The Great British Bake Off is a British television baking competition in which a group of amateur bakers compete against each other in a series of rounds, attempting to impress a group of judges with their baking skills. It is now available on Netflix but matching up the british and american season can be quite tricky. In the US, the show is titled The Great British Baking Show rather than Bake Off because of a Pillsbury trademark on the term bake-off. The seasons themselves are out of order on Netflix but you can blame PBS for that. They got the rights to the seasons out of order and decided to number them based on when they were acquired. The table below can be used to clear up some of the confusion.
Each season, a dozen bakers are selected from a pool of nearly 12,000 applicants. Contestants come from all walks of life and while the average of of all contestants is 37, the youngest contestant was 17 (Martha from season 5) and the oldest was 71 (Flo from season 8). The show is also split almost evenly between female and male, 68 and 64 contestants respectively.
Contestants on the show are not professional bakers. They are home cooks who have a passion for baking. Some are retired, some are students, and others are what we now call "essential workers." The graph on the left shows that nearly a quarter of the contestants work in "Business Management and Administration". This includes jobs like Ruby from season 9 who is a Project Manager or Dorret from Season 6 who works as an Accountant. Most of the contestants don't quit their day job after the show since there is no cash prize. However, some do shift to a more food focused career. More that 20 of the former contestants have written cooking books and many of the former winners continue to make appearances at festivals and as guest judges for cooking competitions.
The contestants featured on The Great British Bake Off come from all over the UK! This map shows the geographic distribution of the contestants hometowns. You can see that many of the contestants are from London and Manchester but some contestants come from as far north as Hillswick (James from season 3).
Each week, one contestant is eliminated and one receives the title of star baker. The final episode is a battle between the final three bakers with the winner crowned after the final showstopper bake. Winners do not receive a cash prize but they do get a cake stand and a nice bouquet of flowers.
Each episode, just before the Showstopper, the judges discuss who is in running for star baker and who is in
danger of going home. Typically they suggest two contestants for each. The graphs above show the number of
times each winner was in danger of going home and how often they were in line for star baker. We can see that
every winner was in line for star baker at least twice and only David from Season 10 never won the coveted
star baker (though he was in the running nearly every other episode).
Each week, one of the two bakers considered to be 'in danger' goes home. For those in danger, the only way to
stay in the
contest is to do well in the showstopper challenge. Nearly every winner has been in danger of going home at
least once. Only Sophie from season 8 was never at risk of going home. She is also tied for the most number of
weeks in the running for star baker and won it twice. Interestingly, the person who won the most number of
star bakers did not win the competition. Richard Burr won star baker 5 times in season 5 and came in as
runner up to Nancy Birtwhistle who is the oldest winner of the show at 60 years old.
The part of the episode that usually gives the bakers the most challenge is the technical bake. This is when the contestants come in to the tent with no foreknowledge of what they will be baking. They are then given a stripped down recipe written by one of the judges along with the exact ingredients needed for the bake. Interestingly, only one winner has come in first on the technical during bread week (John Whaite from season 3) but 5 of the winners came in second place. In the graph below, the y-axis is the position of the baker divide by the number of bakers left. Because of this there is a slight upward shift of the data as the weeks go on. The lower to the bottom of the graph, the better the baker did.
We were curious about the nutritional content of the bakes on the show. To find out more we first needed to get recipe ingredients. To do this we scraped the ingredients from the GBBO website. We focused on the technical bakes because this was the category that had the largest percentage of recipes available (103/128). These have then gone through natural language processing to extract the ingredient, quantity, and measurement for key ingredients like sugar, milk, and flour. We then interfaced with the USDA Food Data Central API to extract the key macros for these ingredients.
The above graph compares the averages of the caloric content for each judges technical recipes. We can see that Paul Hollywoods recipes have 25% more calories on average than Mary Berry or Prue Leith.
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