Now everyone who knows me knows that I love bread, in any form at any time of day and I really miss all different types of bread from home especially the rye sourdough breads. They just seem to be easier on the tummy when you try and digest them. So when my birthday came around again this year I got the chance to learn how to make proper sourdough bread with Rebecca from the TwoMagpies bakery. This was at the beginning of 2020 before lockdown hit and the world changed forever. It was a totally amazing day, we learned so much and were really well looked after. Patries and croissants to start the course off and after all our hard work that morning we were served the most amazing lunch, with home made soup and some very yummy sourdough based sandwiches with several delicious toppings such as smoked coronation chicken and smashed avocado. And to top it all off cakes and brownies & coffee in the afternoon
Having an expert on hand to show us how to do the sourdough properly is much easier than trying to work things out from a book. I never considered the temperature of the dough/water and flour before and that fact alone has been a total eye opener. Sourdough is one of those things that just takes time and a bit or planning as there are several resting stages involved. We also did not spend a lot of time kneeding but instead rested the dough and then folded it and rested and folded again, several times. Rebecca is such a good teacher and was able to accommodate all the different levels of experience from ‘never baked bread’ to ‘tried to make sourdough last week’.
She explained things really well and made us all feel very welcome, all our questions were answered and we went way with a lovely goody bag with marriages flour, dough scraper and the amazing breads we made on the day such as rye, muesli loaf, wheat & rye sourdough, breadsticks and fougasse.
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