Pastry pros: Season 7 of ‘Great British Baking Show: The Professionals’ hits Netflix
Arriving just as the next season of this pro baking competition airs “across the pond,” Season 7 of “The Great British Baking Show: The Professionals” will be available to stream as of Wednesday, July 26, on Netflix.
The series, a spinoff of “The Great British Baking Show” (which itself is the North American moniker for the British-born series, there simply called “Bake Off”), invites 12 pairs of accomplished pastry chefs – patissiers – from across the United Kingdom to compete for glory, whipping up delicious and delectable treats for expert judges – including chef patissier Benoît Blin and executive pastry chef Cherish Finden – as they square off to see who truly is the best of the best.
This iteration of the beloved franchise turns up the heat, ditching the infamous “Bake Off ” tent for a professional-grade kitchen in the heart of a spectacular English manor home, inviting professional patissiers to face a series of increasingly difficult challenges – some well-known to avid watchers of the competition, like the miniature challenge, in which the teams must create three different types of edible miniatures, uniform in appearance, and the Showpiece Challenge, in which chefs must reinvent a popular British dessert and present it as a fine dining experience. These top-notch patissiers race through challenges, summoning all the baking expertise and precision they can muster in order to impress the highly-critical judges and avoid elimination.
Eventually, the competition will be narrowed down to three teams, all of whom face off in the final episode, which sees a duo of difficult pastry-based challenges: first making finger-licking finger tarts, then constructing a banquet of desserts themed after a “Day at the Races.” In the end, those who manage it best will be awarded the “silver platter” and win the champion title.
Last season, the city of Cardiff, England, took its second consecutive “Professionals” win, as chefs Michael Coggan and Andrew Minto from Gin & Bake took the platter, following Laurian Veaudor and Thibault Courtoisier from the Cocorico Patisserie – also in Cardiff – during Season 5. As Cardiff sits out this season, a new town must take its place, and teams from London, Cheshire, Birmingham and beyond are each vying for a win.
To see whose desserts take the cake, dig into Season 7 of “The Great British Baking Show: The Professionals,” streaming Wednesday, July 26, on Netflix.