Yankee Takes, on British Bakes
My wife and I are avid viewers of the various baking show challenges on Food Network. Spring, Holiday and Kids Baking Championship are a few of our favorites. We've also watched through the Cupcake Wars seasons on Netflix and just recently tried out that new "Nailed It" show; spoiler alert...it sucks! So when we came across the Great British Baking Show (GBBS) on Netflix we were excited to have a new show to try out. We did not realize the vast differences it would pose to all our American staples, but wow what an eye opener to how differently we approach our competitive cooking/baking shows in the states.
GBBS starts off welcoming contestants and doing some brief introductions of the contestants, standard practice on the American shows too. Until you compare what they focus on for introductions. American contestants are all about the achievements; Beth is an avid baker who opened her first storefront two years ago, she's won the coveted Piper County California Copper Cupcake liner award this past summer and is hoping to use the prize money to just take a nice vacation with her family because she works so frequently she once forgot their names. Meanwhile on GBBS, we are introduced to Annie who has four kids and eleven grandchildren. She enjoys making Sunday desserts for her family dinners and prefers tea to coffee and biscuits to cake. Not a single mention of the extent of her baking prowess or life's work leading to this moment. We know more about her diet than her career. Not to be a jerk but we also know that every episode of our shows in the states have at least the one hard luck story. After all is there anything more American then watching someone you never have nor ever will meet or know bake or cook for five minutes and become super invested in them winning as an underdog? There's always the contestant who is coming off the worst week of their life and sure sometimes its actually a super shitty thing like being diagnosed with a terrible disease but you can tell the weeks when they're reaching for an underdog story, those are the weeks first world problems qualify as the hard luck story.
My name's Charlie and I've been baking since I was 14 but I was also always good with numbers. I was in the corporate world for ten years wrapped in the hustle and bustle of wall street until one day on my way home I tried to beat a red light and lost. Two taxi's t-boned me (they cut to the shot of a banged up sports car). Thankfully, I walked away with only a few scrapes but I discovered a new me, I quit my job the next day and ever since I have a bottomless depth of appreciation for life that I bake into all I make now.
I don't know about you but my reaction to that is, this guy's no underdog, I'm not rooting for him so he can buy a new Miata. That a*hole damaged two taxis and who knows how many passengers. I hope he has to turn an eggplant into a cookie for this challenge and gets booted. Shortly after the introductions we see the kitchen areas and wow what difference on opposite sides of an ocean!
American kitchens are as you expect large and overstocked with every newfangled machine and gadget ever known to exist. You need four kitchen aid mixers on your station along with two different types of cherry pitters and three different shaped sieves? No problem! But we will only have two ice cream makers for the eight of you to share and at least two challenges will require ice cream as a component so good luck with that. Where do the British bakers work their magic? Would you believe in a giant tent in the middle of an even larger field? Because that's not a joke its the truth. They set up makeshift kitchens slightly bigger than the galley of a catamaran, careful not to waste an inch of space they even include ovens with hide away doors. As for gadgets one British baker put it best when he said "I was gonna use the mixer but then having to pull out the cord and all the such its just easier to go 'head with the whisk." In America, we reconfigure multiple warehouse sized TV studios into kitchens and wheel in stock piles of every ingredient you could use to bake while across the pond the bakers don't even get AC in their tent or use the modern tools they're supplied.
Next we find out the British bakers challenge. In one episode they are required to make a swiss roll cake and they get three and a half hours to do so. THREE AND A HALF HOURS?! That's enough time for them to watch the sponge they made bake and rise; they literally sit in front of their ovens and watch their items bake! EVERY WEEK! AND THEY ONLY HAVE ONE THING TO MAKE! On American shows a typical challenge sounds something like "Bakers in this challenge you must make a three tiered cake with at least two different types of fruit filling inspired by the jelly beans you picked and incorporate the colors of your jelly beans as well, you have one hour." Then halfway through the challenge the host comes out and says "Bakers, nothing goes better with fruity jelly bean cake filling than peppermint schnapps so you must incorporate it into your bake as well." Meanwhile, the British bakers are standing around twiddling their thumbs and biting their nails making sure their oven lights are working. Somehow American contestants still find a way to burn stuff and remake it in limited time constraints while a few British bakers manage to under bake items in their ample time frame. I'll give them this though, one huge plus side to the longer time frames in GBBS seems to be far less injuries in the kitchen. It logically makes sense that less stress and less panic leads to less lacerated appendages and singed flesh. This is a good thing because as they are all in a tent in a giant field its doubtful they have nearby medical assistance. In America, we have medics, IN THE KITCHEN! Notice I said medics, as in one medic isn't enough, ON THE SET OF A BAKING COMPETITION!
Its rather entertaining when the stakes and quantities amp up in GBBS because the bakers panic. "They've asked us to make 36 biscuits in just under three hours so I've got to hurry it up a bit." As I sit on my couch and chuckle about how we ask bakers to finish ONE THOUSAND cupcakes in three hours while also assembling them on a massive 3-D and typically interactive display on every Cupcake Wars episode. Making ONE THOUSAND anythings in three hours sounds ridiculous but good luck with your three dozen biscuits Richard.
Speaking of biscuits do you know what a biscuit is in England? It took my wife and I ten minutes of guessing as we watched the various recipes being made.
I told her I think they call cookies biscuits in Britain, she thought it was more like a cracker based on the show's observable clues. So we finally gave in and googled it. It turns out we were both correct and also both wrong. In America a biscuit (pictured to the right) is a southern staple that can be dense and fluffy, light and airy but also buttery and filling at the same time, if made correctly. It goes amazingly well with coffee or tea and can be finished with butter and honey (my favorite), gravy or a variety of jams and jellies. Some folks even make some sturdy enough to act as vessels for sandwiches. In England however, this is the confusing as hell answer provided when you ask what a Biscuit means across the pond: "A British biscuit is an American cookie and an American cookie is a British cookie and an American biscuit is a British scone and an American scone is something else entirely. Simple!" (Oxford dictionaries). So in Britain if you ask for a biscuit or are offered one be prepared to receive either an american biscuit, a cookie, a cracker, a scone or variation of one of the above depending on the time of day and region in which you find yourself. Here's a British biscuits gallery from googling "British biscuits":
How has this ambiguity not caused enough domestic disturbances to warrant an adaptation to the language? I know I for one would be rightly pissed off if upon opening a fresh jar of homemade jam and asking my wife to bring me "the biscuits" she hands me a damn box of lemon crisp cookies (bottom left corner above) or whatever a jaffa cake is from the guide below. Who wants a scone when they mean cracker or a cracker when they mean cookie? Those are opposite things! In one scenario I am cutting cheese as accompaniment and in another I'm pour milk for dipping purposes. Imagine if in America we called anything cooked on a grill a steak. Now imagine if you walked into a restaurant and said I'll have a steak medium well. If a hamburger comes out, its certainly not what you ordered but its related to a steak almost like a food cousin but what if a hot dog comes out or a pork chop or a shish kebab? Are you more angry or confused? Also if a hamburger is cousin to a steak a shish kebab is like steak's aunt's second husband's step son from his previous marriage, right? Those items should not be falling under the same title or category and if they are some people who can make a difference need to get together and fix that shit!
One of the most entertaining parts of watching GBBS is pretending I can do the math conversions of metric system measurements to the US standard. She just used 24 grams of cinnamon, wow that sounds like a lot (googles conversion) oh its actually just 3 tablespoons. Side note: how highfalutin are we to call our system of measure "standard?" How standard is anything that only three out of 195 countries use? Pretty par for the course I'm sure many Americans think the other 192 should switch from Metric, man do we hate change.
The final juxtaposition of our baking show cultures was a week where the two judges on GBBS couldn't decide which of the worst two contestants that week to send home, so they called it a tie and kept both of them on another week! In America you know what happens in that situation (well first off we never have an even number of judges, DUH) but we don't keep two bad performers we'd just can them both! We don't settle for ties in America much less ties for last place, we're in it to win it every time. Hell, we put a tank gun on a cupcake for a show logo, if that doesn't scream winning at all costs I don't know what does. Stay classy British bakers I like the calm and goofy antics your show provides as a palate cleanser when I'm tired of watching Lorraine Pascale and Nancy Fuller toss endless shade and disagreements across Duff Goldman's neutral zone.
