Love Productions/BBC

We’ve seen cake and we’ve seen biscuits. Week three of the Great British Bake Off promises the bread and butter of baking in the form of, well, bread. I can’t help but be a bit dubious about bread every time bread week comes around: can a loaf really rise to the complexity of a soufflé? The remaining contestants in the Bake Off tent show that bread can do all this and more.

Week three is an episode of firsts in terms of the challenges presented to the bakers (as well as in the case of one baker’s attempt at a showstopper…). The signature challenge introduces 'quick bread' to the tent for the first time; for the uninitiated, this is simply bread baked without yeast. Plain boring as it may sound, the bakers manage to pack their loaves full of flavours I didn’t know could appear in the same sentence as bread: Mat and Nadiya both attack Mary and Paul’s tastebuds with spicy Mexican flavouring, Alvin’s prosciutto, manchego and balsamic onion soda bread sounds more like a meal in its own right than a meagre loaf, and Ugne’s chocolate quick bread with salted caramel sauce raises the existential question of what bread actually is (Mary and Paul approve; I too am an instant fan of bread that looks more like cake).

The major challenge here is the bicarb-buttermilk ratio: too much liquid will produce too dense a dough, too little and the bread won’t hold its shape. Although once in the oven, the bread “has a mind of its own”, as Nadiya puts it, with regards to what shape it ends up assuming, and Tamal believes that there is an “element of faith” involved because of this, the quick breads are successful overall. Paul the Contestant’s orange and cranberry soda bread earns him a handshake from Paul the Professional, and Alvin is left “dangerously happy” with his feedback. Worst off is Mat, and even for him the main complaint seems only to be that his dough is overworked.

This uniformity of standard continues, although this time in a somewhat more half-baked form, in the technical challenge, where the bakers are asked to produce four identical baguettes, also a GBBO first. The secret to Paul’s perfectly crisp baguette is steam in the oven, which, however, is not mentioned in the recipe – Mary accuses Paul of having been “particularly nasty” in designing this challenge. The fruits of the challenge are accordingly not quite up to French standards, to say the least, and come under brutal judging from Paul the Baguette Meister. The attempts at the French classic are underbaked, not properly proved, soft, or wide and short, and even Number One Ian’s baguettes could have stayed in the oven longer. In Flora’s words, the judging was Paul “punching bread, shattering dreams.” And I thought that after stuffing soda bread full of anything and everything, a plain baguette would be a piece of cake, not a pie in the sky.

After two rounds of disappointingly uniform performances, it takes some “Michelangeldough” to separate the wheat from the chaff. The showstopper certainly stopped me even before any dough had been proved or ovens turned on: never have I even heard of 3D bread sculptures, here involving no less than three different doughs. Despite the fact that one discovers whether the bread will hold its shape or whether there is any filling spilling out only when the dough is in the oven, the contestants’ designs are nothing short of ambitious: Mat sets out to construct the Brighton Pavilion, Tamal builds a bicycle (rather obviously named the ‘Breadcycle’), and Dorrett attempts to recreate Tracey Emin’s unmade bed (without ever having practised it before; for me, this is Bake Off sacrilege!).

The real showstopper success is, however, Paul’s ‘King of the Jungle’ sculpture, earning a special commendation (also a Bake Off first). Paul the Professional seems to think the lion’s face is the best thing since sliced bread – personally, I don’t quite understand why it excels so much over, say, Alvin’s Cornucopia (essentially a whole bakery’s worth of bread beautifully laid out), or the 'Breadcycle'.

I was worried that Bread Week would result in a doughverload and eternal boredom with bread, but the creativity the bakers showed kneading their dough is truly of the upper crust. It may not have been the most eventful of episodes in terms of heat in the tent, but based on this week, I would certainly break bread with any of this year's contestants.