German Baking by Jürgen Krauss and a rumination about cookery competitions.

The first thing I did when I received a copy of German Baking, a cookbook from The Great British Bake-Off’s (GBBO) Jürgen Krauss, was watch the season in which he appeared. Generally, I no longer watch GBBO unless a trailer catches my eye (the infamous Mexican-themed show being one) because competitive cooking isn’t my vibe. After several years of work as a pub cook back in prehistoric times, where I obsessed about sending out timely and consistent plates of good food, I don’t find it entertaining to watch others have to do the same. Still, I needed to see how telly Jürgen compared to Jürgen, the author. Would they be congruous?

I am not an expert on Jürgen, although a swift Google search makes his popularity with GBBO fans very clear (Ofcom received 115 complaints when he was voted out). A big part of that is his personality. In the episodes I watched, Jürgen is unflappable, deeply intelligent and kind and clearly thrived in the bubble conditions COVID imposed on the show's making; in interviews, he has said it allowed him complete focus. Viewers took Jürgen, his gentle humour and dedication to their hearts. Refreshingly, his baking tended towards the pragmatic with little twists that were added not for the sake of novelty but because the scientist in him knew they would work. This felt like a novelty itself in a show that appears to prioritise style over substance and— at times — seems to set contestants up for failure by giving them insufficient time to complete tasks. Jürgen appeared to value the process of baking as much as its outcome, an attitude that reminded me of the early days of Bake-Off (which I used to watch occasionally). I believed him when he told an interviewer that he didn’t go into the Bake Off wanting a career change.

The innocent charm of reality and cookery competition shows tends to fade as they progress from series one to two. (Remember Big Brother Series One? That was wonderful.) Over time, contestants are more attuned to the end game; their participation is a decisive career move rather than ‘let’s see what happens’. They know fame will arrive and have some idea (I imagine) of the storyboarding and editing process and where they fit in with this. Still, Jürgen’s demeanour seemed remarkably unchanged throughout the entire series, and he was resolutely himself during the ensuing whirl of post-finale publicity. Watching his episodes, I felt trepidation that these qualities might be lost in a cookbook.

I have bought books from famous TV cooks and chefs (including those written by food TV contestants) only to find at their heart a massive incongruity where the authorial voice or the demeanour of the book does not match their TV persona. This isn’t necessarily the author’s fault. Televised food competitions favour dramatic story arcs and built-in jeopardy. They latch onto and centre their contestants’ more telegenic or challenging personality traits, resulting in exaggerated personas that can hinder the development of an authentic-sounding authorial voice when the time comes to put out a book. So, cookbooks by cooks/chefs made famous via the medium of cooking shows can be tricky. A few feel overly stage-managed, and others seem to lose the voice of the person I thought I was familiar with.

The pathway from Bake-Off contestant to national food column, cookbook, and (sometimes) a show is well established. The advantages of appearing are clear. When a show like GBBO becomes world-famous and potential contestants see the possibilities that might arise from appearing on it, you will get bakers with literary ambitions (and talent) entering. This was probably not the case during the first few series, where the possibility of publishing a book might not have occurred to contestants. Of late, it has become fairly obvious early on who will get a book deal and what that book will look like. Their readership is pretty much baked in. Yet fans feel they know the contestants, so there will be expectations about what a book by their favourite GBBO baker might be like. (I imagine they want to feel as if Jürgen from the telly is helping them to bake Jürgen-style with a recognisably Jürgen voice.) Had Jürgen pitched a manual about the physics of baking to his publishers, I doubt it would have ever seen the light of day.

Jürgen has said that when it came to each week’s bakes, he started with the story he wanted to tell rather than the cake itself. There would be no design for design’s sake. From my perspective, there appeared to be two intentions that guided his time on the show: the acquisition of new skills via baking challenges that would take him out of his comfort zone, and the championing of German baking in a relatable way. From my perspective, underpinning this all was the Jürgen who immigrated to the UK all those years ago, yearned for the food he grew up with and learned how to bake them, making do with whatever was to hand, ingredient-wise. As Jürgen progressed through the show, his conformity to habit and recipes appeared to lessen as he gained new skills and experience and had to cook from deliberately incomplete recipes. His confidence in himself as a representative of heritage German baking became evident as he slowly told his story through food. His success at the latter should not be underestimated in the face of a particular male judge who once went to Germany and probably feels himself to be an ‘expert’ on German baking as a result. We all know what tends to happen when contestants tell this judge about the baking they are deeply familiar with.

Jürgen’s route to baking is a familiar one. He’s self-taught, or rather, he learned the basics at his mother’s side as she cooked for her family in a kitchen he describes as ‘the centre of my early childhood in Germany.’ Some years after his move to England, he realised the only way to have a reliable supply of the German bread he missed so much was to learn to bake it himself. This eventually led to him applying to be a contestant; the rest is history. He admits to following recipes very precisely and that this only began to change after his time on Bake-Off, where he learned to go off-piste and change things up, theory-wise. In turn, this helped reconnect him to memories of childhood baking, and he began to develop recipes for the delicacies he remembered baking as a child and the cakes and pastries his family bought from their local Konditorei. ‘I invite you to accompany me through the flavours of my life in Germany,’ he writes in the introduction. This could not sound more Jürgen. He writes of the Black Forest, where he grew up and a region he describes as having been influenced by Austria and France. Many of his recipes derive from this part of Germany but have been adapted to use fats other than the lard that Black Forest bakers traditionally hold dear. He doesn’t compromise when it comes to the region’s eponymous gateau though, whose execution is he writes, ‘the measure by which I would judge a cafe or bakery… I would be very reluctant to change this flavour profile into something novel.’ He wants us to understand what the Black Forest Gateau of his childhood tastes and looks like.

Statements like this make this cookbook recognisably Jürgen in voice and demeanour. (Yes, I believe books that address their readers so directly are in possession of the latter.) The book’s clear instructions telling you what to look for as you go through the stages of a recipe are massively helpful to less confident bakers. Jürgen’s methodology is as sound as you’d expect. Neither is he prone to flights of fancy; there are no run-on sentences that career into reverie, and his prose is economical, but he nonetheless conveys with quiet beauty, his deep emotional connection to the subject matter in hand as he writes about his family’s festive baking (Stollen made with Quark; White Gingerbread that gets its paleness through the use of bread flour; and Fastenwähe for Lent made using the recipe he developed in England using butter or goose fat instead of lard), and takes us on a trip via bus and tram to the local department store cafe of his childhood. Memories of the Linzer Tortes, Black Forest Gateaux, and Fruit Charlottes served there catalysed a series of cake recipes that ‘would not be out of place in one of the department store cafes of my childhood.’ Still waters run deep. Bienenstich was his mother’s favourite, and it has a place here, as does an Almost Sacher Torte so-named because he has grown to love English marmalade and now uses it instead of the more traditional apricot jam. I’m intrigued by the Russian Plucked Cake, a baked cheesecake with a chocolate shortcrust bottom, but I’d have liked more information about how the cake got its name. I adored the traybake section where Streuselkuchen rule the roost, and the crucial difference between English and German-style crumble toppings is made clear. Crumble cakes made with custard, chocolate pear, and chocolate apple sound divine, as does a cake called The Waves of the Danube (Donauwellen), whose wave-like pattern is revealed when its layers of cherry-chocolate and vanilla sponge are cut. Recipes for different glazes, fillings and creams allow the home cook to use their creativity when following some of his recipes, as does the flexibility to choose different bases for your cake (but not the Black Forest Gateaux!) in much the same manner as Jürgen did during his time on Bake-Off.

The chapter on bread is as strong as you’d imagine. A train commute to work in London, the breakfasts he shared with fellow commuters, and their conversations about food were the catalyst for his recipe for Swabian Spelt Rolls. He tells us that in Germany, ‘often a pretzel works better as a soother for an upset baby than a dummy’, gives us a recipe for the kind of pretzel sold in Freiburg with some sensible advice: begin with bicarbonate of soda whilst pretending you are using the more dangerous lye to practise safe handling and mise en place. In contrast, Quark and Crumble Buns, a go-to snack during his days as a physics student, have no sense of danger, nor does the Cherry Bread Pudding he ate as a child using fruit from the tree in his garden. They are pure comfort.

The German Baking Book: Cakes, Tarts, Breads, and More from the Black Forest and Beyond by Jürgen Krauss is out now.

---

Jurgen is also a skilled musician!