Taylor Ann Spencer tried GBBO's 'worst technical' flatbread - and lost to a smoking pan
Paul Hollywood called this season's Great British Bake Off technical - blue cheese and roasted grape flatbreads - "the worst technical in 17 years." So Delish writer Taylor Ann Spencer did the obvious thing: she baked it herself, against the same 60-minute clock as the contestants.
The challenge looked rough on screen. After an hour of kneading, grape-roasting and undercooking, the bakers handed over trays of thick, raw flatbreads that Hollywood and guest judge Nigella could barely eat. When the bakers argued an hour wasn't enough, Hollywood answered, "There's plenty of time."
Spencer skipped the episode on purpose, printed the full recipe from the GBBO website and started strong - grapes went into the oven as a whole bunch, the dough was kneaded for five minutes and set aside to rest.
Then the grapes started exploding
The first wobble came at 23 minutes, when the grapes came out looking "raw" - the recipe said 20 minutes with no clue how roasted they should be. At 31 minutes came the real problem. Each dough ball had to be rolled into an 8 cm circle, filled with five grapes and one-eighth of the blue cheese, sealed, then re-rolled to 23 cm. The dough was under-rested and sprang back. Worse, the still-juicy grapes burst as she rolled, tearing holes in the flatbreads.
By 45 minutes her counter was "littered with burst grape guts." No flatbread hit 23 cm, and grape juice left black patches of burnt sugar on the pan while she still had three to roll.
When time ran out, she had five cooked flatbreads, three raw ones on the counter and a smoking pan. "I now know how the bakers feel at the end of such challenges: slightly insane and utterly defeated," she wrote. The finished flatbread didn't win her over either - the blue cheese was "way too strong" and the grapes were "random pockets of juice in an otherwise savory flatbread."
Her advice is simple: skip this one, unless you enjoy scrubbing burnt grape sugar off a pan for a week.