As The Great British Bake Off returns to our screens, we sat down with Paul Hollywood to talk about the hotel kitchens that shaped him, the handshake that made him famous and the bakes that still make him happy.

There is a particular kind of person who works the bakery of a grand hotel. They arrive while the corridors are still dark and the night porter is on his last cup of tea, and by the time the first business guests are coming down for breakfast, the croissants, rolls and loaves on the buffet have all passed through their hands. Nobody sees them. Almost nobody thinks about them.

For much of his working life, that was Paul Hollywood. Before The Great British Bake Off turned him into one of the most recognisable faces on British television, he was head baker at some of the country’s finest hotels, among them The Dorchester in London, the Chester Grosvenor and Cliveden in Berkshire, before a move to Cyprus to work in resort hotels on the island.

It is a CV he is still proud of. “I only wanted to become a good baker,” he says. “My CV was excellent. TV was never my plan.”

A career that found him

Born in Wallasey on the Wirral in 1966, Hollywood learnt his trade in his father’s bakery business, a chain that traded along the east coast as Bread Winner. It was a practical, early-morning apprenticeship, and it led him naturally into hotel kitchens, where the volume, the standards and the hours are all unforgiving.

Television, when it came, arrived almost by accident, and a long way from home.

“It’s not something you move from, from baking to TV. It sort of found me rather than me looking for it. It was a strange scenario. I was working as a baker in a hotel in Cyprus and they were making a TV show on Cypriot cooking. They said, ‘You’re a natural, you should get an agent,’ and I said, ‘Oh, okay’.”

He did as he was told. “So I got an agent and I started doing bits on This Morning and things, still working full time, then later Bake Off came along and that was it…”

It is a story that will ring true for anyone who has ever had their career changed by a chance conversation on a work trip. Plenty of business travellers can point to a hotel bar, a delayed flight or a trade show stand where a stranger said something that altered everything. For Hollywood, it happened in a hotel kitchen in the Mediterranean sun.

The almost-soldier

Yet baking was not the only path open to a young man from Merseyside. Ask him what he would be doing now had he not become a baker and the answer is unexpected.

“I nearly signed up to the army, back in my late teens. A few members of my family went into the army. The tank regiment was the one I was looking at.”

It is tempting to see a little of that military bearing in the man who has stalked the Bake Off tent since 2010, arms folded, surveying the benches like a sergeant on inspection. And inspection, it turns out, is exactly what he is doing.

A tidy bench, a tidy mind

No one has watched more amateur bakers crack under pressure than Hollywood. So can he tell, on first meeting a contestant, how it is going to go for them?

“The state of their bench is a good indication. A tidy bench means a tidy mind, means an organised baking head.”

It is advice that translates well beyond the tent. Anyone who has watched a colleague unpack for a three-day trip into a hotel room that looks like a bomb has hit it, or seen a presenter scrabbling through a chaotic laptop five minutes before a pitch, will recognise the principle. Organisation is not a nice-to-have. It is how you perform under pressure.

The same goes for his verdict on the most common mistake home bakers make.

“Not weighing up properly. You have to be accurate with the weighing. Baking’s a science, and without that accuracy you’re gonna have big problems.”

Precision, preparation and a clear workspace: it could be the opening slide of any decent leadership course.

The handshake

Then there is the handshake. Since he first extended his hand across a bench in series three of Bake Off in 2012, the Hollywood handshake has taken on a life of its own. It has been dissected in newspaper columns, turned into memes and even, in one online essay, described as “the epitome of the patriarchy”.

Was it ever planned?

“No, no one’s ever said to me, ‘Give someone a handshake’. It was very of the moment, a pat on the back. Well done, you’ve done a great job. And then it’s just sort of been built up to a ridiculous stage now.”

He has, viewers will have noticed, been giving them out more freely in recent series. Grade inflation, or better bakers?

“I think the viewers would tell you the baking’s got far more professional. They’re extremely good and that’s why you see more handshakes these days.”

There is a physical cost, too. For around two decades Hollywood has lived with carpal tunnel syndrome, a legacy of years of kneading dough by hand at industrial volumes.

“It can [affect the handshake] if I squeeze too hard! It’s eased off a bit since I stopped baking day to day. It’s still there, though. I can still feel it when I’m doing buttons up. I need to get it sorted…”

The Rolls-Royce and the Aston Martin

Hollywood has never been shy of the luxury end of the market. In 2008 he created an almond and Roquefort sourdough for Harrods that was billed as the most expensive loaf in Britain, and which he described as “the Rolls-Royce of bakes”.

He is also a keen racing driver who has competed in Aston Martins since 2015. So what would be the Aston Martin of bakes?

“It would have to be a sourdough with a great British cheese in it, a good stilton.”

Which makes it all the more surprising that, at home, sourdough is not what he reaches for.

“Yeah, I make a lot of bread for toast, sandwiches and stuff. Not sourdough, it’s not good for that. Too holey. I don’t rate it as a toast bread. I like a tighter crumb for toast. And it has to be something that’s gonna toast quickly, not dry out too much. So I like the moisture level to be high. I make it every few days for breakfast.”

Anyone who has battled a dry, over-holey slice from a hotel breakfast toaster at 6am before an early flight will know exactly what he means. It is a small thing, but it is the kind of detail that separates a good hotel breakfast from a forgettable one, and a former hotel baker notices.

Celebrate

The reason for all this reflection is Celebrate: Joyful Baking All Year Round, his latest book, published by Bloomsbury. It is organised around the moments in the calendar that call for something special, from birthdays and religious festivals to summer parties, with ideas for every season.

One of the stand-out recipes is the sprinkletti cake, a bright, confetti-strewn sponge. “A lot of people are using sprinkles on cakes at the moment, and confetti-style things, and it was just a nice idea, colourful and celebratory.”

He is generous in his praise of the book’s photographer. “The photography in the book is awesome, it really shows off the textures. Max Hamilton is incredible. His interpretation of a picture is different to a lot of people. For me it was all about texture and he got it. He smashed it out of the park.”

So which bake will make readers sit up?

“I guess it’s the focaccia with all the garlic, cheese and olive oil. It’s one where they’ll grab it and put it in their mouths and the eyebrow goes up. When the eyebrow goes up you know you’ve got them.”

And if he could have added any bake from any series of Bake Off to the book?

“Probably the caramelised onion sausage rolls, they would be great in there. I’m a big savoury fan rather than sweet.”

A savoury man at heart

That savoury streak runs deep. Given the chance to invent a new theme week for Bake Off, he does not hesitate.

“Savoury week. Anything apart from cake. Or sausage roll week.”

He would, one suspects, approve of the budget hotel group that recently swapped scones for sausage rolls in its first ever afternoon tea.

His most requested sweet recipe, however, remains a classic. His carrot cake has been among the most visited recipes on the delicious. website for years. The secret?

“Moisture. It’s the amount of carrot and the amount of moisture. And the cream cheese topping, the mascarpone, has to be right, the spice level, everything together so it’s more like a pudding than a cake. That’s the secret.”

Is there anything, after all these years, that defeats him?

“Some of the intricate piping work I’m not brilliant at. It’s okay if I have the time, I’ll spend time and do something nice, but if it’s very intricate I sometimes don’t have the patience for it.”

Dinner at the hollywoods’

When he is entertaining, cake is off the menu entirely.

“I do a mean risotto. Or a carbonara. It’s a lot of work because I make my own pasta as well, but I enjoy it. I make a lot of pizzas too. I have a big pizza oven at home that I use a lot.”

The Italian theme continues at the bar. His wife, Melissa, is a former pub landlady, so what is his usual? “Probably a pint of lager. I like an Italian beer.”

And the most surprising thing in his fridge? “Ginger shots. I have one every morning.” A habit many a frequent flyer, fighting off the coughs and colds of long-haul cabins, might be wise to adopt.

A travelling baker

For a man who says television found him, Hollywood has made the most of it, and much of that work has taken him on the road. Paul Hollywood: City Bakes saw him explore the bread and pastry cultures of cities across Europe and beyond, while Paul Hollywood’s Big Continental Road Trip combined his love of cars with a tour of European food. More recently, Paul Hollywood Eats Japan and Paul Hollywood Eats Mexico took him further afield still, in search of what locals really eat.

It is an approach worth borrowing on your next trip. Rather than eating every meal in the hotel restaurant, make time for the local bakery or market stall. Our round-up of local dishes around Asia that truly reflect each destination’s culture is a good place to start.

In 2024 his contribution to British life was formally recognised when he was appointed MBE for services to baking and broadcasting, receiving the honour at Windsor Castle. Not bad for a baker who never planned to be on screen at all.

The last bake

Which brings us, as these conversations always must, to the end. What would be his last ever bake?

“A good meat pie is hard to beat.”

It is a fitting answer from a man whose career began in the pre-dawn quiet of hotel kitchens, far from the cameras. Strip away the handshakes, the headlines and the racing cars, and Paul Hollywood remains what he always wanted to be: a baker who weighs his ingredients properly, keeps a tidy bench and knows that good bread, like good business, is built on getting the basics right.

For those who would rather someone else did the baking when in town, our guide to the best business restaurants in London will point you in the right direction.

Celebrate: Joyful Baking All Year Round by Paul Hollywood is published by Bloomsbury, hardback, £26