After the all-new Batter Week on GBBO it’s back to normal with Pastry Week. We expect plenty of rolling, quite a bit of sweating and a good measure of blind baking – however, with this week’s incredibly tough technical challenge, there could be a fair amount of swearing too.
Filo pastry tarts are quite an easy thing to put together – simply make a little basket out of the sheets, fill it with something delicious and pop it into the oven until golden and beautiful. However, the Bake Off bakers will be required to take on the frankly insane task of making their filo pastry from scratch, which requires an awful lot of patience, a very deft touch and being able to keep cool under pressure when it breaks apart for the tenth time. Even Mary Berry says she buys the pre-made stuff.
If the contestants do manage to get some serviceable sheets of filo, however, then there’s plenty they can do with them. Adam Gray’s Beetroot and fig filo pastry tartlets with Oxford blue cheese taste as good as they look, while Sally Abé’s simple Egg cups with a spicy tomato salsa are perfect for brunch.
Danish pastries will also be on the menu, which require a special laminated dough which is very slightly different from puff pastry in that it contains yeast. The bakers will still need to layer their dough twenty-seven times to create the buttery, flaky texture, but the slightly heavier Danish dough means it will be a bit more substantial than its puffier counterpart. If the bakers have made their own puff pastry before then they shouldn’t have too much of an issue – although anything can happen in the Bake Off tent.