Bake-Off 3: The Showpiece

One bread of your own design, proposed at Bake 11 and baked a fortnight after teaching ends, with every choice in it accounted for

Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 50%

The brief#

Design a bread you would be happy to see in a shop window, bake it for the bake-off on 28 May, and justify every decision in it against the twelve weeks behind you.

You set the brief and then you answer it. Weeks 9 to 12 are the freshest material and the obvious place to look — brioche, challah, croissant, banana bread, flatbreads — but nothing rules out a rye, a sourdough, or the tin loaf from week 1 if you can say why that was the difficult choice. Choose on the decision you want to be questioned about, not on the bread you already bake well.

Three things have to be explicit in the proposal and again at the bench. First, the structural system: gluten network, pentosan gel, gelatinised starch, laminated butter, chemical leavening. Say which one carries the load in your bread and what the others are doing around it. Second, the fermentation schedule — the ratio, the temperatures, the hours, and why it is that shape and not a faster one. Third, the oven: steam or dry, held heat or falling, stone, tin or lid, and what each of those is for. A student who wants the crumb of a 36-hour retarded dough and the schedule of a straight-dough Tuesday has not finished designing anything.

Scope is where a showpiece usually goes wrong. You propose on 3 May and bake on 28 May: twenty-five days, and the last eighteen of them have no class in them. That is one trial bake and one real one if nothing goes wrong. A laminated brioche with a cooked filling and a plaited crown is three doughs, two chills and a shaping problem you have never met, and it will eat double the hours the recipe suggests. Cost it out before you lodge the proposal: write the hours beside each stage, add the oven time you can actually get to, and see whether the total fits in twenty-five days. Idris will tell you at Bake 11 if it does not. Hearing it then is cheap. Discovering it at 2am on the Thursday is not.

Flatbreads land at Bake 12, the week after you propose. If that is where you are heading, propose it on the logs you already have and expect the detail to move once you have baked one on a dry surface.

One bread, and only one. Not a bread with two things beside it: a board of accompaniments is a different assessment, and every hour it takes is an hour off the bread.

What you submit#

Three things: one at Bake 11, two on the day.

The proposal, one page, on paper, handed to Idris at Bake 11 on 3 May. What you are making, the structural system and why, the fermentation schedule with its temperatures and hours, the oven plan, and an hour estimate broken down by stage. Idris signs it, or sends it back for a smaller version — a revised page reaches him by that Friday, 7 May. A bake with no signed proposal is judged against nothing and cannot pass.

The showpiece, whole and uncut, on the bench by 12:00 on Friday 28 May, baked within twenty-four hours of it. Bake it wherever you can get an oven and bring it finished; there is no oven time on the day. If it is a flatbread and comes in numbers, bring six. Marisol cuts it in front of you and you answer two or three questions about whatever the slice shows — the crumb, the lamination, the sourness. A bread that arrives as photographs is not marked.

The bake sheet, one page, as a PDF uploaded before you walk in. The final formula in bakers’ percentages including any prefermented flour, the schedule as it actually ran with clock times and dough temperatures, the oven temperature and what you did about steam, and a short paragraph on where the bake departed from the proposal and what you did about it. Departures are expected. Unrecorded ones read as guesswork.

The Bake pages hold every formula and schedule you were given, and twelve weeks of your own logs hold the rest. If illness or an oven failure is going to stop you, read the assessment policies before Friday rather than after it.