Though the contestants on Great British Bake Off change every season, fans can rest easy knowing that isn’t planning her retirement just yet.
“Look, it can’t be long term. I’ll be 85 in February,” Leith told Us Weekly while promoting her latest cookbook, Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom. “Long term is not something I have any chance of seeing, but if you’re asking me am I planning to retire, no I’m not. I love doing it. And as long as they’ll have me, I will want to do it.”
After this year’s finale of the Great British Baking Show (as it is titled in the U.S.), which debuted Friday, November 29 on Netflix, Leith has eight full seasons under her belt as a judge. Despite spending nearly a decade in the tent, she hasn’t lost her enthusiasm for the job, but she has made some adjustments to make her work life easier.
“I know I’m not as physically agile as I was eight years ago. For example, I asked them to put in a ramp [during the 2023 season] because I’d had a bad leg,” Leith explained. “They put a little ramp for me to get onto the stage so I thought that ramp was really good, and we didn’t have it last year, so I think I’ll ask them for it next year.”
An injury isn’t going to send Leith home, but she’s hoping that her loved ones will let her know when she should hang up her Bake Off apron. “Obviously, I’m gonna have to retire sometime soon because I can’t, and I wouldn’t be able to, do it forever. But I want to get out before I’m pushed,” Leith shared. “But it’s going to be up to my husband and my best friends to tell me when, ‘Look, it’s enough. We can’t have you hobbling onto the stage.’ You know?”
She also noted her Baking Show predecessor is still going strong. “Well, Mary Berry’s not retired and she’s five years older than me. So she’ll be 90 next year and she’s working for the BBC pretty solidly,” Leith said with a laugh. “So there’s hope for us yet!”
Leith says when considering her future, it helps that she still loves her job. “I love it. Who wouldn’t like it? I mean … most television is really hard work. You have to write a script, learn a script, rehearse, rehearse again, do things over and over again,” she explained. “You are on stage all the time, [and] when you’re not on stage you are learning for the next bit. I don’t have to rehearse anything. I don’t have to learn anything. I don’t have to write anything. I have to walk onto this set, eat cake, say what I think, walk off, get paid. I mean, is that not the best job in television?”
The show also gives her plenty of time to write her beloved cookbooks — her latest volume is full of recipes for people who don’t have a ton of time. Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom, which was released by Carnival (an imprint of Quarto Publishing) in October, focuses on sophisticated recipes that aren’t overly complicated.
“When you say to somebody that a book is full of cheats and shortcuts, they think it means that you’re going to suggest going to the supermarket, buying a ready meal and then tarting it up with a bit of tomato salad or something. But I don’t mean that at all,” Leith promised. “I’m still really keen on people cooking, but making it so that it’s simple to do. And also, what stops a lot of people [from] cooking is the fact that they’ve never learned the basics of how to chop an onion and how to get the stone out of an avocado.”
Leith went on to say that certain terms, like how to “sweat the onion,” are often lost on novice chefs or at-home cooks, which can be another cooking turn-off.
“I want to make all that very clear,” she added. “But not in a too teach-y way.”
She also made sure to make cooking the various recipes highlighted in her latest book easy for visual learners with the addition of more than 25 instructional videos.
“I’ve used a lot of QR codes so that people can actually see me chopping an onion or getting the stone out of an avocado,” she said. “And instead of having to read some long, complicated instructions, which make you lose the will to live before you’ve ever got getting the onion out, [instead] you could see, ‘Oh, well, that’s quite easy.'”
Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom is available now wherever books are sold. All episodes of Great British Baking Show Collection 12 are available on Netflix.
