The Great British Baking Show feels different this season. That’s because the hit Netflix show decided to go back to basics after fan backlash to the over-the-top and culturally insensitive challenges we saw in the tent last year. There will be no more showstoppers designed to be literally impossible for the bakers to nail. There will be no more emphasis on savory dishes that challenge the bakers to cook rather than bake. Most importantly, there will be no more cringe-worthy jokes in broken Spanish like we saw in last season’s “Mexican Week.” And no one’s happier about the changes being made to The Great British Baking Show Collection 11 than an alum from Collection 9: Jürgen Krauss.
Jürgen was a standout in his season thanks to his sweet nature and stellar baking skills. He won back-to-back Star Baker honors in the first two weeks of the season, only to get knocked out in the Semi-Finals, to everyone’s shock.
Decider hung out with the iconic Bake Off contestant and now cookbook author last week in our New York City offices. While we chatted with Jürgen about everything from the inspiration behind his new cookbook, The German Baking Book: Cakes, Tarts, Breads, and More from the Black Forest and Beyond, to his friendship with Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner, we also asked The Great British Baking Show favorite his thoughts on the current season.
“I think the bakers are really talented. They all seem to be nice characters getting along very well. Real characters and the challenges are going back to the basics,” Krauss said. “They look more like the challenges that were in the very first seasons with Mary Berry. So, challenges home bakers can connect to.”
Hard-core Great British Baking Show fans will remember that Krauss ironically struggled to connect with challenges during his season’s National Themed Week: “German Week.” That wasn’t just because everyone from Noel Fielding to his fellow contestants assumed he had Star Baker in the bag, putting undue pressure on the Black Forest native. Krauss also was put off by the fact that Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith were asking him to make creations that you’d never see in Germany.
Decider asked Krauss how he felt about The Great British Baking Show‘s decision to axe National Themed Weeks going forward (post-“Mexican Week” debacle) and he was direct with his opinions.
“I believe they [should] scrap them,” Krauss said. “I think it can go horribly wrong, which it did in ‘Mexican Week.'”
“I spoke to the producers recently, actually quite recently, about ‘German Week’ again and how difficult I found it to connect to it. They assured me they decided about ‘German Week’ before they even knew I was applying. But putting, for example, three tiers of yeasted cake together, you wouldn’t do that in Germany.”
Krauss added that he understood the method to the producers’ madness. They wanted to put bakers out of their comfort zone to push them to do “an essentially impossible task.”
“But if that task is connected to culture, that can go horribly wrong,” Krauss said. “So for me, it went horribly wrong because I couldn’t let go of my German heritage. And it can look very quickly like cultural appropriation, which is in some countries more sensitive than others.”
“I had Matt Lucas singing [the] Flintstones [theme] in undecipherable German to me. If I wasn’t German, if I was some other ethnic person, it would probably have caused an outcry. Because it’s German, people laugh about it. I’m fine with that. But it’s a tricky thing to do. It’s more like the stand up of the 1960s that comes through it. It probably shouldn’t be part in our time.”
Speaking of our time, Jürgen is all over this new season of The Great British Baking Show and is moonlighting as British publication Radio Times‘s Bake Off correspondent. We asked him if he had any early favorites in the tent and he zeroed in on “Tasha, Josh, Dan, and Cristy.”
Decider will be sharing more of our conversation with Bake Off icon, hero, and heartthrob Jürgen Krauss in the days ahead.