Flaounes were the start of Britain’s favourite baking competition, ‘Great British Bake Off’. The seven remaining contestants had to prepare ‘flaounes’ from scratch for this week’s technical challenge, using Paul Hollywood’s recipe.
Paul, a flaounes enthusiast, picked up the recipe while living and working as a pastry chef in Cyprus. Mary Berry, on the other hand, just like all the contestants, had never heard of flaounes before.
The contestants were a bit puzzled by the pungent flavour of the two main spices for flaounes: mastichi or mastic (the small, sun-dried pieces of resin from the mastic tree) and mehlepi (made from the tiny stones of the St Lucie cherry). Mastichi reminded Nadiya (last week’s star baker) of an industrial detergent!
As the contestants have never seen flaounes before, and were given very little instructions on how to shape them, they were not able to fully emulate the fully risen, golden brown ‘authentic’ flaounes. According to Paul, only the best one ‘could just about pass for a real flaouna’. Still, they all tasted good, according to the judges, at least.
Look out for our upcoming book (Authentic Recipes from Around the World) for the best (!) and most detailed recipes for flaounes.
Click on this link to enjoy the full episode:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06bffq2/the-great-british-bake-off-series-6-6-pastry
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