Unexpected route into baking
Paul Hollywood talks mistakes, early starts, and being a perfectionist
Paul Hollywood didn’t set out to become a baker. Yes, his father was a baker, but he initially joined the industry through necessity. After going to art school, “I just needed a trade,” Hollywood, 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 the art of 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 Hollywood – 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 the telly. He’s well-acquainted with those 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 contestants desperate for one of his famed Hollywood handshakes. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t made mistakes.
“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. I’ve forgotten rising agents in Genoise [sponges], baking them and they’re flat and wondering what’s going wrong. And overwhipping meringue.
“It comes to you like a bolt of lightning, that it’s all about consistency. It’s about being consistent in your work, and consistentwith 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.”
Hollywood wrote his latest cookbook, Bake, while in the Bake Off bubble in 2021 – 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.”
So is the harsh-but-fair TV judge the same as the Paul Hollywood at home? “At home I’m a bit more chilled,” Hollywood muses – but he’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 chucky 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 published by Blooms bury Publishing, priced £26. Photography by Haarala Hamilton. Available now.