VICKY’S SATURDAY BREAD COURSES
I have been asked a lot about courses in the last couple of years, and I finally have the time to do them justice, so here goes!
THE BASICS
We will be doing three dates in November; Saturday 6th, Saturday 13th, and Saturday 20th. It will be a fairly long day to pack everything in, running from 9am to 5.30pm.
The courses will be at our bakery in Helston, and each class will have a maximum of 6 students.
The cost of the day is £150. This includes all tuition, coffee/tea with brownies and flapjacks, lunch, all materials and bread to take home with you, plus serious goodie bag with flour, willow basket, scraper, sourdough starter, recipes etc., to start you off at home.
WHAT WE WILL MAKE
As we are famous for using our sourdough culture in nearly everything we bake, we will be focussing on making sourdough loaves. I will be aiming the day at serious bread enthusiasts rather than absolute beginners, as this is what has been requested mostly. However, I am not going to grill you about how much you have baked at home and embarrass anyone, so if you have a passion for bread but are not sure about how it all works, that is fine too.
We will be baking three types of sourdough loaf during the day, as well as some more elegant butter rolls. In addition, I will demonstrate another bread for us to eat at lunch-time.
The sourdough loaves will be our classic Bordelais, a wholewheat levain (like the Bordelais but much browner), and a flavoured sourdough loaf. For the flavoured loaf, you will be able to choose between two options to keep things more interesting. We will using our sourdough culture to make these loaves, and you can take some away with you at the end of the day so you can carry on baking at home right away.
The rolls we will make will be the perennially popular rosette rolls, which are a rich, buttery, Venetian recipe. I find these disappear very quickly, and they will make a good addition to your baking repertoire. They can be moulded in a variety of shapes; in fact, we use this dough for our heart shaped rolls on Valentine’s day. We will we turning our rolls into little flowers, hearts and spirals, so they are a fun bread to make for a special meal and also freeze very well.
TALKING AND DISCUSSION
We will start the day with a short discussion/lecture on the stages of bread-making, using pre-ferments (sourdoughs, etc), how to mix, fermentation times, and anything else that comes up.
There will be time to discuss how to build up and keep your sourdough culture at home, how often to feed it, and when to take it out of the fridge. This seems to be the most common cause for concern amongst home bakers – but don’t worry, sourdough cultures are much more resilient than you might assume- they can take a lot of abuse, and as long as they are nursed back to recovery for a couple of days, can still rise you loaf and lend it a wonderful flavour.
We will be hand-mixing each of our breads, as that is what you will be doing at home (unless you have a kenwood or kitchenaid mixer – and we can discuss how to adapt methods to an electric mixer). We will all be working around our long 4m beech work bench, so there will plenty of room for everyone to make the desired mess!
In the middle of the morning, we will have a tea break with brownies and flapjacks, and we will bake some bread to eat with our lunch, so you don’t have to wait all day to taste some!
At the end of the day, we will have a bread tasting and discuss what we have made during the day, as well as how to adapt what we have been doing to your kitchen at home. You will all be taking home the loaves and rolls you have made during the day.
WHAT TO WEAR AND BRING
My assistant will be sweeping up after us all day, but the floor can still get slippy, so please wear relatively non-slip shoes. It can get a bit floury, so it’s probably not the best idea to wear your best clothes. We will all have aprons on, but it’s amazing how much flour seems to end up in the bits not covered by the apron while the apron remains pristine!
As we are not planning on selling anything we make during the day, you can wear what jewellery you like, but of course anything more intricate than a wedding ring might get a bit mucky.
I will try to provide you with everything on the day, so you don’t need to bring anything except yourself.
If you are coming from outside the county, we can arrange for somewhere to stay as we also rent holiday cottages in Helford village, five miles from the bakery.
If you are a vegetarian, please let me know so we can adjust lunch for you accordingly.
HOW TO CONTACT US
To discuss coming on the course or to book a place, please call me on 01326 221521 or e mail me at vickythebaker@hotmail.co.uk
Thanks for reading, and I hope to hear from you sometime soon. If this course does not sound like what you are looking for, then please let me know so I can adjust it next time. Happy baking!
Vicky.
What is sourdough?
A sourdough is a mix of flour, water and natural yeast cells living in the flour and in the air. This mixture is left to ferment, and when it is sufficiently active and filled with bubbles of gas, it can be used to leaven bread.
Every day, we use our sourdough as an ingredient in all of our breads. We always make sure we have some left at the end of the morning. We refresh this with more water and more flour, and by the next morning, the yeast cells have reproduced in sufficient numbers that the mixture is full of bubbles and is ready for us to bake with again. The sourdough is therefore constantly perpetuated. Some bakeries in Northern Europe have sourdough cultures that are generations old; ours is only twelve years old so far!
Our main sourdough is made from white flour, but we also have a spelt sourdough for our spelt bread, and a rye sourdough for rye breads.
The French term for sourdough is levain, so we often refer to our sourdough loaves in this way, such as a spelt levain, or a wholewheat levain.
Why use a sourdough?
Using a sourdough culture to leaven bread has some fantastic advantages. A sourdough is naturally acidic, as it produces organic acids and ethers as it ferments. This increases the acidity of the final loaf, which has a number of effects.
Firstly, this naturally lengthens the shelf life of the bread without using artificial preservatives. Secondly, it strengthens the gluten structure, therefore allowing us to make a wetter, looser dough, resulting in a final loaf that is more moist. Thirdly, the acidity developed during a long fermentation and proof improves the flavour of the dough. Fourthly, the use of a sourdough culture encourages our body to extract more of the minerals and goodness from the flour as we digest the bread.
All in all, using a sourdough is a great idea!