bit by noel was soooo good and cutting

It's okay to be a in a competition and want to win, though!

Competitiveness ≠ narcissism

agreed!

Oz version starts on monday afternoon and is daily (for i guess 2 weeks)

i thought this was interesting
https://www.vulture.com/article/great-british-bake-off-finale-anti-brexit-metaphor.html

Let’s start with an incontrovertible fact: This was a very English season of Bake Off. For the first time since 2011, there were no Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish bakers in the tent. Thus, unlike a typical season of Bake Off, its story was not about the constituent parts of the U.K. coming together to make a glorious whole. Instead, this would be a season about England, the former imperial heartland that led the charge for Leave, and its relationship to Europe and the rest of the world.

In place of the token Scottish or Welsh baker, the exotic color this season came courtesy of two contestants who loomed above the rest: the Italian Giuseppe and the German Jürgen. Both were products of a pre-Brexit age, Europeans who had made lives in England as adults, and they absolutely dominated the opening stretch, taking home five of the first seven Star Baker honors. Jürgen and Giuseppe were not just great bakers, they also made for great TV, each comfortably slotting into innocuous national stereotypes: Jürgen was rational and soft-spoken, a bit like a Teutonic teddy bear; Giuseppe was more animated, with wild curls and the world’s only flattering soul patch. Their beautiful, technically flawless bakes were the dream of the European Coal and Steel Community made flesh dough — two former wartime enemies seamlessly integrated into the most cozily British scenario imaginable. Even the incessant accent jokes from hosts Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas carried less of an edge than they might have in decades past. Here it felt like family banter, a vision of the U.K. still firmly knitted into the European fabric.

Which is not to say that the English bakers got short shrift. There was Lizzie, a colorful Liverpudlian whose Scouse gumption made her a fan favorite. Another standout, Freya from Yorkshire, was not just a glimpse of the future — she’s both Gen Z and a vegan — but also the past: In name and hairstyle, she was a spectral reanimation of the Northeast’s thousand-year-old history as the Viking colony of Jórvík. Contrast them to Maggie, this season’s token Little Englander, an archetype that usually does well on Bake Off. But not this time. While Maggie was pitched as a doppelgänger for judge Prue Leith — yes, the same Prue whose son is a pro-Brexit MP — it was of course hard to avoid thinking of another figure from British political history. When she forgot to add the flour to her sticky toffee pudding, there was no alternative: The lady was not for (re)turning.

Here’s another incontrovertible fact: Four of the first five bakers eliminated came from constituencies that voted Leave in 2016, while the top seven were all from Remain cities. The native-born bakers who went the distance all hailed from a different Britain than the Brexit ideal, a multicultural nation of casual assimilation. The middle tier this year was supplied by London’s Greek community: cheery detective Amanda and burly Cypriot George, who provided a more realistic counterpoint to the characters in Stath Lets Flats. Another Londoner, Crystelle, probably would have won the whole thing were it not for an underbaked focaccia. She was competing not just on behalf of her loving Goan family, but also an entire cohort of millennial yuppies; the woman absolutely loved miso, tahini, and yuzu. (A Goldman analyst, Crystelle also represented global finance, the less-sympathetic segment of the Remain coalition.) And her fellow finalist Chigs rarely saw his own South Asian heritage mentioned. Instead, Chigs was portrayed as the quintessential Leicester man, right down to his love of pork pies.

Last week’s grand finale put a cap on all this. After Jürgen’s shocking elimination in the semis, the season came down to Giuseppe, Crystelle, and Chigs. And what were they tasked to bake in the Technical? Perfect spiral buns from Belgium, the home of the E.U. They looked delicious. Brussels isn’t all bad.

The season ended as most would have predicted it would, with a Giuseppe victory. But after the celebrations, there was also a bittersweet note: A chyron informed viewers that the proud winner had left England and returned home to Italy. The fantasy had finally been punctured. If Britain doesn’t have room for a guy like Giuseppe, what is the point?

It's not about competitiveness, it's about why they want to win. It's become such an established platform to start a career in food media, are they just in it for the insta followers? There's Crystelle, and Chigs was such an enigma to the end (I'm still weirdly fascinated by his shift to glasses, lol). It's impossible to know of course, but Guiseppe and Jurgen seemed pure of heart.

(maybe the glasses was like guiseppe running out of shirts)

I sorta figured he must have run out of contacts, but then he had multiple stylish frames, so was it fashion-based or did he just plan for this contingency?!

If you get in the finale and want to start a career in food media, why not? It sounds horrible going through the application process, multiple auditions, two months of shooting, constant prep, Daily Mail digging in your wastebins, etc. If you get that far, good on you - it seems like a lot of effort! Like - they've probably put in the hours by that point.

Guiseppe's writing a book - talked about it in the finale? - does that make him less "pure of heart"?

It's just a contrast between the early seasons of the show where people didn't necessarily know that they were going on a hugely watched show that would make them famous and able to make a lot of money. Nothing wrong with taking advantage of the opportunities, but Guiseppe at least was convincing in the appearance that he was doing it for personal reasons rather than becoming an influencer.

(I know it's naïve to think that anyone goes on any tv competition show without some desire for glory, but in the past this show has been better than most about letting the viewer suspend disbelief, which is a big part of why it was so successful in the first place?)

Without glasses, Chigs had kind of an intensely furrowed brow as a normal resting face. The glasses helped to either physically cover up the brow, or to prevent him from making that face in the first place (perhaps he had been squinting because he couldn't see very well). I assumed that the show made him wear them once they saw how he looked on TV. He was much more attractive with the glasses!

Ha I think you cracked it

sans glasses he appeared to have slightly crossed/misaligned eyes, the glasses likely a corrective for that