Marcela Valladolid Shares What It Takes to Win The American Baking Competition

The American Baking Competition, airing Wednesday nights 8 – 9 p.m. ET on CBS Television Network, features skilled amateurs competing in baking challenges with one ultimately being crowned the winner.

As an avid baker, I got a real kick out of watching people I can easily identify with compete, and many of the recipes they showcased were certainly inspiring!  Jeff Foxworthy gives the show a fun down-home flair and in this type of competition, I’m always interested in listening to what the judges have to say.

On a press conference call this week, judge and highly-skilled chef, Marcela Valladolid answered questions from food bloggers and shared with Rural Mom, in her opinion, what it takes to win The American Baking Competition.

“For me, what made the show stopper a show stopper was something that I would want to pay really good money for,” says Valladolid. “That’s honestly the best way to describe this. Is this something you could see in a pastry shop?”

No novice when it comes to knowing what a pastry window should look like, Valladolid studied at the Ritz Escoffier Cooking School in Paris to become trained as a classical French pastry chef

“Looking at something and saying I am willing to pay good money because of how it is presented and how it looks absolutely scrumptious and executed to perfection so from the start it has a lot to do with presentation,” says Valladolid. “And it’s the same for the first bite. It just has to be something comparable with the level of pastries at the professional level, things that you’d pay for.”

Her keen ability to judge also makes Valladolid able to easily zoom in on errors in the baking process.

“There were a couple of times I had to stop myself or someone actually had to stop me because I was giving out too much information. I would see them piping various different shapes and sizes on the baking sheet which is a huge no no you want to make everything kind of the same size so that they bake evenly.”

Valladolid also has a great secondary reason for wanting to dole out advice, “The rule was if you bake it we taste it. So I kind of wanted to go in and stop them and be like listen before you pop it in the oven smooth out the top or tap the pan so you get all those air bubbles out.”

The best advice she would give to amateur bakers at home?

“You have to start with a good recipe,” says Valladolid. “If you are not cooking your own recipe and starting on your own from scratch, you need to find reliable sources to find these recipes because with baking it’s all about ratios and proportions. No matter how precise you are at measuring, if you don’t start off with a good recipe it’s not going to work. In terms of what fluctuating temperatures or humidity in the air does, all of that information is, a real good baking book is the only thing that’s going to help you if you’re not an experienced baker.”

For more information on The American Baking Competition, visit http://www.cbs.com/shows/american-baking-competition