Great British Bake Off 2020 week 5

Of all the baking basics, the one I struggle with most is pastry. On the face of it things should be easy, most pastry ingredient lists are even shorter than bread making, but somehow it never quite seems to work that way. It never has quite the shortness or crumbly texture I’m looking for. I’ve tried and I’ll persist, but can’t deny a temptation to cheat every time I walk by the ready-made pastry shelf in the supermarket

This is why Bake Off pastry week always make me a little more nervous than the others do. Makes me feel my commitment to baking something from every show in the series might just have been a mistake.

The challenges the bakers were presented with this week were to make a batch of pasties to their own recipe for the signature bake. To produce six eclairs, three raspberry and three caramel, for the technical bake and a quiche of their choosing, presented inside a pastry dome for the showstopper finale. 

For those who don’t know them, pasties can probably be described best as small individual pies. Half mooned in shape, you may be more familiar with them as South American empanadas. They have a fascinating history and were originally a food eaten by Cornish coal miners in England. Baking the fillings, normally meat, potatoes and other vegetables, inside a pastry case meant a hearty lunch could be wrapped up and taken below ground with them for sustenance during the long shifts. In the very early days, it’s believed pasties were split in two with savoury filling at one end and sweet the other. 

Many food historians claim empanadas resulted from Cornish coalminers travelling to other countries for work and taking the pasty with them.

Now comes my weekly complaint, the showstopper challenge was once again all about the look rather than the taste. I know the bakers had to make quiches for the judges to taste, but the intricate pastry domes they were presented in were almost immediately lifted off and set aside without a glance. I thought the most impressive of these looked very similar to the glass pyramid which sits just outside the Louvre museum in Paris.

If there’s one type of pastry I’ve had any success with its choux. That’s why when eclairs were announced as the technical I knew straight away what I’d be baking this week. Eclairs are a life long favourite, enjoyed now just as much as they were in childhood. I’d always thought of them as a shop-bought thing, so discovering that I could make them at home was a baking high point.

If you fancy having a go this is the recipe I use. It comes from Trinne Hannemann’s Scandinavian Baking, one of the most used cookbooks on my shelf

Ingredients

• 100g butter
• 100g plain flour
• 0.5 tsp caster sugar
• pinch of salt
• 3 eggs lightly beaten

Method

• Put the butter in a saucepan with 200ml of water and let it melt over a gentle heat. Now increase the heat and bring to the boil. Meanwhile, sift the flour, sugar and salt into a bowl. Take the saucepan off the heat, add the flour and stir with a wooden spoon until a firm, smooth paste is formed. Beat until it comes away from the edges of the pan and forms a ball, then remove from the heat and leave to cool for 10 minutes. Add the eggs to the dough a little at a time, beating well after each addition, until the mixture is smooth and glossy. You may not need all the egg.

To then make the eclairs

• Put the dough in a piping bag fitted with a 1cm plain nozzle. Pipe a 10cm line of choux pastry on a baking tray lined with buttered baking parchment. Follow with a second line parallel to the first, so that they cling together. Pipe a third line on top of the other two. Move away from this first bun, giving it plenty of space on the tray, then repeat. You need to pipe eight to 10 of these.
• Bake for 20–30 minutes; do not open the oven door for the first 10 minutes or the pastry may not rise. The pastries are done when they are golden brown and firm. Transfer to a wire rack and, with a sharp knife, pierce holes in the side of each bun, to let the steam out. Leave to cool.

Once cooled I fill the eclairs with whipped double cream that has had some raspberries crushed in it. I then drizzle the tops with melted chocolate, put them in the fridge to set and wait to indulge.

Next time is a complete mystery as Bake Off are having their first Japanese week.