Yep, that's why I watch it. The baking part is cool, I'm a home baker myself and all, but not the main draw. It's not like I'm gonna be making three tier cakes with macaron waterfalls any time. I watch the show because the people are genuinely nice to each other and help each other out when it gets tough.
People can make utter trash on Bake Off, get honest critiques, and yet the vibe is _still_ good. It's really great.
Now a bit off-topic: Bake Off has completely put me off baking myself. Nearly everything always goes wrong. And as this article kind of says: these people aren't _really_ amateurs. So I'm watching and thinking "if these above-average bakers are having this much trouble, I'm not even going to try"
People on bake off are making very hard things. It's very misrepresentative of what baking is like as a result. Even when they make something that's not hard to make (like a cake), they are forced to make it in a hard way (making very elaborate cakes that take a ton of engineering to assemble, having strict time limits, etc). Unless you are trying to do competition baking (or perhaps run a bakery), you'll have a much easier time than that. Literally the first thing I learned how to cook was chocolate chip cookies, so I wouldn't say you should be intimidated by the very hard things that the experts are doing.
It doesn’t help that they’re under a time crunch in a tent where humidity and temperature can be vastly different from contestants home kitchens and even from day to day.
My partner bakes. I don't, and the primary reason is that I am a very good cook, but I don't really measure. Baking is all science-y and requires measuring.
(If I were to be completely honest, probably right up there with measuring is that flour is just so damn messy!)
Here's the thing about measuring and precision. Baking requires less of it than people make out, and stovetop cooking benefits more from it than people make out. So neither popular conception is really right. With baking, I can tell you that I estimate stuff all the time and my bakes turn out just fine. For example, I learned how to estimate shortening as a kid because cleaning that out of a measuring cup is a real pain. There are some very technical recipes where you have to meticulously follow the directions, but that isn't most baking one will encounter.
Yeah, this saying always confused me too. I'm not a very good baker in that I need a recipe and can't just reel off the proportions for a crumble or whatever. But nothing about "normal" baking has ever really seemed especially sensitive. Whole milk/semi skimmed, medium eggs or large, DIYed self raising flour, brown sugar mixed with caster because there's no light muscovado, milk and a bit of extra butter instead of buttermilk. Cheaper chocolate with less cocoa and cut the sugar back a bit. Usually I bake with under half the sugar in the recipe anyway. Ovens vary wildly too. Mostly all turns out just fine.
I had an oven where the set temp did not match the heat of the oven. After several instances of things not coming out the way the were supposed to, I bought a thermometer to compare the two. I learned to set the cooking temp +25°.
It's funny that Ramsay has become this stand-in for someone who blows up professionally. If you watch older shows of his, even the British Kitchen Nightmares, he comes off as generally nice to people who try and who care about things. The only people you see him blow up at are people who are incompetent and who don't care. And a lot of the time when he's yelling he's egging people on to succeed and not trying to tear them down. It's in the US Kitchen Nightmares where I really see him explode because the restaurants they're putting him in aren't even well meaning anymore.
Watching Ramsay on MasterChef really changed my opinion of the man (for the better). He is so supportive of and kind to the contestants on that show, I figured that he must've been playing into a bit on his other shows.
The only reason we watch it is because instead of the shock trash drama of most reality television, the Bake Off vibe is kind.