Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show. This week, Kelsey was unable to participate in the challenge, due to scheduling.
Bread Week never quite delivers. It's annoying, because bread-making is the quintessence of baking, and bread is considered by historians and whatnot to be one of humankind's very oldest prepared foods. A baking challenge that did not give proper space for straightforward bread-making would be, in a word, baloney. Also it just kicks ass to make a good loaf of bread, it's a proud accomplishment. A good homemade loaf of bread increases your Human Heritage score by one unit. You can reach into the past and link hands with the ancients by tying a good knot, or fashioning a clean dovetail joint, sure, but you cannot eat those things, and they do not smell good in your kitchen. Bake bread.
The problem with Bread Week, though, is that there is no such thing as a challenging loaf of leavened bread that can be made in 90 minutes. King Arthur Baking Company has a good recipe for a basic crusty loaf that can be completed, if nothing goes too terribly wrong, in just over two hours. You could fit that into a technical bake, but for the best nine or so amateur bakers in the United Kingdom, this loaf would pose no challenge whatsoever. The real feats in bread-making simply take too long to fit into the middle third of a weekly television show. Often, the judges of The Great British Bake Off resort to stunt challenges, in order to get the whole bake done inside of an afternoon session. Even then, it's hard: in 2023, they needed a whopping 150 minutes to make simple filled sweet-rolls; in 2022, they were given nearly three hours to make treats that were not even bread. Sometimes the judges seem to throw up their hands. In 2021, Paul Hollywood asked the bakers to make breadsticks. Last year, the show's contestants were asked to make fried donuts. You get the idea.
This season, Paul tasked the bakers with making quick, leavened flatbread, not baked in an oven but fried in a pan, in oil, on the stovetop. It is bread, though it is not baking. And flatbread is delicious, for sure. But in order to make this into a respectable challenge, Paul had to throw in an extra component: The flatbreads had to be stuffed with blue cheese and roasted grapes. And the whole shit had to be completed inside of one hour. An hour, in baking time, is practically nothing.
So this was not ever going to scratch the bread-making itch. The pre-bake materials noted that Paul described this bake, at the end, as "the worst technical challenge in 17 seasons," so the flatbreads were for sure going to be a significant test.
A nice thing about the flatbread bake: It uses mostly normal ingredients. The bread part is made of bread things: flour, yeast, salt, water, and oil. A not nice thing about the flatbread bake: I would have to complete it alone, due to Kelsey having a busier than usual schedule this week.
A short time limit for a demanding bake is a mixed bag sort of deal. On the one hand, it's terrifying to start a technical bake knowing that if you spend the first 30 seconds getting oriented you might already have screwed yourself. On the other hand, it's somewhat comforting to know that if you screw yourself in the first 30 seconds your suffering will at least be over quickly. Still, I considered cheating: The materials I was given at the start of the bake list red grapes, "roasted and sliced," as an ingredient. Couldn't I therefore get away with roasting and slicing the grapes before starting the timer? After all, what is flour but wheat grain, mechanically separated from chaff and then ground to a fine powder? The first step of using the ingredient "flour," you will note, is not to mill a half-acre of grain. Wheat grain isn't an ingredient until after it is already processed! Couldn't this be made into a rule and applied to the grapes?
This is how the mind works when it confronts a 60-minute bake. Ultimately I decided my reputation for courageous and upstanding behavior was too important to the children of this great nation, and so I resolved to start in on the grapes only after starting the timer. I took this opportunity to preheat my oven to 450 degrees, which in the case of my piece-of-shit oven means that at the end of preheating it would be hot enough in there to melt iron.
I had another pre-bake decision to make. My home contains too many pans, and I had to pick one of them for frying. I have two good sauté pans that would've worked. I also have an old cast iron pan that lately lives on my stovetop (my daughter like grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches and only I know how to make them to her exacting standards). It seemed easier to choose this one, so I did.
The baking stuff is easy enough. Lord knows I have so much flour in the pantry, plus many little pouches of dried yeast, both the slow-acting kind and the fast-acting kind. For the photo down there, I double-checked to make sure that I was holding the right one. In one hand I held the little red-lined pouch, which says "Original." In the other hand I held the blue-lined pouch, which says "Fast-Acting." It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I consider the labeling conventions of Fleischmann's Active Dry Yeast to be counterintuitive, because as we all know red is the color of speed. Alas, there was not time to write them a letter, much less to have them send me a red-lined pouch containing fast-acting yeast, and a note of apology for the confusion.
The only other point of mild weirdness in the gathering-crap-onto-the-countertop phase of the bake was the presence of honey. The materials list two tablespoons of runny honey among the ingredients, but give no indications of how that honey is to be used. I stared at my jar of honey for a minute, pre-bake, until I conjured thoughts of Winnie the Pooh getting a paw stuck in there, and then pondered whether Pooh prefers his honey runny or soft-set. I should mention at this juncture that I had taken five milligrams of THC, in order to approach this bake in a calmed state of mind.
Stage One: Prepping Grapes, Mixing Dough
Not wanting to slide too deeply into Deep Thoughts About Winnie the Pooh, I threw on my apron and started the timer. My very first step was to measure out flour. Here I ran into my first problem: The recipe calls for 500 grams of "strong flour," which is bread flour, but it turns out that the bag in my pantry contained only about 385 grams. To make up the difference, I added all-purpose flour. Feeling slightly rattled, and irritated at myself that I had not purchased bread flour ahead of this bake, I added yeast and salt to the flour and left that bowl to sit for a few minutes while I addressed the grapes.
I did not feel that I had time to be cute, here. I grabbed a big handful and quickly sliced each grape in half. I made a quick decision to use the oil and honey in the ingredients as a kind of pre-roast dressing, and quickly tossed the grapes in an oil-and-honey mixture. I then lined a baking pan, dumped the dressed grapes in there, and chucked it into the oven, which belched forth a familiar, almost reassuring gust of volcanic heat.
My face thus scorched, I spun around and grabbed olive oil and a cup of warm water and began to hydrate the flour mixture. This never goes smoothly, in the sense that some portion of dry flour is always going to escape the liquid and require intervention with a rubber spatula. I don't know how long this took—there was barely time for taking photos, let alone for checking the timer—but I was not yet in a panic at the point where the dough had become a coherent blob.
I knew it would need to rise and considered working toward ideal proving conditions, but decided there was not time. I draped a hand towel over the bowl and moved the bowl up onto the shelf where we keep our bowls, reasoning that it might be a degree or two warmer up there.
Stage Two: Preparing Filling, Dividing Dough, Rolling Circles
I could smell the grapes. I opened the oven and there they were, clearly roasted. I am convinced that I was within half-a-minute of a conflagration. It was such a huge relief to turn the oven off. The honey had obviously caramelized, and some of it had blown right past caramelization. I did not have time to care about this.
I dumped the grapes out of the pan into a cereal bowl, and then, convinced that I needed to cool them down before they could be stuffed into raw dough, I wrapped the bowl in a hand towel and put it into the freezer. I then spent a minute crumbling up my blue cheese. I'd chosen Point Reyes, a mild raw-milk cheese that pulls up short of that really sharp nose-hair-curling character of, say, a piccante Gorgonzola. After all, I would be sharing this bread with a five-year-old.
With my dough resting and my grapes chilling, for the space of maybe three minutes there was really nothing for me to do. I cleaned up a little, and took a breath, and considered the timing of the rest of the challenge. I figured at a minimum each of the eight flatbreads would need two minutes of frying. I also figured that I would need at least 10 minutes to divide the dough blob into eight balls, to stretch out each ball enough to sock into it some of the filling, to bind the balls back up again, and to roll them into flat circles. I also figured it would not be safe to leave myself less than, say, five minutes of flex time, for snags and second efforts. And my grapes were still hot, so at a minimum they'd need another couple of minutes in the freezer. I figured 33 minutes would be enough time to finish the bake under control, provided I did not have any disastrous setbacks.
I then checked the timer for the first time all bake and watched in horror as the counter ticked below 31 minutes. Shit!
I still do not understand how this happened. Somewhat calm planning had told me that in 33 minutes I could divide, shape, fill, roll, and fry eight flatbreads. But all I had done to this point was passively cook grapes, hydrate flour in an expensive automated mixer, crumble a small wedge of cheese, run a towel over a messy countertop, and then catch my breath, and it had taken me a whopping damn 29 minutes. Shit!
So there would not be time for further proving or cooling. I grabbed my dough bowl from the shelf, whipped off the towel, and scraped the dough onto the countertop. I noted that it did not seem to have risen much at all, but then I had given it, at most, 13 or 14 minutes of time for proving. In any case, I did not have time to worry about that. I formed the dough blob into a neat ball, weighed it, and then used a bench scraper to divide it in half, weighing each part to make sure I'd gotten it close. I then kept dividing until I had eight pieces.
I was pretty much panicking. I figured I was eating into the five minutes of flex time, but worryingly nothing had gone very wrong yet. And I felt like my estimates had not been very conservative: Two minutes per flatbread, for example, is not very much time at all, especially without constant precise control over the temperature of the oil, and cast iron pans are somewhat famously slower than stainless steel to heat up and to cool down. Realistically I could count on averaging something like four minutes per bread. Shit!
All of this was cycling through my mind as I started smushing and filling the dough balls. This is, in theory, the easy part of the challenge. But when you cannot afford even a few seconds of delay, the very last thing you want to be dealing with is caramelized honey. Each little forkful of grapes would stick, and then I would use my fingers to get it onto the dough, and then my fingers would be coated in sticky goo, and I would whimper like a wounded puppy. It was a disgraceful scene.
Somewhere in here I dashed over to the stovetop and fired up the burner under the pan, regretting that I had chosen the dependable but slow-heating cast iron. Shit!
After bundling up and reforming each ball around the filling, I had to roll it out, which involved a dusting of raw flour, which of course stuck to my goo-glued fingers. I again noted during rolling that the dough had not risen much or loosened or otherwise changed its composition really at all during its abbreviated proving phase. I could get it rolled out but it was very glutenous and elastic, and did not want to become very thin. It was all I could do to get it to form flattened circles of just a few inches in diameter, and I felt any extra oomph applied was wasted, and risked bleeding time that I could not spare. Dennis Nedry gave himself 18 minutes to deliver stolen dinosaur embryos to the docks, and learned the folly of an aggressive schedule, when he was eaten by a dinosaur. I had budgeted for two minutes per flatbread, and as the circles came out thicker than I wanted I began to accept the foolishness of my plans.
I rolled the last of my circles and checked the clock. 18 minutes to go. Ha ha! Shit!
Stage Three: Frying the Flatbread
There was a silver lining. Because I had not been able to make large thin dough circles, it was possible for me to fry my thicker flatbreads two at a time in my pan. Now, working in batches, if they took four minutes per batch I would finish with two minutes to spare. Hope bloomed in my heart.
Then I began to fry the first pair of breads and things again went sideways. I'd fought the dough pretty aggressively to get it as flat as I could, and the integrity of the outer layer was not perfect. As the dough warmed in the pan, the cheese melted and the liquid from the grape action flowed and this mixed slime found its way out of the dough circles and into the oil, where it began to char. Shit!
This was not a problem for the first batch of flatbreads. I flipped them over and tweaked the flame and had them off of the heat and into a bowl after probably just over three minutes of frying. But by the time the second batch was ready for flipping, the cheese-grape-goo situation had gotten ugly, and acrid black hell sand was clinging to the fried surface of the flatbread. Smoke was becoming an issue.
I figured I'd saved a minute or so on the first batch, so immediately after pulling the second batch from the pan, I dumped a glass of water in there and frantically scraped at the pan with a wooden spoon, trying to deglaze away the charred junk. This worked—after dumping the water the pan was reasonably clean—but it had a cooling effect, of course, and I had to add a new layer of oil, and then wait for the oil to heat up. This was agony.
The third batch went in as soon as the oil was shimmering. One of the two flatbreads poofed up dramatically.
The fourth and final batch was pulled from the pan with just seven seconds to go. My kitchen was a smoky, oil-splattered, flour-coated disaster, but I had eight cooked flatbreads.
What bothered me most, in what otherwise would've been a moment of triumph, was how fat and dense my flatbreads were. I'd gone into the challenge with that insane mixture of dread and blown-out confidence so common to this stupid stunt. I felt certain in the beginning, because of the warning about Paul's disgust with the contestants, that I was going to completely melt down and produce just a pile of shreds and raw dough. But also, bizarrely, I felt sure that if I made flatbread, that it would be the best flatbread ever, that it would be better than Paul's own flatbread, a culinary masterpiece. Instead, at the end of the challenge, I'd made flatbread but the flatbreads weren't very flat, they looked like English muffins. I knew that Paul would not like them, they would not stand out from what was otherwise an all-timer of a bad technical challenge.
In a rotten state mind, I began to clean up my hell-hole of a kitchen. It was then that I discovered this:
SHIT.
Here's the goddamn flatbread.
It's perfectly edible. It is, in fact, a mildly enjoyable thing to eat, so long as you are not a five-year-old. But it's not very flat. It could be several millimeters flatter. And it would be, so help me God, if I'd remembered that red does not mean fast.
Next week is Dessert Week. If there's yeast involved, I will not make this mistake a second time. Or perhaps I will. Shit.
