Hooray for Hollywood
Great British Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood talks to PRUDENCE WADE about his baking mistakes, getting used to early starts, and being a perfectionist
PAUL HOLLYWOOD didn’t set out to become a baker. Yes, his father was a baker, but he joined the industry through necessity.
After going to art school, “I just needed a trade,” Paul, 56, confesses. “The Eighties were difficult for everybody, everyone was on the dole. So you needed a trade to get some money – it was hard, being young.
“Getting a trade was always a bonus, whether you were a plumber, a bricky or whatever, and I ended up being a baker.
“It was a skill I had to learn, but I did pick it up fairly quickly” – and he knows how lucky he is to have fallen in love with baking.
“Any person who does a job they love – it’s not like work. Getting out of bed in the morning was difficult, but you get used to it.”
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Paul – best known as the steely-eyed judge on much-loved show The Great British Bake Off – built a whole career as a professional baker before going on TV.
He’s well-acquainted with brutal 2am starts (his secret was to never snooze his alarm: “Anyone that snoozes in my industry ended up getting sacked for being late”), later becoming head baker at the Dorchester hotel, and supplying Harrods and Waitrose with his bakes.
Now, he’s arguably the most famous baker in the country, with Bake Off contestants desperate for one of his famed Hollywood handshakes when they do well. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t made mistakes. In fact, that’s how he became the baker he is today.
“I’ve screwed up in the past. I think when I was starting, I missed something like yeast, which is really critical,” he remembers.
“Having to put all the dough back in the mixer, diluting the yeast and putting it back in the 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.”