Jürgen Krauss “Wouldn’t Mind” Returning To ‘The Great British Baking Show’: “It’s Always Interesting What Mistakes You’re Going to Make”

Jürgen Krauss, one of the most beloved bakers in The Great British Baking Show history, is now making it his mission to teach other home bakers how to make the enchanting breads, cakes, and biscuits of his childhood. Krauss’s new cookbook, The German Baking Book: Cakes, Tarts, Breads, and More From the Black Forest and Beyond, gives fans the tips needed to recreate his mother’s best-loved recipes, German bakery classics, and even Jürgen’s ideal Black Forest cake.

Great British Baking Show fans first met Jürgen back in 2021’s season of the show (known as Collection 9 on Netflix). He was a 56-year-old physicist who had begun baking when he missed the bread baked in his homeland of Germany. Jürgen soon dazzled judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, earning back-to-back Star Baker honors in the first two weeks. Jürgen continued to excel as the weeks went on and was considered, along with Giuseppe dell’Anno, as a major frontrunner to win the whole shebang. However, in a shocking twist, Jürgen was eliminated in the penultimate episode, the Semi-Finals.

Decider caught up with the Teutonic titan of breads, doughs, and precise piping last week in our New York City offices. In between asking Krauss to test out Magnolia Bakery faves and getting the lowdown on the one tool every baker needs — spoiler: a metal bench scraper — we had a long, wide-ranging chat about his new book, new circle of celeb friends, and what it took to get on Netflix’s The Great British Baking Show (or The Great British Bake Off as it’s known everywhere outside of the USA and Canada) in the first place…

DECIDER: So, first thing’s first: how did the idea to make this cookbook come to you?

JÜRGEN KRAUSS: That came out of [The Great British] Bake Off. When I got an agent, which happened pretty much right away after Bake Off, something I’d never thought about having, she developed an idea of a book. She was very clear that a book is essential for keeping your face out there at a high profile. I wasn’t so convinced at the time. But, erm, well, that’s an agent for you. They are there to do that sort of thing.

And we had a few ideas which we put forward to publishers and the publisher my agent preferred came back with a different idea, and from [the] merging of those ideas, came this book. It’s essentially looking at what people liked from me on Bake Off, which is, well friendly approach, you know me from there. And also glimpses into my childhood. So the book is all things I liked to eat as a child. Things you would buy in a bakery, things my mother would cook, things I made myself.

I was struck how in the opening pages you talk about, “Imagine like you’re in this four walled room,” and you describe so viscerally the sights and sounds of childhood. Why was it important for you to invite the reader into your childhood and your life in Germany?

Because that explains how I came to baking, how natural that was for me as a child and as a teenager, even. I didn’t think anything of having baking skills. I could just make a cake and it happened. And that was due to my mother being around all the time and also having that fairly limited space with a huge family in the greater house.

Is there a certain section that you particularly are proud of? Whether it’s the sheet cakes, which I wasn’t aware of, but that seems like a really wonderful mainstay kind of list of recipes to have in the kitchen? Was it the bread, because I know you’re a big bread aficionado? Was it the more festive stuff? Which section did you enjoy working on the most?

I mean, if I would say I didn’t enjoy working on some of the sections that would be completely wrong and it deface the value of the book. I enjoyed working on all of the sections really. Some sections were harder to come by. Some were really easy. I put so much emphasis on the tray bakes, for example, because they are really everywhere in Germany. I have pictures from my favorite patisserie in Freiberg, where I come from, and in the window you see the bakes that are in this book. Tray bakes with streusel on top and crumble cakes. Sheet cakes, they’re on festivals. They are so flexible. You can make them big and small and it’s easy to feed a huge crowd with them. You can vary them just with tiny add-ons like apple slices and custard and you have something completely different and I didn’t see that sort of thing in the English baking tradition. So that’s why I put the emphasis there and I think it’s being picked up rather well.

Speaking of the English versus the German traditions… Coming from Bake Off — which for Americans, that’s our entry point to a lot of not only British baking, but European baking — I was struck how your tiered cake section felt like all the classic Bake Off Showstoppers, but they’re German cakes. Did that occur to you at all? Like how it’s interesting how the British have sort of embraced the German dessert cake as their own.

If you talk about German baking, I’ve always had a problem with that because Germany, as it is now, hasn’t been around very long. If you look at a map after The Thirty Years’ War —

It’s all the different principalities. 

There are specks of Hapsburg everywhere in Germany and these spheres of influence, they still show in food traditions. So I think of it more often as European influence and there was always an exchange between England and the continent. It is an island and they have their island food. For example, apple crumble. I’ve never seen that in Germany. That was really new. Once I moved to England, you wouldn’t dare to buy that in a bakery. So there are really strong island traditions in England, but there has always been an exchange.

Obviously you have a Black Forest cake recipe in your cookbook. You talk in the book about how you have to have one because on Bake Off, you mentioned how it’s how you judge a patisserie. You try their Black Forest cake. What makes your recipe so special in your opinion? Is there a certain ingredient or technique that you use that elevates the recipe?

I think the secret to the recipe, which I also mentioned on Bake Off, is balance. I noticed that a lot of things that are called Black Forest in England, and probably in the U.S., just use chocolate and cherry and forget about the cream element. Some forget about the alcohol element. For me, it’s a balance between the three. It’s a very light chocolate sponge. Nothing heavy, nothing like devil’s cake. So it’s a light chocolate sponge. It’s whipped cream, which is also very light. And it’s very little of the cherry filling, but it’s all flavored with kirsch. So the whole experience is light. It’s almost like a cocktail. It shouldn’t be heavy. It shouldn’t fill you up and make you want to lie down.

I know you have a section on Basics in the back of the cookbook, but besides that, is there anything here that you think is like a really good gateway for beginners? If someone’s never baked bread before or made a cake from scratch?

The pretzels, if you do them with the sodium bicarb dip, are quite easy to make because the dough is very stiff and because of that, it’s physically hard to knead it, but you don’t get into a sticky mess with it. It doesn’t stick. It doesn’t have enough liquid to do that and you can cut a lot of corners in that recipe. The process I describe is the best you can get with rising and cooling. But you can, for example, cut the cooling and once your pretzels are soft to the touch and dry, you can dip them, bake them and it will still be great.

Another very good starting point are biscuits. The cinnamon stars are essentially macaron, but they are not made with whipped egg whites. You add the egg whites, you can’t overdo it. You can roll it out and if it sticks, you roll it out again. You can add a bit of icing sugar.

No, that’s really helpful. Sort of shifting gears to Bake Off. I know that you are watching it and you’re being a correspondent for Radio Times. So I saw on Instagram that you’re excited for the season. Can you tell me why? I’m excited for the season, too, already, but I’m curious if we have similar reasons for optimism.

But yeah, 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. They look more like the challenges that were in the very first seasons with Mary Berry. So, challenges home bakers can connect to.

Speaking of the early seasons, did you watch the show when it first aired in the UK? Like when did, were you, did you become aware of it as a phenomenon?

I think I didn’t watch it. We hardly watch any TV. We don’t have a TV. We watch everything on the computer. So colleagues started telling me you have to watch this and eventually, well, we binged on it.

What is the process of getting on The Great British Bake Off? Is there an audition tape? Is there a screen test? I’m curious about that.

It’s all. Yeah, it’s all of that. It’s a process that took half a year. It goes up and up and up in stages with each phone call. You’re aware that there’s less people they are calling and the questions change, the qualities of questions change. Surprisingly, the least they’re talking about is baking. I think they want to make good TV, right? So you have to be able to fit into the screen and be a character that people can connect to.

So it starts with a form which is I think when I downloaded it, it was eight pages and filled in, it’s about thirteen or fourteen pages, and fifty or so photos for portfolio. And then the first call; that is a bit about baking technicalities. And then there’s a call after that where they cross-check what you put in your application form in terms of your baking experience, but as well, social media exposure, and past jobs. From there it goes to screen tests and psychological assessment and then the test bakes. First one over Zoom. Second one live.

So you were in one of the two seasons shot in the Bake Off bubble because of COVID. I always felt that there was like a deeper sense of camaraderie with the contestants and the hosts and judges in those seasons. Did you feel that? Were you happy that you were in the bubble or do you kind of wistfully wish that you could have gone back home and gone to and fro?

I was really happy to be in the bubble and seeing the previous season being filmed in the bubble actually triggered my application. My wife was pushing me to apply, but the final straw was then seeing those bakers doing what they were doing and I could imagine myself there.

A lot of people are upset that you got kicked out before the finals. Do you think, though, like if you had made it to the finals, you would have had a shot at winning the whole thing?

I can’t answer that question really because all four of us were totally exhausted and, in a way, it was a relief not having to do those bakes. It was sad. I would have loved that all four of us went into the final and some part of me was in the final because Chigs made his mushroom. That’s a great shaping technique I taught him. He references that as well, very kindly. So, I’m in a happy place.

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I can see you’re in a happy place! You saw Japanese Breakfast at Radio City last night. Speaking of which, your publicist said that you and Michelle Zauner are friends and you’re doing an event with her. How did that friendship come about?

Actually, we spoke about that last night. I went to Michelle’s concert and hung out with the band afterwards. So they did their first U.S. tour after COVID with a new album, Jubilee, and they were all a bit jiggly about it, meeting so many people, etc. And they were hanging out in the bus, driving from location to location, and they watched Bake Off to calm down and they all fell in love with me. They had t-shirts made up of my face and “Be Sweet.” Then Adam Schatz, the saxophonist, when they did the European tour, he said to Michelle, “I’ll get in contact with Jürgen. He’s a trombonist. Maybe he brings his horn.” And I said yes. I didn’t know who they were. This whole world was new to me, but I said yes. And I played in the London concert and, yeah, it was wonderful. And so they invited me to their concert and Michelle very kindly agreed to host me at Barnes & Noble’s.

Would you ever go back on The Great British Baking Show again if there was an All-Star season? I know other bakers have done the Holiday Specials. Is that of interest to you? Or are you like, “I don’t want to be in that tent ever again.”

I wouldn’t mind. I don’t have an aversion against it. It’s a very interesting and challenging place to bake in and it’s always interesting what mistakes you’re going to make.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.