Sourdough Happiness at Bread Ahead Bakery

Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend Bread Ahead Bakery’s “Wild About Yeast" sourdough baking course, here’s how I got on.

 

The first thing I loved about it was the bustling market setting ( Borough Market!). We settled in around the big wooden table munching on brownies from the bakery and sipping tea while the rain came down outside the big floor to ceiling windows. Bakers ran in and out with boxes of Bread Ahead’s famous doughnuts and metre long loaves of “Cathedral Bread” named after Southwark Cathedral right next door.

 

 

What a lovely atmosphere in which to spend a Saturday afternoon, a world away from my normal idea of a cookery school in a country house, in someone’s fancy kitchen. This was a working bakery, a successful business, enough to inspire even the meekest of bakers and having just won Slow Food’s London’s Best Bakery award we knew we were in for learning some brilliant expertise.

 

 

Our first lesson was making our starter, who we brought to life in a little pot, named (Bilbo Baggins) and then put to one side to begin his life and gather the wild yeast that is carried on the air. Our instructor Aiden Chapman demonstrated his passion for baking immediately by delving us into the world of sourdough and his lifelong love for this fascinating way of baking. I loved the idea that your soughdough starter will carry on and on and give birth to many loaves in it’s lifetime, spreading it’s happiness over the years and even passed down from generation to generation, who knows, maybe my grandchildren will be cultivating Bilbo in their futuristic fridges in 30 years’ time.

We then moved on to a beautiful rye dough, which we made into two loaves, one was shaped in a banneton, a round basket used for shaping and proving dough. Once turned out this beautiful loaf’s surface begins to crack in an artistic pattern, I loved the individuality of each loaf. Each one was unique and beautiful. The 2^nd loaf we made from the rye was shaped and baked in a loaf tin and flavoured with caraway seeds, coriander seeds and thick, sticky molasses. It smelt heavenly whilst baking and came out beautifully.

 

Next up was our brilliant Beetroot no-knead psycadelic sourdough! Quite a mouthful indeed, but this is what I have decided to name it after a brilliantly fun mixing session of bright pink beetroot. Aiden also informed us that the terminology "bad trip" comes from when British sailors would go on long sea voyages, apparently the sourdough bread they made on these long voyages from starters kept in varying conditions had hallucinogenic properties, making this swirly bread dough even more apt.

The fun continued with another kind of pre-ferment called a Poolish, something that Bread Ahead had created for us to speed up the process. We used this to hone our shaping skills and made both a traditional French baguette and a pizza base. Both turned out fantastically. The pizza base was wonderfully crisp and flavourful, the mozzarella was from one of the market stalls and tasted milky and delicious, overall a grade A pizza and therefore one happy Cat.

 

 

A wonderful day was topped off by the levanne loaves, we used a pre proven dough to learn all about shaping and cutting, how to ensure our loaves would bloom outwards and grow into beautiful shapes in the oven.

 

 

I would thoroughly recommend the Bread Ahead Wild About Yeast course, I’ve yet to replicate it at home, but I can’t wait to do it and get into a rhythm of baking sourdough bread for my friends and family every week. The expertise and knowledge you gain from this course are hugely valuable and the day itself was a delight, extremely hands on and wonderfully rewarding. There is nothing like pulling your freshly baked loaves from the oven and revelling in their success - except perhaps travelling home on the tube with 6 warm loaves radiating beautiful aromas around the carriage.