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Great British Baking Show ™
Season:
Episode:
Pastry Week
Which bakers are in the tent?
Signature Dish -
Samosas
About the dish ...
Host: "For your signature challenge, the judges would like you to make samosas. Now, these delightful pastry parcels are over a thousand years old. The judges would like you to make six sweet and six savoury samosas with a dip to compliment each. Each set must be uniform, skillfully shaped, and beautifully presented."
Prue Leith: "Everybody's had a savory samosa, but I don't think many of us have ever had a sweet one. Whatever they want to put inside there, they can. I'd like to see different colours, different layers, different textures. The last thing we want is a bland, boring samosa."
Paul Hollywood: "For me, I'm really looking at the pastry. How good are their pastry skills? Traditionally, it's fried. Now, when you fry a samosa, the key thing is it's crispy, it's thin, and it's light. This is samosa pastry with just some oil, some plain flour, some salt, and some water. Though beautiful in its simplicity, samosa pastry is difficult to perfect. As always, it's quite a tough dough to get right. It's very easy to keep on adding lashings of water. But you don't want your pastry to be too soggy. You want a flake, you want a bit of bite. Just as important is the amount they work their dough. If you overwork your pastry, the gluten gets too developed and it springs back too."
Time Allowed
2 hours