Jane's Cookery School Blog, May

May sees the launch of King or Queen of the Sourdough here at the bakery and to kick this off we held our first Sourdough Surgery at the Cookery School last week. What is a sourdough surgery you may ask? I guess you could look at it in such a way that it is a dissection of the process of sourdough making. I thought of it more as an opportunity for a group of like-minded people to come together to share their experiences and concerns and try to answer some frequently and not so frequently asked questions. Who better qualified to answer those questions than Tom Herbert.

Before working at the Cookery School my own knowledge of sourdough was, to be honest, limited. In situations such as this, I tend to ask as many questions as I can to whoever I can, (apologies if you have been on the receiving end) so you could be forgiven for thinking I had an ulterior motive when asking Tom if he would run the surgery. Maybe I did.
We asked people who booked onto the course to email in their top three questions and we would try to answer as many as we could in the time we had set aside. One thing I think is important when teaching is to keep things as simple as possible. Why overcomplicate things when you don’t have to, and there sure are people out there who make sourdough sound as if you need a chemistry degree to be able to understand the process. Tom isn’t one of those people, and I like the way he explains the method so simply we can all understand, and, more importantly, go away and make amazing bread! Bread that you are proud to share with your friends and family.
If you fancy being King or Queen of the Sourdough 2017 or would like to join our Sourdough Nation group we would welcome you there.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/SourdoughNation