Bake Off’s Grape Flatbread Technical Beats a Home Tester in 60 Minutes

This season’s Great British Bake Off technical challenge, stuffed flatbreads filled with blue cheese and roasted grapes, has drawn complaints from fans, critics and former contestants. Judge Paul Hollywood called it “the worst technical in 17 years,” according to Delish. A Delish writer then tried the recipe at home under the same 60-minute limit and ran out of time with three of eight flatbreads still raw.

On the show, the bakers ended the hour with trays of thick, undercooked flatbreads that Hollywood and fellow judge Nigella could barely eat. When the bakers said an hour was too short, Hollywood replied, “There’s plenty of time.”

How the technical challenge works

In a technical, every contestant gets the same ingredients and the same recipe, often with sparse or deliberately incomplete instructions, and bakes it blind. The Delish tester instead printed the full recipe from the Bake Off website, which the writer described as far more detailed than the version given to the bakers, and followed it exactly, without first watching the episode.

Where the home attempt went wrong

The website recipe has the grapes roasted whole on the bunch for 20 minutes while the dough is kneaded for five minutes and rested for 15. After the rest, the dough is cut into eight pieces. Each piece is rolled into an 8 cm circle, filled with five grapes and one-eighth of the blue cheese, pinched closed, turned seam side down and rolled out again to 23 cm.

That second rolling caused most of the trouble, according to the writer. The grapes came out of the oven still juicy and looking barely roasted, and the dough had not rested long enough, so it kept springing back. As the dough was rolled out, grapes burst, tore holes in the dough and ran to the edges. None of the flatbreads reached 23 cm; the widest was about 18.

By 45 minutes the writer still had three pieces to roll and had to start cooking. Juice leaking from the holes burned onto the pan as black patches of sugar. The flatbreads needed less than the 90 seconds per side the recipe gives and had to be watched closely to keep them from burning.

What it means for anyone trying it at home

At the 60-minute mark the writer had five cooked flatbreads, all with burst grapes, three raw ones and a smoking pan, even though the dough was rolled much thinner than the bakers on the show. The writer called the challenge difficult and close to impossible, and said the main problem was the design: juicy whole grapes sealed inside dough that then has to be rolled flat.

The writer was able to taste the five finished flatbreads, which Hollywood and Nigella could not do with the show’s entries. The blue cheese was too strong for the writer, and the grapes read as random pockets of juice in a savory bread. The writer’s verdict was that home bakers should skip it unless they are ready to scrub burnt grape sugar off a pan.

Source: Delish