One of the reasons I first started teaching people to make sourdough was to show people how easily they could run a bakery from home. As well as milling our own flour, using herbs and flower from in the garden here, we also share that making unique home milled and fermented bread is a great way to supplement your income running and a pop up bakery from home is really fun. It’s a great way to meet people and if you have children then I certainly recommend it was a fantastic way to get my children earning their own pocket money.
I set up our bakery in the summer of 2011 – it was a brilliant idea and a way to teach my children the value of money. I’d worked out that by milling grain, adding in herbs, such as lemon thyme for roses to the mix then the bread was. special and the price of making a sourdough loaf to be about £1 and they sell for about £3 so this seemed like a great way to combine the garden and the kitchen to make some dough!
(Excuse the pun.) Admittedly as a baker I had a pretty good idea how to go about setting it up, however it is relatively inexpensive to set up and requires very little investment to produce beautiful artisan sourdough loaves that have your customers returning every week. We sat at the kitchen table for a family conference and agreed that we should have a go ourselves. I’ll give you three weeks, said my husband, ever the optimist. The children were ecstatic and promised to help.
There was a steep learning curve and a few disasters along the way but it works really well. We ran the bakery for almost a year, making breads such a lemon thyme, black pepper and rosemary focaccia, and adding roses and Angelica to the baguettes, and milling lavender in the flour too. The locals call me beautifully eccentric but we have such a wonderful time doing it. Our customers often stop for coffee( and yes I have even milled coffee beans and green tea in the breads) and we chat, our neighbours stand and gossip and my children are really good at mental arithmetic and making bread. I’m not sure it’s taught them the value of money yet … but it kept them so busy that they had much less opportunity to spend it!
1770 – Recreating a Heritage grain beer barm bread
You can not fail to be inspired by Vanessa and her passion for good quality preferably local food and by her in depth knowledge that has taken a lifetime and a very ‘foodie’ mama and I’m sure nonna to learn. Vanessa’s teaching style is very relaxed and you just feel that you have popped around to a friend’s for coffee and a delicious butter biscuit as she teaches you all there is to know about sourdough and how to run your own pop up bakery. Although when I arrived I thought it could be something I might do at some point in the future, 6 hours in Vanessa’s company and I am thinking some point might be January. You can ask any question and be assured of an answer that comes from experience not a text book although I shall be buying her own text book soon. I’ve made sourdough for sometime but was able to pick up so many little tips that would have taken a host of bread disasters to learn so even if you have no intention of running a bakery (this will change) I still would recommend this course to anyone who loves sourdough and wants to learn to make some, you even get a little sourdough starter to take home with you to kick start your own baking empire. Can find no fault, other than I wanted to stay longer. 5 stars.
I would describe myself as a experienced and confident cook who was looking to expand on my “stale” culinary skills. So where better to start than a day on making sourdough bread. I have made a variety of breads but never this one, as whenever I have read up on the process I never got further than the sourdough starter! How do you start a sourdough starter, well now I know, thanks to Vanessa’s knowledge and relaxed teaching. I asked many stupid questions, which Vanessa gave clear, basic answers, repeating a process (several times!) when asked. I had a thoroughly enjoyable day, thanks to Vanessa’s generous hospitality, lunch was delicious, we got to try 3 types of bread which Vanessa had prepared the day before, all within her beautiful home. I took home my orange, fruit and walnut sourdough which was made all the better by a orange syrup Vanessa just happened to have on her stove! A true domestic goddess, thank you Vanessa for your encouragement and knowledge.
I have just been on Vanessa’s one day sourdough / starting a pop-up bakery course and have left it both impressed and inspired.
I have been making my own sourdough from a home-produced starter with fairly satisfactory results for 3 years, but am considering launching a pop up bakery within a community store that I am involved with.
Vanessa’s course takes all the fear out of both the managing of a sourdough starter (which is far less technical than generally imagined) and the setting up of a pop-up bakery. It also opened my eyes to the vast number of breads that can easily be adapted from the basic dough – all 5 of us left with very different breads.
Vanessa’s engaging and inclusive teaching style is well framed in her “shabby chic” (her words not mine) kitchen parlour. No notes – either for student or teacher, no fancy (and expensive) presentation folders, but a wealth of commonsense knowledge and advice, imparted while in the act of working the bread, sipping tea and homemade biscuits or over a lovely simple lunch.
Vanessa promises follow up advice to her students at no cost, and expects to receive calls, tweets or emails at that “what do I do when (insert baking crisis) happens?” She has underlined my confidence in what I was I was doing, but with literally a lifetime of bread baking behind her, her insights were vital.
All in all a great day, with fruits of take-home knowledge, a beautiful loaf for the next day’s breakfast (although I was digging into mine all the way home), and most importantly your own portion of Vanessa’s very active starter, which could form the basis of a new business or a lifetime of fantastic bread at home.