Interview with Benoit Blin - Judge

Benoit is Chef Pâtissier at Raymond Blanc’s Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, where he has worked for over 30 years. The legendary restaurant has held 2 Michelin stars for more than 30 years, and Benoit heads up a team of 13 pastry chefs. He was Team President of the UK team in the 2011 Pastry World Cup and has served as Chairman of the UK Pastry Club.

He achieved the title of MCA (Master of Culinary Arts) in 2005, the highest accolade in the industry, awarded only every four years to the best Pastry Chefs in the UK. Benoit also holds a French Master’s degree in pastry and was awarded Pastry Chef of the Year in 2009. He is a long-standing member of the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts. His first book, Bake with Benoit Blin: Master Cakes, Pastries and Desserts Like a Professional, was published in July 2024

He has been a judge on Bake Off: The Professionals alongside Cherish Finden, for all ten series of the show.   

This is the tenth series of Bake Off: The Professionals. How does that feel?
It’s amazing. Let’s be brutally honest, when we started off ten years ago, we never thought we’d find enough pastry chefs in the country to do one series, let alone ten. And now the industry has grown, there are more pastry chefs than ever before, and more interest in baking, which is fantastic. So, ten years on, this feels like a bit of a celebration for us.

How do you think the show has changed in that time?
Well, there are the obvious ones – it was on a different channel, and had a different name. And we started off with three chefs on each team for the first two series. You can also see that now there are more women involved, whereas it was initially quite male-dominated. Now it’s much more diverse, which is a reflection of how the industry has changed over the last ten years.

The standard seems to get higher every year. Has that trend continued this year?
What I’ve really noticed is that the gap between the strongest and weakest teams has narrowed so much. And when you reach the second or third stage of the competition, you see the teams are all really close together. I think now all the teams really understand what the competition is all about, so they prepare a little better. 

So that makes your job a bit more difficult!
Yes, definitely. And this year was very, very close. This was the first year I couldn’t call it, even the day before the final. 

Did you have a favourite challenge from the new series?
This year we’ve brought in quite a few new challenges, or added new twists to familiar challenges. But my favourite would have to be the floating showpiece. You have to make a chocolate showpiece that floats on water. Why did we ask them to do this? Because we can! This isn’t something you’d necessarily be asked to do in a professional kitchen, but we chose this challenge because, ultimately, it’s something you can design and make work – and it does work! Also, it encourages our chefs to look at weight. We are working and living in a world of sustainability and waste management. And we’ve noticed over the years a lot of the showpieces getting bigger and heavier, with potentially a lot more wastage. But this challenge encourages chefs to create volume without adding weight. 

There’s another new challenge - Whoops I Dropped the…. What’s that one all about?
It’s a twist on a challenge we’ve done before – a suspended showpiece. We wanted to bring a sense of movement into it. So you need to feel, when you see the showpiece, that there is motion, it is something that is getting dropped. You need to feel that this object is not going in the right direction.

There are a few secret challenges. What do they tell you about the teams?
The secret challenges actually serve a couple of purposes. The first is to give the chefs a bit of a breather, by giving them a challenge where they don’t know what they’ll be making, so they can’t spend ages preparing for it. But the main reason we have the secret challenges is because they help us understand how our chefs think on their feet, as a team, under pressure. All of the secret challenges this year are very different, but I can’t tell you any more about them than that. 

Were there any challenges that the chefs particularly struggled with?
They all experienced different failures at some point. In particular this year I think some of the chefs struggled with puff pastry, for some reason. Some of them had never used the machine we use for folding and laminating puff pastry, and some of the teams really struggled with that. 

Obviously, skill and hard work are both crucial in the competition, but how important is the element of teamwork?
You need to find your best match to enter this competition. But it’s not just about that, it’s about synergy between the chefs. One leader and one good co-worker is crucial. It’s about respecting and understanding how you work together, but also knowing your strengths and weaknesses. We had teams this year where one was a chef and one was a pastry chef. The chef might not fully understand the world of pastry, and needs to be guided strongly by the pastry chef. But then once the savoury challenges come about, they become very interesting, because at that stage it’s playing to their strengths. So they complete each other – and teamwork is about completing each other. 

After ten years of the show, what are the main qualities a team needs to win the show?
For me it’s about two things – resilience and humility. What I mean by that is everyone’s going to have a bad day in the kitchen, so you need to have the resilience to know that you’re going to go through that, and be able to put it behind you. And the humility is the need to respect what the competition demands of you. So prepare yourself. Don’t assume that you’ll be too good for the competition, because the competition will get you at some stage, and it will be that day that you find yourself feeling small and under-prepared. So be humble about the competition. Life is about being humble, and understanding that preparation and hard work makes a difference. 

The chefs often get emotional. Do you ever take them aside for a little pep talk?
Of course! You’ll see me give them a little gee-up. Sometimes the chefs do get emotional, and there is always the temptation to get a little soft with them, and sometimes we are there to pick them up and say “Hang on a minute, you’ve done some really good things as well as some bad things.” Ultimately, it’s a balancing act. We are trying to be constructive as much as possible. We know it’s hard, we’ve seen it for ten years, and we know how difficult this competition is, so we try and guide our teams, in order for them to become the best versions of themselves. 

You and Cherish have been working together for ten years on the show. How do your approaches to judging differ?
We express things differently, and we perhaps look at things in a different way. But ultimately, we appreciate the same things. Cherish will dissect everything bit by bit before tasting, whereas I want to see and feel it in one go. For me it’s about storytelling – I have to understand what the chef is trying to say with their dessert. I need to enjoy myself eating something, and I talk about the technical side of it as a result of that eating. Cherish is more likely to go technical straight away, and understand what every aspect of it does, before it comes together. For me it’s the other way around. But, in the end, we are looking at the same things. I’m not getting a ruler out to measure every little cake, but Cherish likes to make a point of the precision and things like that. So we have a different approach, but it normally leads us to the same result. We almost always concur on what is good and what is not. 

Do you ever get recognised out in public? What kind of stuff do people want to talk to you about?
I’ve just come back from Mexico, and I was approached by someone in the airport, and someone in a restaurant. Someone came up to me and said “I was just looking at Cherish’s page on Instagram and here you are in the restaurant!” People often stop for a quick chat, but they are never intrusive in any way. They usually ask how Cherish is. People are very sweet, they just want to talk about how much they love the show. 

Along with Ellie and Liam, the four of you seem to get on really well. What do you get up to behind the scenes?
We love going out for dinner. This year we went to a restaurant in the village where we were staying, and did a bit of wine tasting. It was really interesting, discovering some new food and enjoying some wine, and our time together.

What is it that you love about the world of pastry? Why did you choose it as opposed to savoury cooking?
For me, it was all about pastry from a very young age. I had friends whose parents were bakers on the street where I grew up. And as I grew up, I never enjoyed eating meat that much, I was a bit of a fussy eater. But the sweet side has never been an issue for me. I’ve always had a sweet tooth. So naturally I became a pastry chef. And I still eat a lot of pastry. That’s the problem. You’re meant to eat less as you get older, but it’s something I enjoy making and it’s something I enjoy eating. I love coaching as well, I love watching others spread their wings in the beautiful world which is pastry. It’s a job I’ve always done with passion, and I still love it.

Is it true you used to get up at 4am to work in a bakery?
Yeah, when I was twelve. In those days, my dad, bless him, would get up and drive me to work, where I started at 4am in the summer holidays. In those days, all I could think about was working in a little bakery. And my dad would get up and drive me, until I was old enough to get a little moped. My mother was dead against the idea of me having a moped, but my dad, funnily enough, decided it was fine for me to get one! 

What would you say have been the most formative experiences of your career?
For me, there’s no one thing. What I’ve done in my career has been to work in different sides of the industry. I did two apprenticeships, one as a baker and one as a specialised pastry chef. Then I worked in the army for a year, where I worked in a military restaurant/hotel, then I worked in restaurants, then I worked in hotels. I’ve covered all sides of the spectrum of my work, and that helped me decide which career I wanted to choose. So for me, the idea of waking up at 4am every day was perhaps not the lifestyle I wanted to have, so I decided the restaurant industry was more suited to my needs. And it allowed me to discover the cheffing side as well, which made me less of a fussy eater. It helped me to broaden my knowledge of ingredients and how you combine them. I think my experiences have made me a more rounded pastry chef, but also a more rounded human being. 

This year marks 30 years since you moved to the UK. What do you like about living here?
The weather. [Laughs]. To be honest with you, I come from Normandy, so across the channel, the weather is pretty similar, so it’s not so bad. I’ve made England my home, and I’ve been blessed and welcomed here for 30 years. My kids were born and raised here, my son plays rugby, they went to school here. It’s my home now, and I’ve never looked back.

So if your son played international rugby, which country would he play for?
[Laughs] I know he supports France, like his father, when we play England. But we like watching England play, and if they’re not playing France, we’ll support England. There is a culture around rugby which reminds me of teamwork in the kitchen. You rely on each other, and you are only as good as anybody’s mistakes on the pitch. It’s the same in the kitchen – you have to take the good and the bad as a team. 

How has the British gastronomic scene changed in the time you’ve been here?
Everything has changed. I will always remember going out with my wife the first year, and my goodness, eating anywhere was a struggle. But then, as time passed, the gastropub scene was opening up, and the cooking was becoming more interesting. Now you can go anywhere in any town, and you would expect to have a good meal. It has evolved tremendously. 

What’s the last culinary disaster you had?
I try never to have one. You have challenges, but we work as a team. Sometimes there will be issues that need to be rectified before service, like the setting of the cream or the bake of something. But we have systems in place to prevent that from happening. You can’t say to someone who’s going to spend £1000 on a table of four for a meal, that you made a mistake, so you have to work it out. There might be a bit of a delay, but it needs to be right. My job is to prevent disasters from happening.

In the history of Bake Off: The Professionals, do you have a favourite creation that chefs have made?
I remember a couple of things. I remember a beautiful showpiece done around croque-en-bouche, illustrating a mannequin lady with her dress made out of choux buns. I remember some interesting combinations of flavours, like mushroom and caramel, I remember beautiful storytelling in a chocolate showpiece with a scene from Cornwall with a cart and a boat, and it had a pie, and the fish were moving. It was really well-designed and beautiful to look at. 

As a judge, if you are presented with one dish that looks incredible but tastes just average, and one that looks average but tastes incredible, which will you put through?
The taste, definitely. Ideally you want the best of both worlds, but I’d rather have a simpler design but beautifully executed textures and flavours, you have to start there with a dessert. If you can’t enjoy eating it, it’s very hard to justify the rest. 

Do you learn anything new from the chefs that you’ll incorporate in your own work?
Yes, absolutely. Sometimes as a chef, you store things you’ve seen away in your toolbox. One day, you might need something, and you’ll say “parmesan with a bit of white chocolate, how about that?” Or one year we had the combination of dried mushrooms in a salted caramel on the show, and one time in the restaurant we decided to do petits fours which celebrated ceps, so we made petits fours which looked like mushroom and were sweet, but had mushrooms in them. Whenever I’m looking for something new, I will go into my toolbox, and things in there may well have been inspired by chefs on the show. 

Why has the show endured? What’s the secret to its success?
I think it’s a human adventure. What happens on the show is very honest, you can’t make it up. It is authentic. It’s genuine people competing at their best. None of it is staged in any way. I think the audience really connects with that. And the viewers can feel the tension when they’re watching the preparation, they can feel the pressure, the stress, the anxiety. And they have a human connection, when it works, and when it doesn’t work. 

Watch or stream Bake Off: The Professionals on Channel 4.