Ugh, it’s Bread Week or, as it’s known in my household, Paul Hollywood will be interminable this week. What adjective does Rowan keep using in this episode? “Diabolical.” Yes, indeed it is, as Paul walks around with his eyes the same blue as Prue’s glasses as everyone tries to suck up to him. I will say this for Paul: He looks amazing in a peacoat, and it’s strange how often we see him in one because, need I remind you, this show is filmed in summer!
The signature challenge is to make a cottage loaf, which, as an American, I have never heard of and, as a born-again English, I have never seen in my life other than the last time it was a technical challenge on the show. (Please do not try to align the season numbers between the U.K. and the U.S., it is more complicated and arcane than breading a 126-stranded loaf.) It’s basically two balls of dough pressed together to form something that looks like a bread gourd.
And, yes, because of the balls, we get all sorts of puns. Paul walks over to Matty and asks the “proportion of his ball size.” Now I’m thinking about the gym teacher in a jockstrap, and I must say, my dough is rising. It’s even worse in the signature when they’re baking buns, and we have to keep hearing about how Daddy Dan’s buns are too small. I don’t know. I have been inspecting his buns (respectfully) for the better part of the season, and I think they are absolutely perfect.
The crazy thing about Bread Week is that there are hours when everyone sits around waiting for their dough to rise. Yes, sometimes they’re working on side dishes or fillings, but they had nothing to do this week. Can’t we have a mini-competition? Maybe someone could win an advantage? Could there be a hidden immunity idol in the tent? Instead, we just get a cricket match between Saku and Allison, where our poor hostess gets beaned right in the thigh.
Eventually, they get back into the baking, and there is a whole segment as everyone tries to join their balls (tee-hee) together by jamming their index and middle fingers right through both of the balls. What is this? A baking shocker? Is it two in the loaf-a, one in the sofa? No, that’s not how this works.
Poor Rowan is having the worst time of it, making a loaf so big it wouldn’t even fit in Donald Trump’s apartment, even if it were as big as the inflated numbers he used to evaluate his net worth. It’s also falling over, and he must stick a dowel down the middle to hold it. “You just want an easy life,” he sighs as nothing goes right. (If you want to see a real-life breakdown on Bake-Off/Baking Show, check out comedian James Acaster on the celebrity version of the show.)
When the judging comes around, Paul calls Rowan’s creation “monstrous” and they don’t get the sun-dried tomatoes he included, only the olives. His oven neighbor Abbi has it even worse, her whole loaf collapsing into something that looks like Pizza the Hutt from Spaceballs. Paul tells her it’s because she didn’t add enough salt to the mixture. Zaddy Zan (as I sometimes call Daddy Dan) has a good loaf, but Paul thinks he needs to learn how to better distribute his fillings, probably with a mixer.
On the positive side, they love Tasha’s roast garlic and rosemary loaf, a flavor combination that four of the contestants, including Abbi, used, but not as well as last week’s star baker. Paul says it’s “90-odd percent there,” which is as nice as His Royal Herring Heart will be this week. Paul says that Cristy’s dusted cranberry, walnut, and rosemary loaf is “decent,” which you will not be surprised to learn is a compliment here in merry ol’ England.
Moving on to the technical challenge, it is the Devonshire Split, which I thought was a slang term for the crack of one’s arse, but it’s actually a bun filled with cream and strawberry jam. As I mentioned above, there is a lot of talk of buns, including Daddy Dan saying that he didn’t add sugar to his buns (and I offer to do it for him). Then we get a whole set of Noel and Nicki talking about Paul Hollywood’s “wrinkly balls,” and it’s all I could do not to turn this show into an SNL sketch.
When the judges come out, they remark that almost all of them are underproved. Luckily, this season, it’s not because they gave them 20 minutes to make them and then are shocked when all the results are absolute rubbish. They gave them time to prove what they could do (yuk, yuk), so this seems like bakers’ error. Dan and his buns end up being the bottom of all bottoms (ahem), along with Rowan and Abbi. The tops are Dana, Tasha, and Saku, who I love dearly and want to win even though I don’t think she will make it all the way to the final. Maybe she’s a “slow burner,” as they love to say on Love Island.
The showstopper is making a “plaited bread centerpiece” with two different types of flour and any fillings they want. If you watched the episode, you already figured out that plaited means “braided,” right? Do we need to review this again for the kids in the back of the classroom who were passing notes? Okay. Good. Also, I love that it is just a “centerpiece”; it doesn’t need to be a sculpture or a mobile. It doesn’t need to tell a story from their childhood or depict what they would buy first if they won the Powerball. It just has to be bread. I give Cristy mad props for making a challah and a babka that fit together. It’s just an intricate-looking wheel. Well, it would have been if one fit inside the other, but they didn’t get all mad about it.
Regardless of the vague brief, everyone else tries to make their centerpiece look like a thing. Well, not Daddy Dan, who just spells out the word “pizza” using braids for some reason? Is it because it has ’Nduja in it? (English people are crazy for this spicy sausage. I don’t think the modern English household could operate without ’Nduja or Halloumi.) Everyone else is making a tiger or a cow or a tree or a hammer or Daddy Dan’s perfectly proven buns. Well, that’s what I would have made.
The oddest choices, at least to me, are Matty and Josh, who want to make the mascots for their favorite sports teams. Matty’s is West Ham, a Premiere League team whose logo is two hammers on a field of blue and “claret” or, as we say in the rest of the world, maroon. Josh is making a tiger for his favorite rugby team, the Leicester Tigers. (That’s pronounced “Lester.” Yeah, I know. Try living here!)
Everyone is also freaking out about how complicated the braiding is and how they can’t figure it out. I don’t know, I did the most cursory of YouTube searches, and this video explains it quite well. It seems — dare I say, from the comfort of my home where there is no flour spread on every flat surface — rather easy.
As the baking period ends, my crush, Daddy Dan, seems in the deepest of trouble. He ran out of dough and couldn’t spell all the letters of P-I-Zed-Zed-A, probably because he hand-filled all of his strands rather than mixing it all together. And because he’s running out of time, he doesn’t bake things all the way through. It’s an unmitigated disaster when he brings it up to the judges. You know how they say that even bad pizza is still pretty good? Well, that doesn’t hold for things that spell pizza, and Prue literally tells him, “You can do better than that.”
Rowan, for the third challenge this week, also has a poor showing for his standing tree sculpture. Paul calls his curry-flavored bread nearly inedible and tells Rowan that he overfilled all of his dough and the yeast wasn’t able to do its job. Abbi, shockingly considering how well she’s done the first two weeks, is on a one-way ticket to Struggle City as well. Paul says her tree design is too “rudimentary,” but even worse is the flavors and textures of her bread, which they both seem to hate.
Meanwhile, Tasha’s Medusa sculpture using a milk bread face with pastrami and cheese and pistachio pesto-flavored snakes is a thing of absolute beauty. They ooh and ahh over how good it is. Paul doesn’t quite give her a handshake, but he gives her a little golf clap, which is currently trading in all Bake Off crypto markets as 1/16th of a handshake. He also tells her she really understands bread, which is the nicest Paul has been since his last divorce settlement. Josh’s cranberry-orange and chocolate-orange tiger is another marvel. Go Leicester.
In the end, he loses out to Tasha, who had too good of a week two weeks in a row. Good for her. As the bakers sat tensely on their little stools, I was deeply worried that mine and Daddy Dan’s love story would be cut short, but he ekes it out to another week, and poor Abbi, who I saw going much farther, loses out to bread. At least Paul wasn’t too horrible to her on her way out.
