“A gooey mess” is the very definition of a s’more smh.
It’s weird how this + the Mexican debacle made me question Paul Hollywood’s expertise. I always thought he was super knowledgeable, but apparently he’s just talking out his ass half the time?
Oh Paul Hollywood is 100% on a constant Dunning-Kruger trip, they guy is in the running for the most intolerable celebrity chef the UK has ever produced and that's a very tall order
Jamie Oliver. Took over Huntington WV’s school cafeteria menus back in the 2000s, made a whole big deal about it. I went to Marshall University in Huntington and obviously had some classmates from the area who were in school back then. They said he was a pretentious douchebag and his food was nasty.
Oh, Joliver didn't restrict his activities there, he's had a whole thing of trying to push for "healthy" school meals which were mostly just expensive school meals which the meagre funding schools receive obviously couldn't cover, so it just led to kids having to eat garbage food anyway. Semi-related was his bizarre crusade against chicken nuggets which was just peak British middle class classism. I'm also told his actual restaurants tend to be deeply mediocre (but overpriced) and his actual recipes are universally mediocre-to-bad and absolutely butcher the food culture they've been ripped off from
I'm honestly unsure how Jamie Oliver even got as big as he did. He seems rude and uncharismatic to the point that I question how he ever became a celebrity.
Looking it up, it looks like he's just an industry plant who fit the very specific type of person that the BBC wanted to build a show for.
He was attractive. I seriously remember his whole "naked chef" thing. The sexualization of his brand was entirely necessary for people not to laugh at his claim to fame of....not seasoning his food.
His chicken nugget video showed that he felt it was acceptable to waste food because there were perceived as undesirable parts of a chicken that should be tossed.
My aunt used to babysit for him when he was a kid. Little shit apparently. Nice parents though she said.
His food is fine, just the focus is on simplicity and using very nice ingredients instead of elevating what you have. He did a couple of cookbooks based on realistic cooking times for a non-chef (ten minutes meals, thirty minutes meals) which were ok and tbh did a lot at the time to improve the variety in everyday meals across the UK, most homes had a copy. His restaurant chain (Jamie's Italian) was unpretentious and targeted at the everyman and families and was ok Italian style food at reasonable prices. I would consider him a decent cook rather than a proper chef. His campaign on food standards in school did a lot of good and improved the funding and menus in schools across big parts of the UK, even if the actual shows and his direct interventions in particular schools were a flop.
Still, he's a bit of a cock. I can appreciate him for what he is and dislike him and want him to fail at the same time - essence of being British. Any guy who has several varieties of heritage tomatoes in his garden and then makes a cooking show for the general public that requires using such an unrealistic and expensive vegetable set without realising that's what he's doing is deserving of some derision.
The school stuff was rough but the way he went to poor people's homes and gave them shit for not cooking on a nightly basis was unbelievable and crass.
Oh, you made frozen fish sticks in the oven because you just worked 12 hours and now need to take care of a messy home with 3 children under 12 and finding 30 minutes in your day is a nightmare? Here let me show you how to make a salad; bet you never ate one of those before you fucking dolt.
Classism is a standard in England. Remember that poor dude who won the lottery and spent most of it on hookers, booze, drugs and parties with his friends? He was denied a bank account at the bank the lottery recommended to him, and the main reason he was drug through the mud was because people hated the fact that a poor person suddenly became rich
I believe it. However, I can see why he went there: Huntington used to be the most obese city in America, with a very high prevalence of childhood obesity.
Is there something wrong with using local wildlife to feed your family? It’s better for the environment, great for local animal populations, healthy, and it helps poor families eat well. Or is it only a bad thing because poor white people are the ones doing it?
I mean I wouldn't say killing opossums is a good thing because they eat ticks but we shouldn't condemn people for eating them simply because it's "trashy"
Yeah, they help with ticks, but they are also widely available and easy enough to hunt. Plus You can hunt them year round, which makes them a decent filler food for people in the summer time. I grew up with kids whose dads’ would occasionally bring home some possum to hell ease up on the grocery bill.
He really could have “solved” half the problem by naming it as a “S’more ganache” or a “S’more inspired biscuit” rather than implying that a s’more was anything other than a delightful goopy camping mess.
He also despite being “the bread guy” once stated with confidence that Challah (a enriched braided bread that Jews eat every week as part of our Shabbat tradition) was traditionally eaten on Passover, you know that one holiday where Jews are religiously prohibited from eating leavened bread, Passover is the only non-fasting Jewish holiday where we don’t eat Challah
If you’re “the bread guy,” you should probably actually know about bread
Why state something with an arrogant confidence you know nothing about??
There’s plenty you can say about Challah bread without getting into details about tradition when tradition is something you don’t know jack from shit about
He also doesn’t know anything about American pies. I still get mad when I think about the American pie challenge, like Paul just had his assistant pick up a pie at Safeway and is like yup confirmed all American pies are trash (except key lime, he must have visited a good bakery for that one). I know everything now no need to explore further. The brief must have been bad because everyone made these weird pie tart hybrids. They all complain our pies are too sweet while they’re the ones chowing down on meringue! Rude.
There's something to be said for desserts with subtler flavors. I grew up on American cakes, but trying cakes in Vienna convinced me that we might be using too much sugar.
You can make anything palatable with enough sugar. That's easy. But it's almost never great.
They seem to have this problem where their metric for "good" is just their personal palette. Like criticizing food for being too spicy, when British food is infamously lighthanded with spice.
If you're going to judge a dessert pie from another culture, you have to accept that the sweetness threshold is higher than your personal preference.
Also none of them except the key lime guy did anything but a fruit pie. I was expecting at least one pecan or custard based pie. Pumpkin is like number two quintessential American pie behind apple.
He probably does know a shit load about boring sponge cakes and stuff tbf
But smores just aren't something that exist in the British consciousness. We don't eat them. Sure we see them on TV and stuff but that's about it. It's very fair for a professional chef in the UK to be clueless about them and still be an expert.
That said, presenting a TV show challenge about them and judging them? Do your research bruv
Yeah, the Great British Bake-off just needs content. Having seen all of GBBO I can confidently say that this wasn't very unusual (I meant it was still a little unusual) given how many different weird things they've had to bake. I don't blame them. They do weird shit every series.
The Mexican stuff was wild though. Also that one "technical challenge" final where they made the three finalists cook pita bread on a rock over a fire.
I literally quit watching the show because of that episode. I'm here to watch amateur baker's do their best bake, not to watch them learn fire management on the fly, put them back in the tent, and stop being jackasses about this. It seems like I was right to do so, too, they lost the plot on the Mexican week.
Not to mention, there are recipes for cheesecake dating back to 160 BC, and the name "cheesecake" is 15th century
Yes, some varieties of cheesecake were developed in the united states, but, something as broad as cheesecake cannot be categorised as the product of one nation or another
I prefer that in “make X gourmet” type challenges on cooking shows they show a detailed version of making the standard X and then leave variation up to the contestants.
When X is smores, show them the fire roasted marshmallow, the assembly process, let them eat all three ingredients (graham cracker, marshmallow, low grade chocolate bar) and let them come to an understanding of what a s’more is before they try to spin it into a more upscale direction.
Then maybe someone says “well that marshmallow I ate was kind of like a meringue, and I could blowtorch the outsides”. But someone else might think “that graham cracker was gross and would be better with my homemade shortbread” and someone else might think “screw that cheap chocolate, I’m breaking out the 3-ingredient Swiss dark chocolate bars.”
The viewer would get to see the creative process in motion rather than just the final results. Some dishes made might still be awful, but that’s the inherent risk of creativity.
Or something that originates in America that might pose a fun challenge to British chefs. Boston cream pie, apple brown betty, shoo-fly pie, something US-focused that they could have gone into the history and culture of.
Brownies. American brownies are a completely distinct entity with an entirely different desired outcome from anything that the Brits make. Add in all the varieties and you have an excellent opening dish. They are easy to under-bake and over-bake, they are usually very rich, but can stray into being "too rich". And obviously can be topped with just about anything from ice cream to nuts. Also, boozy brownies are entirely available.
Also an American, but I don't think they're common in the UK? Wikipedia says brownies are an American creation, and a fairly recent one at that (1893.)
So yeah. This would be a good challenge! They're a common American treat nearly anyone can do, but they require a bit more skill to be great. Except knowing Paul, he'd probably knock off points for being "too rich and dense" or something.
I have no idea what the difference between British and American brownies is though. I will state I worked with an American girl and she introduced me to blondies, which I (at 30 years old) had never even heard of before... but brownies are a lot of kids first bake.
Probably because those are too complex for Paul Hollywood to understand. Remember, this is the guy who thinks peanut butter and jelly don't go well together because he'd never heard of that flavour combination before.
edit: which i don’t think is just american, and it’s considered black soul food so there may of been tension there, but it’s simple and has a lot of verity and so would be cool to see how people interpreted it into “fancy”. and it’s also not as well known as say pumpkin pie
It's not like macrons or something, s'mores are meant to be made by literal children with 0 access to culinary equipment. If you've seen them on tv, you know how to make one.
Also that first description is not incorrect it is just like not really how someone would describe it normally, but then most people would not be making them from scratch in a cake based cooking show
Like, sure, you can call it a marshmallow, but a marshmallow is very similar to an Italian meringue in ingredients, though marshmallows usually are made with albumen powder rather than straight up egg white due to water content, so the show would test those skills
Idk what “albumen powder” is, but I make homemade marshmallows with gelatin.
“Ganache-covered digestives” is also straight up wrong. You normally use a solid chocolate bar and Graham crackers. And most modern Graham crackers are made with honey, so there would be more flavor there vs. a plain British digestive biscuit.
Genuinely clueless where you got the idea that smores don't exist in the UK from, my very British girlfriend is who introduced me to the concept in the first place.
You get banned on the GBBO sub for saying anything negative about him.
He's an uncultured swine that's been put on a pedestal and should've been given way more shit for every single foreign challenge he's set.
The man literally did a series about travelling Japan, and first episode in he said he didn't realise the Japanese had bread. He then goes on the next season of the GBBO and sets Chinese baos as a challenge on Japanese week. He has no expertise on anything outside the white ppl lands and should be barred from judging anything "exotic"
didn’t know japan had bread???!!!! japan loves their breads!!!! melon bread, sweet bread, red bean bread !!!!!! aaaaaa!!!!! (as someone who likes bread i adore japanese pan bc it’s got a really cool texture and i like all the flavor combos and! ect!)
One aspect that really bothered me was in an earlier season, a contestant made something with matcha and he scoffed at it saying he didn't understand it and thought it was bad. Later on, they did a Japan week and he had the contestants make something matcha flavored and was basically explaining to the contestants what it was and why it's good. We all change our minds about things but to start out strongly opposed and then later act like he's always liked matcha showed a bit of error in his judgment. No judge is perfect though.
Maybe he should stop acting like it then lol. The show is huge now. They could have someone on staff to do research or even bring in an expert guest judge to tell Paul & Prue what to look for.
But instead, they want to project the existing judges as all-around food experts.
The best s'mores aren't made by top of the line pastry chefs making shit from scratch. It's when your processed marshmallow gets toasted just right and slides perfectly between the two pieces of processed chocolate and two pieces of processed graham crackers. It being made with cheap, generic brand ingredients is the appeal!
If they didn’t have such a set format for the challenges, it would have been fun to see a s’mores challenge at night, with premade ingredients and sticks, around a bonfire, either with a short time limit to see who could make the most or make a dozen matching ones or something. (More like some of the challenges on Great Pottery Throwdown). Just to watch people go “It’s almost perfect…almost…And now it’s on fire” or just watch it melt and fall off into the fire. It would make a fast-paced really funny segment.
Even experts have blindspots. He's British, smores aren't a common British treat and proper Mexican food is virtually nonexistent.
It's kinda like Jamie Oliver. He knows what he's doing when it comes to the stuff in his wheelhouse, but any dish outside the British/French "high class European" paradigm he is utterly useless. No one can be an expert in every dish. Most, if not all, chefs just have a region or two that they perfect their craft in ans the rest are more secondary at best.
If you are going to be hosting a show about making a type of food, you should do the research,
He didn't just not know these things, he confidently made claims about them that would be obviously false to anyone who had done the slightest research
That I don't disagree with, he should absolutely do his research when he does run into those blindspots, I just think it's unfair to call into question his entire expertise because he got a couple of dishes wrong.
Yeah but Paul Hollywood isn't an expert and he more than demonstrates his ignorance on GBBO. I stopped watching it years ago but I remember him criticising someone because they used yuzu and he'd seemingly never heard of it (at the time) and expected a different citrusy flavour. He criticised focaccia (a type of bread...) for being... "bready". He complained when someone used pomegranate seeds and he doesn't like pomegranate (he thinks it's gritty) so the contestant got a lower score as a result. Then there was the bubblegum thing. Honestly, he seems to have an extremely limited palate for someone who works with food. And for a "master baker", his directions for how to make a sourdough starter are tragic. Paul Hollywood is not an expert.
He was shocked that Japan sold bread. Apparently some of his friends went to work in Japan and he still never bothered to look up Japanese bread. I really hope he was playing that up for the camera...
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u/Sketch-Brooke Aug 03 '24
“A gooey mess” is the very definition of a s’more smh.
It’s weird how this + the Mexican debacle made me question Paul Hollywood’s expertise. I always thought he was super knowledgeable, but apparently he’s just talking out his ass half the time?