The Chronicle (South Tyneside and Durham)
Hooray for Hollywood
PAUL HOLLYWOOD didn’t set built a whole career as a professional out to become a baker. Yes, his baker before going on TV. father was a baker, but he joined He’s well-acquainted with brutal the industry through necessity. 2am starts (his secret was to
After going to art school, “I just never snooze his alarm: “Anyone needed a trade,” Paul, 56, confesses. that snoozes in my industry ended “The Eighties were difficult up getting sacked for being late”), for everybody, everyone was on later becoming head baker at the the dole. So you needed a trade to Dorchester hotel, and supplying get some money – it was hard, Harrods and Waitrose with his being young. bakes.
“Getting a trade was Now, he’s arguably always a bonus, the most famous whether you were a baker in the country, plumber, a bricky or with Bake Off contestants whatever, and I desperate ended up being a for one of his famed baker. Hollywood handshakes “It was a skill I had when they do
Paul and fellow judge to learn, but I did pick well. But that doesn’t
Prue Leith on The it up fairly quickly” – Great British Bake mean he hasn’t made and he knows how Off on Channel 4 mistakes. In fact, lucky he is to have that’s how he became fallen in love with baking. the baker he is today.
“Any person who does a job “I’ve screwed up in the past. I they love – it’s not like work. Getting think when I was starting, I missed out of bed in the morning was something like yeast, which is difficult, but you get used to it.” really critical,” he remembers.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget “Having to put all the dough that Paul – best known as the back in the mixer, diluting the steely-eyed judge on much-loved yeast and putting it back in the show The Great British Bake Off – dough – I’ve done that before.”
He adds: “It comes to you like a bolt of lightning, that it’s all about consistency. It’s about being consistent in your work, and consistent with the products that are coming out. It’s all good and well being good on one day, but you have to be good every day.”
Paul wrote his latest cookbook, Bake, while in the Bake Off Covid bubble last year – and he couldn’t have chosen a better environment.
“It gave me the drive, because it was all on tap – some of the things I was eating at the time, I was thinking I could better that, or do something like that.”
Some of the bakes he sees “pique his interest”, he says. “I’m a professional baker – it’s my job, it’s my life. But at the same time, you see the bakers bring in things like bao buns, or they’ll bring in a strange [flavour]. Matcha – I’ve never been particularly fond of – I tried matcha, I don’t like matcha. I don’t think I would have used it myself.
“Sometimes I’ll pick up something and go, I quite like that flavour. I might try that when I get home. But nothing really surprises me 13 years down the line, it would take a lot to surprise me.”
So is the harsh-but-fair TV judge the same way at home?
“At home I’m a bit more chilled,” he reveals – but Paul’s still very much a perfectionist.
“There are certain things I like, I do have a routine. I make bread all the time for home, and I always make toast for my egg in the morning – and the egg has to be done at five minutes and 13 seconds. Not 12, not 14 – 13.
“I’m like that, I don’t like change too much – I think it’s just the way
I am.”
■ Bake: My Best Ever Recipes For The Classics by Paul Hollywood is published by Bloomsbury Publishing, priced
£26. Photography by Haarala Hamilton