caitmcg

I always thought it would’ve made a more interesting end to the show if Vinick won. Having Santos win was just so obvious, and probably also less realistic, in that it’s most common to have a party flip after a two-term president, for better or worse.

Don’t bet on it. The Christmas episodes have always aired in full on PBS, as far as I know, unlike the regular seasons.

Per the Guardian:

A little 10-minute feature about Gregory, his background and journey, and plans for his new restaurant.

I think he was planning to, but he ran out of time. He was really rushing to finish, and he said he was going to skip piping, so it sounded as if he was going to lose some of his planned decorative elements.

My ex loved s'mores, so as an apartment-dweller in those years, I can attest that you can properly toast a marshmallow speared on a fork and held over a lit gas stove burner or even a hot electric coil burner. You’re only out of luck with a ceramic/glass top of induction unit.

While that was true for past ice cream challenges (like the ice cream cake), in this case the freezer discussion pertains to the technical, so they had no advance notice of practice. And several said they’d never made ice cream before. it is true that empty refrigerators and freezers are not as efficient at retaining cold temperatures, so I’ve often seen the suggestion to store large bottles of water in the fridge or bags of ice in the freezer so it’s partially filled. I think the fridges are always empty on GBBO save for refrigerated ingredients for the challenge underway

I will say that Chetna's two baking books,The Cardamom Trail: Chetna Bakes with Flavors of the East and Chetna's Easy Baking: Simple Cakes with a Twist of Spice, which go heavy on those flavors, are excellent.

They all did a pretty good job on the waffle cones, as it seemed the only ones that leaked from the bottom were the ones where the ice cream was already a melted mess (i.e. unset) going into the cone. I had a summer job at an ice cream shop in my teens, and rolling the cones so the bottom point is tight was the major learning curve. It’s not hard to do, but they didn’t have any practice.

And ideally, a home freezer should be even colder; it’s advised to keep your freezer at 0 degrees Fahrenheit, which is -18 degrees Celsius (the scale GBBO is working in).

They were made from oven-dried pineapple, and are completely edible.

I’ve found Clinique All About Eyes Rich to be good when I’ve wanted something thicker and with heavier moisturizing power.

All my British cookbooks and recipe sources tend to call for digestive biscuits in contexts where American recipes would use graham crackers, e.g. crumb crusts. So I’d say they are analogs: mildly sweet, crisp, and made with some whole grain wheat (i.e. graham) flour. The “s’mores” would’ve more resembled s’mores if the marshmallows were half the size and if they’d toasted the whole marshmallow with the torch before putting them together. This is so true. I’ve made marshmallows, and they’re far superior to store bought. And this is coming from someone who doesn’t even like marshmallows.

I realize it’s three years later, but Brideshead Revisited is by Evelyn Waugh, not Anthony Trollope (who died before the turn of the twentieth century).

There was a shot of Janusz with a bunch of small pans of brightly colored cake batter, so I believe he cut the cooked colored cakes in graduated widths and stacked, shaped, and nestled them in his mousse. It was his required baked component.

An Aaron Sorkin specialty, apparently.

From what I’ve read, they find out the signatures and showstoppers several weeks before the season begins filming, and are required to submit recipes/ingredient lists to the producers for the entire season's challenges before the show begins even though most won’t make it to the end.

Flour tortillas are made from an elastic dough that contains fat, as well as gluten from the wheat flour, so they can be easily rolled out. With just masa and water, no fat or gluten, corn tortilla dough doesn’t roll well, vs. the even pressure of pressing. Plus, in the context of the show, I think they’re limited in the technicals to whatever equipment is left at their stations. Luckily, here in the real world, a cast-aluminum tortilla press is an inexpensive investment.

I don’t doubt that things do go cold by judging, but the article did say that they have folks clearing stuff off the benches.

Field corn as opposed to sweet corn (which in the US, we tend to just call corn, but in the UK is referred to as sweet corn, as Syabira and the judges did this episode). Dried corn is not just used to feed animals, it’s also used to make cornmeal, polenta, etc. The process of soaking and cooking the dried corn with calcium hydroxide (nixtamalization, which drives niacin into the grain), then peeling, is how fresh masa is made. I imagine they were given the corn post-peeling and grinding it up is what they had the food processors for. It’s a bit odd to me that Paul adds some masa harina, since usually people use masa harina when they don’t have access to fresh, prepared masa or want to go through the labor-intensive process of making it from scratch.

According to this article, there’s actually just one woman hand-washing it all between bake time and judging, although with occasional assistance from runners.

That drove me crazy when I first watched the show, but I’ve since discovered that it’s not uncommon for British recipes to spell it Genoese (for example, River Cottage), so it made more sense to me that that’s what the contestants and judges knew it as.

They really should retire the non-European “national” themes, unless the producers are willing to do more in-depth research and skip the awful jokes. This at least wasn’t as offensive as “Japanese” week. Both Paul and Prue kept conflating tacos and tortillas. Multiple times in judging the technical, they weighed in on the “taco” when they were talking about the tortilla. I’ll have to go back and look again, but it sounded as if they incorporated corn of some kind into the tortillas (hence the puréing in the food processor before adding the masa harina)? Anyway, hardly traditional. Corn tortillas are usually made from masa (cooked and ground nixtamalized corn) — either freshly processed or in flour form — water, and salt, only. No surprise they chose tres leches for the signature, given that it’s probably the best-known Mexican cake. Also no surprise that virtually all the pan dulces were underproved, because they did not actually give enough time in the challenge to properly proof an enriched dough. For the technical, they could’ve gone with flan or any number of Mexican dishes that are actually baked. Chocolate and chile has become pretty common/popular in the way that salted caramel has, but yeah, I don’t really think it’s a big thing in Mexican baking. If anyone is interested in Mexican desserts, I recommend taking a look at the cookbook My Sweet Mexico, by Fany Gerson.

They had to do an enriched/brioche-based showstopper, and since such doughs need a longer rise, they made their dough on Day 1 after the technical and came back to it on Day 2, as I recall.

It’s like when a contestant says they’ve never made something like meringues. Even the less-experienced among them should know by now that they’re going to have to make pastry creams and meringues and laminated doughs, so ought to know the processes aside from practicing for showstoppers.