Sourdough Baking Class

Over the weekend Alison and I participated in a sourdough baking class at the Traverse Moutain Harmons. This class was with our favorite Harmons chef - Chef Frekya. 

First, Chef Frekya gave us all a crash course on sourdough starters. She walked us through the three main types of starters - mother (sourdough culture), sourdough starter (for use in immediate cooking), and a levain. After talking about the characteristics and care of a sourdough starter we began baking. 

Here is a useful video from Chef Frkya about sourdough:

Chef Frekya had already prepped and allowed the dough to go through the first proofing. That way we could jump right into baking bread. We were making three types of bread today - a round sourdough loaf, focaccia, and a sourdough loaf in a pan. 

We started out on the round sourdough loaf. We walked through and performed the next steps - punching, scaling/portioning, rounding, and benching. 

While we waited for the round loaf to rest we worked on the focaccia.  I didn't realize that the key ingredient in focaccia was a lot of onion. Like so much onion that was folded into the dough. We kneaded it out onto an oiled sheet pan and let it rest. 

We prepared our last loaf using the same steps as the sourdough loaf. Instead of rounding, we put these directly into a bread pan. 

Things we moving quickly we rounded the round sourdough loaf again and put them into the oven. We learned how to score the bread and add it to the oven. We added ice to the bottom of the oven. We also baked the focaccia and the bread in the loaf pan. ~40 minutes later we each had 3 delicious loaves of bread.

While we were waiting on the bread we made some dough using sourdough starter, flour, and salt. 

Chef Freyka cut up her bread. We ate bread with soup and a nice salad for lunch. Then we packed up all of our stuff. We went home with 2 sourdough cultures, 6 loaves of bread, and 2 portions of dough. It was so much bread and the makings of bread. 

We couldn't eat it all, even if we wanted to so we gave some bread to our neighbors. On Sunday Anna Holly and Skylee were staying with us. We used the dough to bake a sourdough loaf for Blake for Father's day. We also took a loaf to Alison's grandmother. 

All in all, this was a fun class that helped us elevate our sourdough baking skills. We are still experimenting with how to make the perfect loaf at home. We have the knowledge now so we are confident with a little work we can figure it out.