Professional Baker Reviews Baking Scenes from Movies & TV | Vanity Fair

who's cleaning that up that's what i want to know who's cleaning that up hi i'm penny stankowitz and i'm the owner and creative director of sugar couture a custom sugar art company in williamsburg brooklyn today we'll be breaking down baking scenes and film this scene is from the great british baking show five minutes remaining it's breaking up in front of my body race is leaning and i'm sure that's not going to do me favors one minute left it's just about okay it's horrible because it's melting down but i will be able to finish it time is up it's finished there's a lot of manipulation and time frame here i have five minutes left he hasn't even touched his cake barely even cut it definitely hasn't filled it or decorated it next shot they cut too it's half filled he's about to finish filling it still hasn't decorated it still hasn't iced it still hasn't put stuff on top of it it's finished they're lying to me and i don't really like being lied to there's no way that happened in five minutes giuseppe is taking a huge gamble he plans to bake one large cake and then slice it into three layers so i'm using a hitting rod in the center and cake belt around it to homogenize the heat across the cake i was on team just happy for sure he makes a really silly choice to bake the cake entirely in one pan he could have baked off three separate layers if you were to bake off every layer independently it would take one oven all in the same time about 20 25-ish minutes to bake a layer and then it would cool really quickly but when you bake a thick cake it's like over insulating itself and so it's gonna take 40 to 50 minutes maybe an hour but then he does this other thing which is he used something called baking strips which are these strips that you soak in water and you put around the outside of the pan and their intention is to reduce the heat coming from the side so that the cake bakes more evenly but what it does is it insulates the pan which means it takes longer to bake so he makes every mistake that he shouldn't be doing in this moment in time i can start assembling which is stressful stuff quite nice and firm which is good can i talk about her cake for a second breaks my heart what she's doing is she's damning the cake because she's gonna fill it with an orange curd so curd is super soft and won't completely squish out the sides unless you first pipe icing around it to hold it in but she goes double height she pipes two rings around it but then the curd that she puts in there is only like to the first pipe around and then she puts the next cake on top and you can see it sink in it's because she piped that so high that things weren't in touch with each other this scene is from matilda [Music] first of all i was that little girl okay maybe my mom wasn't so crazy but i relate to matilda let's just say that those are perfect pancakes her flipping technique is great she got it just at the right moment where the bubbles were starting to come up flip it over is a perfect golden brown i want to eat her pancakes i could get on criticizing the wet measuring cup instead of the right measuring cups but if they're perfect pancakes so i can't falter they have exactly the right height they're exactly the right color that you'd want pancakes to be you can't argue with results there's definitely another hand that comes in there and flips them that isn't hers because you can see from the perspective of it she's not tall enough to kind of get there but i'm not mad at her look at her she's just four years old gets up and makes her own pancakes i kind of admire that this clip is from big night what are we making here exactly call the plumber please it's a pasta no with a special crust and is it it's a shape like like a drum like a tympanic drum and the inside come on please one of the most important things in the world i love this movie so much it was written by stanley tucci directed or co-directed by stanley tucci and obviously it's starring him and look at mark anthony my god that's marc anthony it's such a labor of love that it feels so personal on so many levels timbano it's based on a family recipe of stanley tucci's what they create they bake pasta into something else the dish is meant to ultimately resemble the drum so it's baked in a pan that's going to give it that shape and this is fresh homemade pasta and then they fill it with more fresh pasta that they've made then there's homemade sauce and there's homemade meatballs and cheese and it's layered like a lasagna is layered and then the pasta gets folded over and it gets baked all of the components for this dish have to be made separately because each of them is going to cook at different times and different rates and then when it's assembled it's all about bringing it together as a whole setting layers it's going to take a lot of time it's going to take definitely 24 hours for sure it could be made over three days between making all of the things and making them all right there's a lot of fear you can feel a lot of fear coming off of them is this right is it ready because you never really know if you cut it and it's too hot just going to be all over the place and so all of that adds to the drama and then when you finally cut into it you can see the difference between the pasta and where the meat is this is absolutely impressive i don't have a single negative thing to say about the technique the handmade pasta it's exactly the way i learned how to make pasta from italian people everything they show you is very authentic big night is an amazing food movie because you see their passion and the love that they put in everything they're making the care the attention to detail and how important it is for them to share it with the people they love this scene is from shakala [Music] the story sets her up as coming from a family who discovered chocolate discovered its deliciousness discovered its medicinal uses so her technique is very grounded in sort of the techniques that were developed when chocolate was first found so there's no electrical machinery in her studio she's making the first quote bean to bar chocolate basically so she's starting from beans she's grinding the beans and then literally turning it into chocolate she knows oh her way around tempering there's a lot of hard work involved in that and they really do skip over a lot of it i do have one little criticism at one point she gives one of the people who live in the village this bag and she calls them chocolate nibs and she tells them that they're an aphrodisiac after your husband and refined coconuts from guatemala to awaken the passion they're just the broken up bean so that would be like eating an entire unsweetened chocolate bean and that would be very very bitter [Music] there's no way you would be able to eat that much unknowing what the result was gonna be from them there's a lot of subtext the chocolate is a character in the film and it represents letting yourself go it represents indulgence and it represents joy this scene is from it's complicated oh what about a warm chocolate croissant oh it's my specialty [Music] first of all i think they're high to think that this is gonna happen in an hour is insane to make a croissant it's a two day process you start with a dough that dough has to proof for two hours and then it goes into the refrigerator and sits overnight you have to make butter packets they don't show that they skip that entirely the dough has to be folded together several times they show them doing that and i could give her a little bit of a pass on maybe the dough was already in the fridge but then it has to be folded in and it has to be chilled for a half an hour between every fold and then it has to proof for two hours before it can get baked so this is a minimum of four hours hey i'm just gonna make you a chocolate croissant it's not gonna happen [Music] the other thing is that is a traditional croissant shape chocolate croissants or peno chocolate are usually a rectangle of dough that's folded with chocolate in it and turned upside down so it's a rectangle i think that the filmmakers are thinking that people think of croissants as a specific shape so it's a little unrealistic now on that level they did a really good job of rolling it the way you pull it out and then the roll and how she pulls the little tail up really nice and snug and tight to wrap around that was really well done you have to be really careful that you don't smush the layers together when you cut it so using a pizza wheel is also the right technique but it's a really fun scene because if it is four hours and they're still giggling and high after it i want to know who their dealer is this scene is from to all the boys p.s i still love you [Music] she does a pretty good job here i got a couple critiques for they're not chilling the dough it's very soft and sort of stretchy and it's not kind of holding its shape and by not chilling pie dough the butter doesn't set up and you're never gonna get something flaky so you need to keep the dough really cold throughout the process in order to have that steam escape and that flake [Music] she uses a knife to cut the vents but she uses the bench scraper to cut the shapes so had she used the knife she probably would have gotten cleaner cuts and honestly gotten probably a couple more pieces out of the extra scraps of dough for sure the other thing is is at a certain point she piles up all of the dough and then puts it out like playing cards almost and if that dough is warm like that is it's gonna stick completely so it's not a great idea to pile those up on top of each other the other thing that i kind of wish she had done is paint egg wash around the edges of the bottom ones to have something for the top ones to really stick to because without that they're definitely going to expand and separate in the oven you're going to have a lot of cherry pie filling out of the hand pies rather than in it where you want it and she makes the egg wash she makes the egg wash in the end so the fact that she doesn't use it to seal it breaks my heart a little bit so it's charming she bothers to go through the steps and she bothers to try to do it right she cut the vents to allow steam to escape when she was making her cherry filling she used lemon juice which is going to help thicken it but it's also going to add a lot of complexity and acid which is really more of a seasoning in something like this than it is a flavor profile i think she does a good job she's using the tablespoon so she doesn't overfill them she's not trying to be a professional she's just trying to bake something at home so she does a great job for this i'm sure that everyone who's eating her hand pies is very happy this clip is from chef [Music] this is a really simple but kind of profound dish it's fresh berries that are macerated with a little bit of sugar topped with freshly whipped cream and a little bit of the caramel dust sometimes simple is the height of what something can be every ingredient holds much more weight the caramel dust that he uses is an amplifier for the flavor it's a counter balance because caramel is slightly bitter and so it balances off the sweet of the berries and the rest of the sugar a lot of times chefs want to overdo everything to show what you can do but the reality is is that restraint is one of the most powerful weapons you have and so in a way this restraint and the simplicity in this dish shows his maturity as a chef chocolate lava cake is not just undercooked chocolate cake that's not what makes the center molten you take a frozen cylinder of ganache and you set it in the ramekin so that as the outside coats fully the inside becomes molten that's a fantasy deep down inside i think we all want to scream and rage if not at a reviewer at yelp you can't answer back so you kind of just have to stay in the kitchen and take it as far as the molten lava cake it's on the fence because there's actually two ways to make it and there is a way to make it where it is just under baked cake and there is a way to make it where you freeze a ganache my husband wouldn't recognize the difference between the two methods it hurts yes it hurts when you write that it hurt you it does it does but i probably would ganache is very rich and very creamy versus the under baked cake which tastes a little bit of raw cake chef's a fun movie and it's one of the few food movies that does actually seem to convey what it's actually like to live and work in a restaurant this scene is from bridesmaids [Music] she's clearly depression baking right which i guess is why they would justify making a single cupcake which of course is kind of crazy how do you do a recipe that makes one cupcake it's like literally impossible you would inevitably screw something up if you're gonna use a half a teaspoon or a teaspoon of salt in a recipe for 12 or 24 cupcakes how do you break down the salt to actually get it in there you'd have to break down the egg and beat the egg separately and then add a small amount she's not even measuring by weight which would be the only feasible way to do this the other thing that i noticed when she takes the cupcake right out of the oven she just flips the pan right over and you would never do that you always want to let the cupcake set up for between five and ten minutes at that point when it comes out of the oven it's still super soft and the structure is not completely set so if you flip it out right away it's gonna collapse on itself it's likely to break so it's another little piece of movie magic they were jumping the gun on that a little [Music] the flower is probably made out of fondant i would make that out of gum paste gum paste can be rolled much thinner and then you get a much more delicate petal out of it and something like an orchid is nothing if it's not delicate right i know i'm being like hyper critical but like that's what i do and none of that is really something you want to eat fondant is a love it or hate it thing and so putting that much fondant on the top of a cupcake isn't really delicious which she seems to think herself because when she does take that final bite she avoids it she only eats the cupcake in the icing from the bottom this scene is from princess switch switched again this shouldn't be too hard ah there's the sugar behind the flower i'll get it it's quite all right oh it'd be easier if i guess i just told you oh you weren't funny i'll give you funny who's cleaning that up that's what i want to know you notice how the guy gets flour all over his face but the pretty girl only gets it from her face down because we don't want to get anything on that makeup food fight scenes they're never really funny to me because i always think about the mess you know who has to deal with this after they're done it's clearly a very large kitchen that's built to do a lot of volume so the flower would probably be in large bins someplace much more easily accessible rather than one five pound bag left half open that could fall easily that's a little unrealistic you probably wouldn't put that there and flour like gets in your nose it gets in your eyes like you don't really want a face full of flower right how are you gonna end up with the romantic kiss at the end of this everybody's gonna be making out with flour in their mouths it's pretty gross when food is represented right in film it's an act of love it's an act passion and it really can help tell a story in a very special and magical way when it's done wrong it really emphasizes what's inauthentic about it whoever knew being judgmental was gonna pay off for me in the long run

Channel: Vanity Fair

Views: 1,000,502

Keywords: bake off, bake show, baker, baker reviews, baking, baking in movies, baking movies, baking review, baking scenes, baking tv, big night, british bake off, british baking show, chef, chef review, chocolat, great british baking show, it's complicated, matilda, matilda review, pro baker, pro baker reviews, professional baker, professional baker reviews, reviews, the great british bake off, the great british baking show, vanity fair, vanity fair reviews

Id: x7aY3uqkhxo

Length: 17min 51sec (1071 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 22 2021