The sun is out, the beer gardens are open and everyone is trying to pretend their exams aren’t two weeks away. Given the impending doom of sweaty exam halls, this review offers a show to nibble and not devour.
We are not talking duvet day binge show, but pure BBC One brilliance that you can tune in to every Thursday at 8pm. Britain’s Best Home Cook will bring Mary Berry right back to your screens.
Think if Great British Bake Off had a baby with MasterChef - Mary Berry is the cute grandma and Claudia Winkleman (host of the show) is your nuts auntie. Mary is joined by two new judges who are essentially a young John Torode and Greg Wallace given that, like John and Greg, one is a chef and one is a “produce expert”.
[pullquote]I must stress how fab it is to have Mary back on our screens[/pullquote]The programme starts slow, but when you learn all the chefs will be living in a house together you can already smell the beef. The format of the show allows the cooks to show their cooking flair and the first round saw the amateur cooks make their take on a burger. The winner of the first-round picks between two options for the vital ingredient of the second round.
I personally took great delight when the winner of this week’s first-round picked nuts over berries -especially given the low-key bitchiness of the other cooks at this choice. In the last round, the worst chefs of the first two challenges are given a recipe they must follow exactly. But the twist is that ingredients are only provided to create the dish once. No whipping up an extra Hollandaise because theirs curdled because they’ve only got once chance.
Maybe it’s not as good as Bake Off. But I must stress how fab it is to have Mary back on our screens and I have a lot of hope the co-habitant nature of the show could stir some serious goss.
