'Just stop' Bake Off contestants can 'save mistakes', says expert

Channel 4’s ratings hit The Great British Bake Off will be hitting its halfway point with the contestants whittled down. So far, the home bakers have been put through their paces in the regular rounds of Bread Week, Cake Week, Biscuit Week, Pudding Week, Halloween Week and now it’s first-ever Mexican Week. During the episodes, each week has seen one person crowned Star Baker while another person is eliminated.

However, the show hasn’t been without its share of mishaps with under-baked items, which weren’t given an all-important second prove to collapsing creations in the Showstopper round.

Interestingly, in an exclusive interview, co-founder of Bad Brownie and baking guru, Paz Sarmah, said even when things went awry in the tent, there was always the potential to save a bake in the end.

“Everything that could go wrong, always does go wrong, doesn’t it?” he said. “The way I look at it, you’ve got two things. The stuff that you can control and the stuff that you can’t.”

Paz continued: “Things like the weather, and it’s a really hot week, you can’t control and you just have to deal with it the best you can. And the stuff that you can control, just make sure you follow the thing as diligently as possible.”

READ MORE: Here's a look at all the eliminated contestants on Bake Off so far

“If you need to, just stop, even if it’s just for 20 seconds. Just take a time out and come back to it.”

Otherwise he warned: “And then it spirals and then that happens and then that happens.”

Paz said there were times he felt “completely awful” watching Bake Off and sympathising with the contestants as their culinary disasters played out on television.

“You can just see the blind panic that’s on some people’s faces and I’m still in admiration because the stuff they come up with is just unbelievable,” he said.

However, he said there was “always a way to save something” and advised the contestants to find out how to save really common mistakes.

He gave ganache as an example, saying when it split you simply needed to add in a splash of cold cream or cold milk and use an immersion blender on the mixture.

His advice on the common pitfall of caramel was to either do a wet caramel, whereby you put water and sugar together and stirred it to dissolve it and then “never, never, never” touch it until the water has gone.

Paz said: “On Bake Off, every time they do that, they stir it and I just look at it and put my head in my hands, like, ‘Don’t touch that caramel!’ because then you agitate it and it crystalises and then it forms those clumps.”

On the flip-side, he said for a dry caramel bakers should be stirring away but said whatever method you were doing you should always “watch like a hawk” caramel.

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