Sourdough Bread at Home

"In this class, you will meet a wild, untidy blob of sourdough culture, take it home and name it. You will come to love this blob. You will learn how to care and feed for your blob. You will learn how to work with this blob to make delicious, homemade sourdough boule. In the process, you may learn things about bread, about yourself, about life."

That's how longtime baker Pamela Brown describes what she's planning for this introductory class on making and baking sourdough bread. This delightful morning workshop will introduce new and aspiring bread bakers to the age-old art and skill of making sourdough bread at home.

What You Will Learn:

• Care and feeding of your sourdough culture
• How to explain and demonstrate baker's ratios for a high-hydration dough
• Weighing, mixing, stretching, folding—but not kneading—your dough
• Autolyse, bulk fermentation, bench rest, shaping, and scoring
• Baking off a bakery-style loaf in your home oven

What You Take Home

• A jar of wild, local (Los Olivos) sourdough culture
• A banneton basket for proofing your dough
• The joy and satisfaction that you have adopted a new family member (the sourdough culture) into your home

Recommended for Folkies ages 14 and up (youth with adults only, please). Have younger children you want to bring? Kindly email us before you register to talk make arrangements.

Head Folkie for the Day

Nearly 40 years ago, Pamela Brown's college roommate explained the weird, bubbling mass in a Mason jar in their shared fridge. She showed Pamela how she fed this wildly, untidy mess. "I was mildly aghast at the look and smell of the thing," she says. "It wasn’t pretty. But, I started making bread and—except for the decade I practiced law—I haven't stopped since." Nearly every day, Pamela wakes up and calculates if she can sync the recipe she has in her mind into the curves and folds of her life.

"For me, it’s magical: Convincing water and flour and leaven to develop into a delicious, beautiful loaf is always an adventure," she says. "Each loaf is an art project which reflects the real experience of life. And, giving someone a homemade loaf of bread is one of the great joys of life."