Sourdough Teacher or Sourdough Baker
Gatekeeping is so 2024
It’s no secret that I am a completely self taught sourdough baker. I learned everything I know from other self taught self bakers that were sharing their journey online. I bought a recipe ebook early early on, and I link the blog posts of other bakers as often as I can. There’s no room for withholding information in my kitchen, so I’m excited to share my sourdough process with you.
I’ve been baking for and selling bread to my community for close to two years, I’m baking 30 to 50 loaves of sourdough artisan bread, sandwich loaves, focaccia bread, and dozens of sourdough cookies and treats each week. I’ve started participating in local pop up markets twice a month spring-fall, and my bakery has grown to the point of needing to expand into a basement bakery space…I love it. But even while loving and appreciating the creative outlet and the financial contribution my bakery has brought to my family, I can’t withhold the sourdough information I’ve learned. I know that not everyone is able to purchase weekly homemade bread, and that’s why I can be your baker or I can be your teacher.
I’ve been teaching sourdough classes for over two years, I started with just four class participants at a time circled around my own home dining room table. After the birth of our last baby I felt less at peace with hosting the classes in our home for a variety of reasons. I didn’t like the scramble of prepping to host strangers in my living room while my family was living and operating as normal and then getting stashed in the basement during my class, I started to feel less at ease about inviting people we didn’t know into our home so intimately, and I knew that for this to scale at all I needed to be able to teach a larger crowd at once. Four people at a time was just not enough income to make the effort of displacing my family for the afternoon and energy of prepping 48 hours of sourdough worth it to me. So I expanded to working with local small businesses that were willing to host an event that could be mutually beneficial. Last night I taught a sourdough class at our favorite local play cafe (we love you Sunshine Play Cafe!) for a group of 20+ budding bakers. The larger group setting is such a great teaching flow, I have more fun engaging with a crowd in the 20-40 range, questions that come from the audience help everyone learn more, and it’s the same amount of prep for me to teach one person as it is to teach fifty people.
I’ve taught classes at the local play place, my own home, a local university, and a vineyard nearby that I love working with. At the start of 2025 I don’t have an exact count but I’ve certainly taught over 200 in person class participants the basics and essentials of sourdough bread…and I am so excited to be able to convert this class to a Substack experience. Keep your eyes peeled for a post coming next week that shares the outline of how I make my classic artisan loaf of bread! This will be a barebones walk through with less content that the class contains, but a great preview to what the full class experience will give you. The sourdough artisan loaf recipe guide and the online class will be part of my paid tier of Substack, and I hope you can understand that I don’t do this to make sourdough learning less accessible for anyone. I am doing this because I’ve put five years of sourdough research and more than ten years of home baking experience into this resource that will be nicely bundled up in one course. I’m a full time stay at home mom who has created my sourdough microbakery from the ground up with just my brain and my googling fingers, and I am so excited to share with you all that I know in hopes that you can also make great bread for your own family.
I’ll see you right here at Honey’s Homestead on Tuesday morning to share my start to finish sourdough artisan loaf recipe with you!
