Matt Moran: Australian Bake Off celebrates the joy of licking the bowl

GREAT AUSTRALIAN BAKE OFF
Series return
Thursday, January 27, 8.30pm, Lifestyle, On Demand

“When you’re five or six, sitting up on the bench cooking with your grandmother, that’s generally baking,” says chef, farmer, businessman and co-judge on The Great Australian Bake Off Matt Moran. “It’s one of the first crimes in life, licking the bowl! Then when you get older, you’re retired, all you want to do is make your own bread, bake a cake. It’s for all stages of life, and all walks of life.” Or to put it another way: who doesn’t like cake?

That certainly goes part of the way to explaining the enduring popularity of Bake Off, about to start its fifth season in Australia and in its 12th in Britain.

The show is also at the kinder end of the TV spectrum. “It’s a really feelgood show, there’s no question about that,” Moran says. “There’s no meanness, there’s no bitchiness.” The drama, he says, comes purely from the fact that sometimes things go wrong – as any fan of the show will attest. Collapsing cakes, blackened pastries and adventurous ideas that don’t quite come off are all part of the journey. He sees his job as both sharing his expertise (which, after 30 years in the restaurant business, is considerable) and bringing integrity to the role of judge.

“If you’re going to criticise someone you have to be able to back it up,” he says. “So you say, ‘Sorry. Your cake’s shit’. But then you have to explain why it’s shit.” (For the record, Moran has never actually described a contestant’s baking as “shit”.)

And increasingly, he says, contestants also look to him, and co-judge Maggie Beer, for tuition. “What I found this year, probably more so than any other year, is that after every Technical (as the name suggests, a test of technical skills) – regardless of whether they did it right or wrong – they actually wanted to talk to you about it and ask you why and when and how.” Then, towards the end of the competition, the contestants were clearly using what they’d learnt to produce some pretty spectacular bakes. “It was quite humbling to see that the guys were really wanting to learn as much as they could. They didn’t just see it as a competition.”

Moran says that compared with when he was his daughter’s age the world of food and food knowledge has exploded. (Moran has two children: Amelia, in her mid-teens, and Harry, in his early 20s.) “I didn’t know anything about anything. I thought that I didn’t like seafood but in fact I’d never eaten it. There was no access to it. Fish fingers were it.” There was a lonely iceberg lettuce in the crisper. Most of our seafood was exported. Flathead was sold as bait. Then, just as our access to food and ingredients started to burgeon – through both Australians travelling overseas and the world coming to Australia – cooking shows also started to proliferate, igniting a passion in the general public for information about food and how to use it.