Savory Pies, Nigella’s Karpatka And A Decorative Pie Built Without A Tin: The Great British Baking Show’s Pastry Week Is On Netflix Now

Pastry Week is on Netflix now. Episode 6 of The Great British Baking Show, Collection 14, appears on the show’s US Netflix title page as of Friday, October 30, three days after it first aired on Channel 4 in the UK on Tuesday, October 27. Netflix’s one-line summary sets out the menu: savory pies, “mountainous choux” and a freeform showstopper.

What the bakers make

Channel 4’s listing for the episode says the bakers make savory pies and a Polish choux dessert, and that there is “decorative pie pandemonium in the showstopper.” It ends on the show’s usual tease: “But who’ll flake under the pressure?”

The Polish choux dessert is a karpatka, and it is the Technical. Bake Off’s official recipes page posted Nigella Lawson’s Karpatka on October 27 under its Technical label, and the show’s YouTube channel links the same page as the episode’s Technical Challenge recipe. Bake Off describes the cake as crisp choux pastry filled with a vanilla custard cream and dusted with icing sugar, named for the Karpaty, the Carpathian Mountains, because its mounds of choux look like snow-capped peaks. The full recipe is on Bake Off’s page; we are not reprinting it.

Netflix calls the showstopper freeform. Bake Off’s own YouTube clip from the episode fills in the brief: Paul Hollywood and Nigella Lawson ask the bakers for a large decorative pie, made without the use of a tin.

As of Friday, October 30, the karpatka is the only Pastry Week recipe on the official recipes page. No savory pie recipe from the episode is posted there yet.

Watching from the US

Netflix carries the series under the title The Great British Baking Show. Collection 14 premiered on September 25, and Netflix says new episodes arrive every Friday until the finale. Pastry Week is the sixth episode listed.

This is the series with a new judge. Channel 4’s series listing describes “Twelve new bakers and a brand-new judge,” with Nigella Lawson joining Paul Hollywood, Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond.

Five pie cookies to bake while you watch

None of these is a Bake Off recipe, and none of them is choux. We do not have a choux recipe. These are our own cookies built on pie, and each description comes from its recipe card.

• Apple Pie Cookies: the closest thing to pastry on our site. Store-bought refrigerated pie crust is cut into 3-inch rounds, topped with a spoonful of cooked cinnamon-apple filling, latticed with strips of the same dough, brushed with egg and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.
• Pecan Pie Cookies: a soft brown sugar cookie baked with a well in the center, then filled once cool with a stovetop mix of chopped pecans, butter, brown sugar and cream.
• Cherry Pie Cookies: a butter cookie with a thumbprint, filled after baking with a cooked fresh-cherry filling, with an optional white chocolate drizzle.
• Apple Pie Cookie Bars: one cinnamon-sugar crumble of flour and cold butter does two jobs, pressed in as the base and scattered on top, with spiced apples layered between them in an 8 x 8 dish.
• Oatmeal Cream Pie Cookies: a pie in name only. Two chewy cinnamon oatmeal cookies sandwich a piped vanilla buttercream filling.

Featured image: a karpatka, not from the show. Photo: Shaiith / Shutterstock.