Great American Baking Show: Who Won It?

Spoiler note: this post names the winner of every Great American Baking Show season.

The Great American Baking Show is the licensed US cousin of the tent, running the same signature-technical-showstopper format on American networks since 2015, first on ABC and now on the Roku Channel. Judge Paul Hollywood has appeared in most seasons, giving the show a direct line back to the original UK series. Here is the full list of champions, one season with a real asterisk attached.

Every Great American Baking Show winner

The season that never aired a finale

Season 3 is the one worth explaining in full. Only two episodes had aired when ABC pulled the season from its schedule in December 2017, after multiple former employees of judge Johnny Iuzzini's restaurant came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against him. Rather than air the remaining episodes, ABC announced the winner directly: Vallery Lomas had won the competition, with Cindy Maliniak and Molly Brodak as her fellow finalists. Lomas later spoke publicly about how the scandal affected everyone connected to the season, contestants and crew alike, and went on to build a well-regarded baking and cookbook career regardless of how her win was announced.

The show itself also went on hiatus for several years after that, not returning until 2023 on the Roku Channel with a new judging lineup pairing Paul Hollywood with Prue Leith, mirroring the UK show's own Channel 4 era.

That five-year gap between season 5 in 2019 and season 6 in 2023 is the longest hiatus of any show in this franchise, and it is a direct line from the Iuzzini scandal: no network was eager to pick the format back up while the fallout was still fresh, and it took a full platform change, from broadcast television to streaming, before the show found a home again.

Who has hosted and judged it

Mary Berry judged the first two seasons alongside Johnny Iuzzini before Paul Hollywood joined for season 3 onward, eventually becoming a fixture of the American version much as he is of the original. Sherry Yard judged seasons 4 and 5 alongside Hollywood, before the show's hiatus and eventual relaunch brought in Prue Leith, essentially transplanting the UK show's current judging pair onto American television. Hosting duties have rotated through Nia Vardalos, Ayesha Curry, Emma Bunton, Ellie Kemper, and Casey Wilson across the show's run, usually paired with a rotating co-host. The most recent season, season 9, aired in 2026 with Casey Wilson and Andrew Rannells hosting and Hollywood and Leith still judging.

No cash prize, same as the original

Like its UK parent show, The Great American Baking Show does not hand its winner a check. The prize is a trophy and the title, full stop, which is unusual for American reality television and is very much a deliberate choice carried over from the original format rather than a budget decision. That choice keeps the tone closer to the UK series than to most other US cooking competitions, favoring warmth and technique over the cutthroat drama that cash prizes tend to encourage elsewhere in the genre.

The wider Bake Off family

The Great American Baking Show is one of several international adaptations of the same tent format. The Great Canadian Baking Show has run its own version since 2017, and back in the UK, the celebrity charity spin-off is covered in our Celebrity Bake Off winners rundown. For the original, our full list of every Great British Bake Off winner covers all sixteen series. If the format has you wanting to attempt a showstopper of your own, a solid set of bakeware covers most of what any of these shows' technical challenges actually ask for.