Paul Hollywood’s actual flatbread recipe proves how hard the Technical on Bake Off was

Something messy happened on The Great British Bake Off – literally. The bakers struggled with Bread Week’s technical challenge. Paul Hollywood tasked the contestants with making blue cheese and roasted grape flatbreads, but they didn’t exactly rise to the challenge. Most of the flatbreads were still raw. Paul Hollywood declared the challenge “an embarrassment” and “the worst Technical [he’d] ever seen in 17 years. So, what went wrong? Was the entire Bake Off cast unaware of what a flatbread was? Did the challenge prove too tricky? To investigate, we dug up the actual flatbread recipe.

Now, in honour of Bread Week, the Bake Off cast had just one hour to make blue cheese and roasted grape flatbreads. They received stripped-back instructions with no specific timings.

Paul Hollywood’s example, then what the bakers actually produced
(Images via Channel 4)

A more detailed version of the recipe has been posted on The Great British Bake Off website. These instructions do say the grapes should be roasted for 20 minutes, the dough should be mixed for more than five, and the dough must rest for 15 minutes. But alas, the recipe still doesn’t indicate how long the “easy and adaptable flatbreads” should take to make overall. 

However, Paul Hollywood’s 2012 cookbook How to Bake does contain a recipe for “stilton and grape flatbreads”. And the book specifies this recipe takes… drum roll please… two hours of prep time, plus five to six minutes to cook each flatbread.

The recipe in How to Bake
(Image via Bloomsbury Publishing / YouTube)

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The flatbreads in the book aren’t identical to the ones on Bake Off. In the How to Bake version, Paul Hollywood uses butter not olive oil, and doesn’t bother to roast the grapes. But the final product looks pretty similar.

The book’s recipe suggests you leave the dough to rise for an hour, and cook each flatbread for approximately two to three minutes on each side. So, going by this recipe, even if the bakers let their dough rest for the 15 minutes recommended by the Bake Off website, it may well still take two hours and three minutes to produce eight grape and cheese flatbreads.

 

 

 

 

 

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Featured image via Channel 4