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.
The technical challenge for the fifth week of the 16th season of the Great British Bake Off was something called "The Gala Pie." As he always does, Chris sent me the recipe for this the Friday before I was supposed to make it. "I'm sincerely sorry to miss this bake," he wrote, before dropping in the recipe for something that at first glance looked like it would be disgusting British slop for a cow to eat. The Gala Pie, according to the description Chris sent, is a "rectangular pork pie made with a rich hot water crust pastry. And that’s not all, you must have the classic line of eggs going through the middle."
A thing about me is that I am in a phase of not eating eggs. I have been in this phase for almost five years. Don't worry about it! It could end at any time! But because of the no-egg phase, and because I had never seen a Gala Pie before, I googled it, and what confronted me was upsetting. It looked like essentially un-smooth pâté with a hardboiled egg plopped in the middle, surrounded by pastry. I did really consider making this, but without Chris by my side to encourage me, my will to spend three hours making a weird pork pie that probably no one in my house would eat fell negative, and so I did not make it. I do feel badly about this, because certainly it would have been horrible. But I was tired, and it is getting dark so early.
I failed, however, to think through that because Chris's vacation (which he very much deserves) is through Wednesday of this week, and because Chris obviously took his very amazing wife on the vacation with him, there was no one to get me the recipe for this week's challenge! Thwarted! But I could not abandon you all twice. I would never. I innovated in the recipe-obtaining space, and I asked Jasper (who watches the show) to get the recipe for me. He did not, because his wonderful wife (and my friend!) Kristin wanted to get it for me! Here is what she said:
Chris's wife is the unsung hero of this blog franchise. I had always assumed that the pared-down version of the method was easy to make or available online or on Reddit somewhere. It is not! The process of getting it involves: watching the technical bake footage several times in an attempt to pause on the quick moments where they flash a print-out sitting on a baker's workbench; writing down word-for-word the moments when the bakers themselves read portions of the instructions out loud; and then, if you can believe it, using your own judgment (!) to fill in the gaps by taking the fully complete method from the Internet and deciding which parts to omit based on what the bakers themselves appeared to know and not know. She is an artist!
Everyone say thank you to Chris's wife! And everyone say thank you to Kristin!
Kristin watched the episode. She glimpsed the papers that the contestants are given. She compared these papers with the online recipe that the show posts, and she returned to me with a method and ingredients list for Paul Hollywood's Raspberry Soufflé. I was to make four of them, and I had a mere one hour to do so.
Ingredients and Shopping
I was very pleased that the recipe for the soufflés required no strange ingredients and no white chocolate. I was less pleased that it, yet again, included icing sugar, but by now this is just the life that I have committed myself to. For this bake, we needed eggs, icing sugar, flour, butter, more sugar, more eggs, more icing sugar, and raspberries! Luckily, I had almost all of these things in my house. I did have to go to the grocery store to obtain raspberries, but I love raspberries, so this was fine by me. I also got a rotisserie chicken. Very productive trip!
The other thing we needed were little soufflé dishes. I was really scared that we would have to make eight soufflés, and then I would have to create some kind of tin foil cup (as usually happens). But we only needed to make four, and I have four adorable little ceramic soufflé cups that I usually use to eat yogurt out of.
One strange thing was that the recipe called for specifically one "large egg" white and four "medium egg whites." I have no way of knowing what these words mean. Every other ingredient was given in grams, so I just ignored these adjectives and used the eggs that were in my fridge. I feel they were all medium-sized.
Stage Two: Making the Leaves
My greatest concern was time. Almost all of the bakes for this show are three hours long. Sometimes they are even longer. But this week, we only had one hour, which meant that the steps were simple but would need to be executed quickly and deftly. Nothing makes you less quick and deft than the ticking clock. The minute I started my timer, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees. I did this because it felt right and for no real reason.
The first step of the method was to make eight curved leaf-shaped tuiles. I had genuinely no idea how to do this. I assumed it was decorative. And I assumed (incorrectly) that the recipe would be for some kind of dough that could be rolled out and then cut into shapes. So I followed the instructions and ended up instead with a substance the consistency of pancake batter. This could not be rolled out and cut into shapes!
Already, six minutes had disappeared from my clock. I had no idea how long it would take for the leaves to bake, and I assumed that the soufflé would take something like 25 minutes in the oven, so I felt a lot of tension in my body. I decided to spoon the batter into a piping sleeve and pipe my leaf shapes. This was much less precise than I expected, because even though the batter was smooth, it spread when you piped it out, so it was difficult to get the lines to look nice. Also, again, there was very little time.
I had enough batter to make at least 20 leaves, so once the first 12 were done, I threw them in the oven and piped 12 more sloppy leaves (half of which kind of looked like flat madeleines). I was not sure if these were supposed to be browned or pale. Also, I did not really have time to care. The first batch spent six minutes in the oven, and I removed them. The second batch, I set a timer for and moved on.
Kristin later told me that the contestants were given silicone molds to make their leaves, which seems quite easy to me. Surely, given a silicon mold, I would have done this perfectly!
Stage Three: Making the Soufflé
I could not remember for the life of me if I had ever made a soufflé. This was unfortunate. A lot of how I work is bodily instinct, so usually if we are making cake, for example, I just start doing stuff and try not to think too much about it. Generally, I can look at something and tell if it is the right texture. But soufflé is not a desert I typically order, because I don't like it that much. With the exception of a dark chocolate soufflé, they are mostly way too sweet for my taste, so even my interactions with soufflés are limited. This was not ideal!
The first thing I did was put my raspberries in a pot with some sugar until the raspberries got all loose and jammy. I mashed them with a potato masher. The method Kristin gave me said "Make a smooth raspberry puree using 25g of the caster sugar."
So, even though I hate to do it, I decided to run my puree through a sieve. This did not really work. The seeds were big, and most of the puree refused to go through the mesh.
The clock continued its forbidding march forward, and so, fearing I was running out of time already, I threw all of the puree into the blender in front of me and blasted it.
The second time, it went through the sieve much better, and I put that back into the pot on the stove with the rest of the sugar to get really, really hot. How hot? It's hard to say! Had I been able to see a recipe for Italian meringue, I would have known. But I didn't! I decided to get it as close to an arbitrary 250 degrees Fahrenheit as the time would allow me.
In the meantime, I put the egg whites in the KitchenAid on medium speed and just left them over there. At this point, I was beginning to panic a little. I had forgotten to melt the butter to coat the soufflé dishes, and because my microwave is still broken, I decided to just rub a little bit of cold butter into the dishes. When I coated this with the sugar, it became clear that I had missed many spots. There was no time for this. The eggs were becoming stiff and the raspberry stuff was getting hotter and there were a mere 30 minutes left. This was not good! I assumed the soufflé needed 25 minutes! But it might need 30! It was already too late for 30!
There was no time! How hot was the raspberry stuff? Somewhere in the 230s! It would have to do. I poured it as slowly as I could into the KitchenAid with the egg whites and let it whip. Somehow there were only 27 minutes left. I could not let it whip forever. Later, Kristin told me the key was to make sure there were only soft peaks at this stage, which I had, but fully by accident.
I had earlier planned to pipe the soufflé mix very neatly into the cups. But there was no time for this. I used a big spoon and plopped it in there! Good enough! Into the oven they went!
Stage Four: The Finished Product
My soufflés were in the oven for the maximum amount of time (24 minutes and 30 seconds) before I was forced to remove them in order to get the leaves on them and the powdered sugar on top.
Here are my soufflés:
I think they turned out pretty well! If I had managed to find two more minutes somewhere in that bake, and they could have had two more minutes in the oven, I think they would have been perfect!
Kristin also decided to make the soufflés (she used the full recipe and did not make the leaves), so you get to see hers too! Here they are:
Here's Kristin:
I decided to use the full unedited method from online since I had already seen it when crafting the pared-down Bakers' version / Kelsey's version (Taylor's version) and I thought that pretending I hadn't would be cheating. The souffle's great strength is it uses only three ingredients and takes 45 minutes without the tuiles, which I skipped. The weakness is the obscene amount of sugar, as the bakers and Prue point out in the episode. I have a strong sweet tooth, and even still, if I made them again I would cut the sugar in half. I also somehow ended up with way too much batter. But my soufflés seemed to rise enough, and also now I own ramekins, so the outing was a success on the whole.
I also had way too much batter, but I just shoveled it all into my little cups, for better or worse. I think maybe my cups were just too small, which is a personal problem. I, too, consider my soufflés a success, even though I did not really enjoy eating them. Also, my kitchen was a complete disaster when this bake ended because of the short time limit.
Oh well! Next week, Chris will return from war (vacation), and together we will conquer ... uh ... Dessert Week? Surely that's nothing to worry about.
