GBBO

cunts!

cunt me!

Despite being well over 35, as an ignorant American, I've never heard of malt loaf before.

An appealing cast this season. It must be very hard to cast these bakers.

The photography is pretty amazing, especially the inset footage of wildlife around the tent.

That one contestant looks a bit like Vice President Harris.

The gentleman they sent home was endearing and took it very well. When he commented that he’s often too hard on himself, I found that very moving and wonder if anyone else did.

I don’t know how they keep the emotional timbre of this program so warm and humanistic each season, but they do.

Bump for Episode 2 of "An Extra Slice"

Why do the hosts dress like blind people?

After biscuit week I’ve come to the conclusion that the US has shitty baked good traditions. In an American Bake Off what would they make? Oreos? Dump cake? Muddy paws mix? As a US citizen I’m ashamed.

I love Noel and loathe Matt.

I used to love Matt and I avoid looking at Noel.

The hosts dress like blind people because they need to divert attention from their unconventional facial attractiveness.

We're objectifying Chigs and hating on Freya in this thread.

In my dreams, the world is a cakewalk. I lick the bowl, I lick frosting off my fingers—my cake hole is at the ready. If I can’t have it, I go bitchcakes.

Three of the four hosts are so goddamn ugly I can barely watch. Paul is still handsome but he is moving quickly.from.husky to fat.

[quote] After biscuit week I’ve come to the conclusion that the US has shitty baked good traditions

The fact is most Americans - native & otherwise - cooked over an open fire or in clay ovens that didn’t last very long, for most of the country’s history. There was no established nationwide aristocracy for hundreds of years that had large kitchens, ovens & cook staff. No kings, princesses, grand dukes, counts, dauphins, boyars, emperors or countesses. Most Americans had no way inventing a Victoria sandwich or a strudel.

Dude, we have had ovens and houses since the late 1600s. WTF?

Are you Brit?

[quote]No kings, princesses, grand dukes, counts, dauphins, boyars, emperors or countesses.

But we've ALWAYS had plenty of queens!

[post redacted because independent.co.uk thinks that links to their ridiculous rag are a bad thing. Somebody might want to tell them how the internet works. Or not. We don't really care. They do suck though. Our advice is that you should not click on the link and whatever you do, don't read their truly terrible articles.]

Why are the English so unattractive?

Paul's bulge is looking hefty in that pic, R16.

I love the B in GBBO Give us more

[quote] Dude, we have had ovens and houses since the late 1600s. WTF? Are you Brit?

Dude….wtf? Cooking in 1800s in Carolina:

Most North Carolina families did not have the resources for a separate kitchen, and the hearth provided the center of home life and family activity. With no ovens or electricity, women prepared meals on the hearths of brick fireplaces. They used different types of fires and flames to prepare different types of food. For example, a controllable fire was used to roast and toast, while boiling and stewing required a smaller flame.

Dutch ovens might be used…they were tight lidded cooking pots for roasts, stews & soups.

The dainty delights of British sponge cakes, fruit & savory tarts, pavlovas, Austrian linzer tortes, French Raspberry religieuse were not staples of American homes because people were busy making flapjacks and coffee with chicory. The great chefs of Europe who knew the secrets and tricks of the trade handed down for generations in the castles & country homes of the aristocracy did not emigrate to the US in the 1600s-1850s. They stayed their asses in Europe, where they could make a good living. The type of kitchens that were used in great homes in Europe were only available in a handful of restaurants on the East Coast cities, mainly NY and Boston, and in New Orleans and San Francisco. The US, being rampantly capitalistic, suffered financial crashes, regressions, depressions, inflations, deflations. Really, the Gilded Age was the first time any Americans had the wealth of the European aristocrats and could import great chefs and outfit lavish kitchens where new dishes could be developed. That lasted 30 or 40 years…then it was back to wars and depressions.

Europeans were horrified by American food. Before the great wave of German immigration in the later 1800s there really wasn’t much beer in the US. Wine was not usual in the Anglo part of the US because the soil & weather weren’t very good. In New Spain, the winemaking was much better than in the part of the US conquered by Northern Europeans. Apple cider was the alcoholic drink in the US and it was rough & high in alcohol content. Water was served with dinner in the White House.

Open hearth cooking—cooking in a fireplace—was the only way to cook in the White House up until Millard Fillmore’s administration (1850-1853).

By the time the US was settled by enough Europeans for them to stop warring with the Indians & with each other, convenience foods were already invented.

Well, then I argue the "British" food is more Continental than Anglo.

They are not cooking mostly Brit food.

Richmond is the host of the GBBO?

Yes, most of what they bake is continental.

Not loving this season. No gay hotties and no young cutie pies (of either gender). And, like most current British TV shows, they've gone ludicrously overboard with the diversity casting.

As for the hosts, Paul seems like he's phoning it in at this point. No spark of joy or fun there anymore...it's just a well paid gig.

Noel has worn out his welcome and I like Matt doing what he does best, sketch comedy, but here he's wasted.

Dame Prue is...no Dame Mary Berry.

Why do we need TWO threads?

The BBC pays for this show to reset the UK's global reputation as host to the worst food in the world.

It's funny, my grandmother came from an Irish immigrand family, but she cooked like the English: all her savory foods were basically roasted or boiled meat and boiled vegetables with little or no seasoning at all. But her desserts were amaaaaaaazing, and they were her favorites. She always wanted there to be room for dessert, so when my mom was a kid, she served dessert before dinner.

I did a study abroad at Cambridge 20 years ago and all of the students, including some from Germany and France who I met there, were amazed by how flavorless almost all the food they served at the university was. We asked a bartender where we could go to get good authentic British food and he said "what's authentic British food?" All he could think of was fish and chips, and he said that that's really more for tourists in that area. He told us if we want to eat good food that British people eat, we'd need to go to an Indian restaurant. But I do remember passing by *a lot* of cake shops with insanely beautiful cakes on display in their windows, which I've since seen a lot on the Food Network but have never seen in real life where I live in D.C.

R26 Well, it's no longer on the BBC but yeah....the irony is the fact that the British have NO edible cuisine really.

I mean, the Sunday Roast and Yorkshire Pudding ARE yummy but...that's about it.

R17 The clothes don't help. Why are they dressed like that?

R28 The zany clothes pretty much match the spirit of the show, including the nonsense commentary from the comedians. I don't mind any of it. It adds the personality that distinguishes it from US cooking competitions.

But, they could still express themselves with their clothes AND attempt to coordinate with each other. I don't understand why a hugely popular network show doesn't have a costume coordinator for the two judges/two hosts so they don't look so mish mosh.

R30 I see the whole design as 'eclectic.' The casting is a juxtaposition of personalities and styles. I have no problem with it. And I like Prue, and I like Nile's whimsical-goth thing. I am warm and cool on the other guy depending how he is acting. I like when he's more normal but find his antics a little grating.

Maybe I am just always a dissenter, but Paul is the most annoying one to me. Not so much him, although his arrogance irritates me a little, but what has been made of him. The will-he-or-won't-he-shake-someone's-hand thing feels totally gimmicky and inorganic to me. I think it's pretty stupid, and the contestants' reactions to it are over the top. Maybe it's actually that important to amateur bakers, I don't know, but I don't like to see people so desperate for validation.

"An Extra Slice," episode 3.

R20: most American food has European, usually British roots. Wine asking has been around from the beginning. One of the oldest houses in the Cleveland area was the farmhouse for a vineyard for winemaking established in the early 19th century. Winemaking was established in New England before then.

Wine wasnt popular in the US. In colonial times, native grapes didn’t make drinkable wine. Colonists on the east coast brought over European Vitis vinifera , which came from a Mediterranean climate. Eastern seaboard frigid winters, humid summers that caused fungus & a North American insect called phylloxera devastated Vitis vinifera. Plantings died within 3 or 4 years.

People eventually hybridized vinifera pollen with native grapes. It tasted better, and by 1850 wine was produced in every state, but in very small quantities. It wasn’t popular relative to whiskey, beer or hard cider because those beverages were produced far less expensively. When Americans drank wine, it was usually imported. In 1840, just under 3 percent of wine consumed in the US was produced in the US. Imported = expensive, so the US didn’t develop a wine-drinking culture.

By the Civil War, the Catawba grape, which was being grown in Ohio, was wiped out by fungus.

Spaniards started vineyards in their California missions. In the 1870s, the Gold Rush brought other European people to CA and they began drinking wine, but there were few vineyards & transport to the East added to the cost, so very little CA wine was sent outside of CA. Politicians got congress to raise taxes on imported wine so that CA wine would be the same price in 1875. But cider was still cheap and an influx of German immigrants opened breweries throughout the northeast & Midwest. Wine remained a small segment of US alcohol market.

Then came prohibition. The Volstead Act of 1919 allowed people to grow grapes at home & ferment them. This coincided with an influx of immigrants from the Mediterranean who knew how to make wine. California vineyards switched over to selling grapes rather than making wine. They made grapes with thicker skin to survive a 5 day train journey back East. Grape prices tripled and vintners planted more acreage to keep up with demand for home growth & consumption. The quality of the grapes wasn’t very good. When prohibition ended in 1933, the winemaking industry had been shut down for 12 years and a lot of knowledge was lost.

After prohibition in 1933, so many people were making their own wine at home that CA vineyards decided to try to complete in the hard liquor market. They switched over to making fortified wine like sherry & port, which had been illegal during prohibition. Two thirds of the output of CA vineyards became fortified wine from the 1930s til the 1960s. Boomers might remember lots of tv commercials and magazine ads in the 1960s for sherry & vermouth.

Wine finally started making inroads in the US in the 1970s. Wine and cheese parties became a new fad. Wine tasting classes were popping up all over the country. Americans were traveling to Europe and wanted to learn about wine before their trip. In order to show their sophistication, Americans learned which wine was served with which food, identified the level of dryness or sweetness, and learned to describe a bouquet.

The drinking age was lowered to 18 in some states during the Vietnam War and wine producers pursued the teen market with fruity wines like Boone’s Farm Apple or Stawberry wine.

It took America a good while to accept wine drinking. In the beginning, US wine tasted terrible. Then it was expensive because it was imported from Europe. Then it had to be shipped from California to the rest of the country via new railways.

Then came Prohibition, and wine became associated with Mediterranean immigrants, especially paisanos from Sicily, who were considered non-white. Then California started making fortified wines after prohibition in order to compete with the hard liquor market. Finally, the 1970s made wine an acceptable drink for Americans who wanted to appear more sophisticated & travel the world with some knowledge of wine.

Wine is still viewed with suspicion among many Americans though, associated with coastal “elites” — people who aren’t good ole American heartlanders & who harbor European socialistic, effete, degenerate, non-protestant Christian morals..

Early Explorers and Native Grapes All of the explorers and early settlers made note of the abundant and vigorous wild grape vines—they could hardly help doing so, since they were obviously and everywhere to be seen along the coast of eastern North America. Within two years of Columbus's discovery, for example, the Spaniards reported vines growing in the Caribbean islands. [9] The Pilgrims in New England found the species now called Vitis labrusca growing profusely in the woods around their settlements. [10] The labrusca, or northern fox grape, is the best looking of the natives, with large berries that may come in black, white, or red. It is the only native grape that exhibits this range of colors. Labrusca is still the best known of the native species because the ubiquitous Concord, the grape that most Americans take to be the standard of "grapeyness" in juice and jellies, is a pure example of it.

The name "fox grape" often given to labrusca yields the adjective foxy , a word unpleasant to the ears of eastern growers and winemakers as an unflattering description of the distinctive flavor of their labrusca grapes and wines, a flavor unique to eastern America and, once encountered, never forgotten. One of the dominant elements in that flavor, the chemists say, is the compound methyl anthranilate; [11] it can be synthesized artificially to produce the flavor of American grapeyness wher-

― 7 ― ever it may be wanted. But why this flavor (which, like all flavors, is largely aroma) should be called "foxy" has been, and remains, a puzzle (see Appendix 1).

Hundreds of miles to the south of the Pilgrim settlements, and even before the Pilgrims landed, the gentlemen of the Virginia Company at Jamestown encountered a number of native grape species, among them the very distinctive one called Vitis rotundifolia —round leaf grape—that grows on bottom lands, on river banks, and in swamps, often covering hundreds of square feet with a single vine. The rotundifolia grape, commonly called muscadine, differs sharply from other grapes; so different is it, in fact, that it is often distinguished as a class separate from "true grapes." The vine is low and spreading, and the large, tough-skinned, round fruit grows not in the usual tight bunches but in loose clusters containing only a few berries each: hence the variant name of bullet grape. The fruit is sweet, but like that of almost all natives, its juice usually needs to have sugar added to it in order to produce a sound wine. The fruit has also a strong, musky odor based on phenylethyl alcohol that carries over into its wine. [12] Scuppernong is the best-known variety of rotundifolia, and the name is sometimes loosely used to stand for the whole species.

Both Pilgrims in the north and Virginians in the south would have known the small-berried and harsh-tasting Vitis riparia —the riverbank grape—which is the most widely distributed of all native American grapes (difficulties in classification have produced some variant names for this species, of which Vitis vulpina is the most common). Riparia ranges from Canada to the Gulf, and west, with diminishing frequency, to the Great Salt Lake. As its name indicates, riparia chooses river banks or islands. As its range suggests, it has a tough and hardy character that allows it to survive under a great variety of conditions. It is currently, for example, being used as a basis for hybridizing wine grapes for the cold climates of Minnesota and Wisconsin. [13]

Another grape widespread throughout the eastern United States is Vitis aestivalis , the summer grape, the best adapted to the making of wine of all the North American natives, though not the most widely used. Unlike the rotundifolia and others, it has adequate sugar in its large clusters of small berries; and it is free of the powerful "foxy" odor of the labrusca. Aestivalis fills in the gaps left by riparia and labrusca, for unlike the former it avoids the streams, and, unlike the latter, it prefers the open uplands to the thick woods. Another grape common in the East, Vitis cordifolia , the winter grape, has a taste so harshly herbaceous that only under the most desperate necessity has it ever been used for wine.

The Catabwa grape is still with us and has a large range which still includes Ohio. It has continued to be used in winemaking, although like a lot of older, sweeter kinds of wine, you don't hear much about it. Back in the 19th century, the sparkling version of Catabwa was good enough to be exported back in the 1840s. New York State wine (esp. champagne) was a punchline well before the 70s.

Lots of grape discussion - nothing about Chrystelle's delicious-sounding grape and feta focaccia.

Some brit dissing 'murican food I think.

All tools of trolls!

tolls

and i don't even know if that's right.

Someone cutting an pasting from wiki a California-centric version of wine/grape history in the US.

i did the american part. not the rando-euro-grape-centric first one.

And of my fuckin focaccia? Nothing

clump is redoing a season from 2015. some muslim lady baker i recognized because she got her on tv show. and oy fit dads on there too.

Mind trying again, R44? This time in English?

We need to piss on your grave.

....

heil meinen Kuchen!

I cannot disagree with men pissing on his grave.