Paul Hollywood: 'I still say my dad’s bread was the best'
Artisan baker and co-judge of 'The Great British Bake Off’, Paul Hollywood begins his new column with a little getting-to-know-you chat. Let’s get ready to crumble...
When Telegraph Weekend asked me if I’d like to write a column, I was very flattered. I’ve never been given the chance to write anything like a newspaper column before. Yes, there have been books of my recipes, and I’m very proud of them, but before this there’s been nothing where I’d had the chance to talk to readers regularly on such a personal level.
So the first thing to say is that I’m really looking forward to chatting to you each month: about baking – obviously – but also about some of the other stuff that goes with my work, about the sort of things that happen to me when I’m working, and about what life has taught me along the way. Plus a few recipes and tips for the mix.
When you meet someone for the first time, what you usually end up doing is telling each other a bit about yourself, so here goes. I first baked bread when I was eight. I grew up in Wallasey on the Wirral, near Liverpool, and my dad worked nights as a baker, so he was usually asleep when me and my two younger brothers, Jason and Lee, were awake. But Saturdays were when we were all together as a family.
In the afternoon, what he really liked to do was watch the wrestling on ITV (this was the mid-Seventies) – Big Daddy versus Giant Haystacks. But what the three of us wanted to do was pile on top of him and have a big fight of our own. On this particular day, though, I came in and there was a fire in the grate. In front of it there were dough balls that my dad had made, rising under a tea towel.
I can still remember asking him questions about what was happening to the dough. As he explained it to me, I watched it rise. Then we baked it. I still say it was the best bread I’ve ever eaten. If there was a starting point for me, that was it.
When I was 10, my dad moved to the East Coast, where he went on to found his own chain of bakery shops called Bread Winner. They eventually stretched all the way down from Aberdeen to Lincolnshire.
The headquarters were in York and all three of us kids would go over on the train to see him. My mum would put us on the train at Lime Street in Liverpool – she’d fork out for first class because she thought we’d be safer. Because I was the oldest, I was in charge until my dad would meet us off the train in York.
Hot, but not cross: Paul and fellow judge Mary Berry on 'The Great British Bake Off’ (BBC/LOVE PRODUCTIONS)
His office was above the bakery and it was on those trips that I had my first real experience of what went on in a bakery. There would be five or six bakers working down there and, when we weren’t messing around making a den behind the big flour bags, I liked to help them. They’d let me measure out the sugar or put the jam in the doughnuts. I’d even earn a few quid off my dad. And perhaps it encouraged something in me – and our Lee. He’s got his own very successful bakery business now on the Wirral.
If my dad was the baker in the family, it was my mum who did the biscuits, cakes and pastry. I like to think I’m a mixture of both my parents. Another clear memory from my childhood was the first time my mum let me make ginger biscuits with her, standing on a chair at the kitchen table, helping her to do the mixing, rolling them into balls, then shaping them on a baking tray, and using a fork to flatten them out. That was my job. And then I’d watch them in the oven. I couldn’t wait for them to be ready to eat.
It was a clean, simple, quick recipe – just the sort of thing that kids love. They don’t want to have to wait around for hours to taste the result. That’s why I always say, when it comes to getting kids interested in the kitchen, bake with them first, and then move on to cooking later.
With baking, I always think it’s like arming them with a weapon for life. But too many of us seem to have stopped baking with our kids. One of the many brilliant things about doing The Great British Bake Off is that I get hundreds of tweets, lots of them from university students who watch the programme and then try to make bread for the first time. But I always wonder why have they had to wait so long to find out how you do it?
So if you’ve got kids, give it a try. If not ginger biscuits, then how about making bread with them? It’s easier and cheaper than teaching them to make a basic meal because the components are simple and always on tap. You don’t have to keep going out to buy more each time. If you’ve got flour, yeast, baking powder, and a bit of salt, you’re away. If you use baking powder, you can make soda bread with them in 45 minutes from starting to it coming warm out of the oven. That’s what I call instant gratification.
As I know, because history is now repeating itself and at home I really enjoy baking with my 11-year-old son, Josh. We’ve just been making pizzas and chocolate roulade together. He wanted to put raspberries in it and I didn’t. I love they way you can load children with information when you are doing practical things with them. Their brains are just like sponges. Show them how and they pick it up so quickly. And very soon they’re telling you what to do.
So that’s how I got started on baking, but it nearly came to nothing. When I was 16, I ended up following my mum’s side more than my dad’s. She’d been to art school and that’s where I decided to go – to Withens Lane in Wallasey to do a preliminary art and design course. The idea was that you tried a bit of everything and then decided which area you wanted to specialise in – fine art, photography, jewellery-making, textiles and sculpture. If I’d continued, it was sculpture I’d have chosen. I sometimes think that manipulating dough is a bit like sculpture.
Then my dad’s firm bought a bakery in Walton, on the other side of the water in Liverpool. He gave me a call and asked me to come and join him. I was 18 and it was too good an offer to resist. All I had to do was pass my driving test, because I’d be going to work at two or three in the morning, and you didn’t want to be taking night buses all the time across the Mersey. Too many drunks!
I found being the boss’s son extremely difficult. People said I was a snitch, or my dad’s eyes. I stuck it out for two years until he asked me to move nearer to where he was then living, just outside Lincoln. I joined him and learnt the trade. By the time I was 20, he’d asked me to be head baker for a group of shops in the area.
I was working six days a week, getting up and out on the road so early in the morning that my dad used to joke there were only three sorts of people in their cars at that time – bakers, bobbies and b-------, the three Bs. I was a young lad in a car and was always being pulled over by the police, but then they would turn up at our bakery at five in the morning for a pie and a cup of coffee.
I’ve never had a problem getting up in the morning, and I enjoyed the responsibility, but it was an odd life for a lad in his early twenties. I felt I was missing out. I was envious of mates who had “normal” lives. If I found time to have a drink with them between shifts, I’d be no good at work afterwards, so I didn’t. And, if I’m honest, I was still a bit homesick for Wallasey. So after two or three years, I told my dad I wanted to go solo. He was upset, naturally.
Once I was back home, I got a job as head baker at the Grosvenor, the poshest hotel in Chester. It was something different. I was 23 and this was when my hotel career started to take off. I went on to work as head baker at the Dorchester in London, but I was still restless. At one stage, I went back to the Grosvenor, and then I ended up being poached by a hotel group that was setting up in Cyprus. I stayed there almost six years and I loved it. The money was good. I had a villa with a pool. And I finally managed to break my ties with home.
I started doing a bit of television work when I was in Cyprus, and I’d be buzzing afterwards. So, when I finally decided it was time to come back to Britain to take a job as head baker at Cliveden, the smart hotel with the infamous swimming pool, I contacted an agent who’d given me his card. Television jobs started coming in. I did a show called Use Your Loaf and then was one of three co-presenters on Great Food Live on the Good Food channel. Among our guests was Mary Berry.
I was also busy at the time setting up my own artisan bakery in Kent. Then in 2008 I got a call out of the blue from some television producers. They had a new idea for a show and were looking for someone to work as a judge alongside Mary Berry. When I got the job, she gave me a big hug and said, “Let’s go for it.” Which more or less brings us up to date.
But I promised you a recipe, and here it is – my mum’s ginger biscuits. Enjoy them.
Gill Hollywood’s ginger biscuits
Here’s the recipe my mother taught me
4oz/110g margarine
4oz/110g sugar
4oz/110g golden syrup
8oz/225g self-raising flour
2 tsp ginger powder
Gently melt the margarine, sugar and syrup in a pan
Pour the mixture over dry ingredients and mix until it resembles a dough
Take a teaspoon of the mixture and press into a biscuit shape. Place on a baking tray leaving enough space for the biscuit to expand and repeat
Cook on 350F/180C/Gas 4 for 10-12 minutes until golden brown
Paul Hollywood’s next column will appear at the start of October
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