Bread & Baking Workshop

Fill a table with bread and baked goods you made yourself. In this full-day Bread & Baking Workshop you'll learn how wild yeast and fermentation work, how to read a dough, and how to shape and bake with a proper crust and soft crumb.

The Hero: A Bakery Table of Your Own

By the end of the day you'll have baked a country sourdough loaf, golden focaccia, cinnamon scrolls and soft pineapple buns. It's the kind of spread that anchors a long lunch or a weekend brunch. Sourdough runs on its own timeline, so your chef will have doughs ready at each stage. You'll mix and shape your own loaf to take home, and bake one that was started earlier.

The Bake List

You'll mix, shape, score and bake a country sourdough loaf, make a rosemary and sea salt focaccia that's easy enough for a weeknight dinner, roll cinnamon scrolls with vanilla glaze, and bake pineapple buns, a soft milk bread with a crackly sweet top. You'll also learn how to feed a sourdough starter and keep it alive at home.

What You'll Learn

You'll feed, maintain and read a sourdough starter, mix and stretch-and-fold a dough and judge when it's ready, shape a tight loaf and score it for oven spring, work with enriched doughs for soft, sweet bakes, and plan your bakes around your week, including overnight proving.

What to Expect

This is a full-day, hands-on class from 10:00am to 5:00pm. You'll have your own bench and step-by-step guidance from an expert chef, in a small group of up to 16 so there's plenty of one-on-one help. We bake with premium Victorian flours, butter and dairy, and enjoy the bakes straight from the oven with tea, coffee or a glass of wine. You'll take home your own sourdough starter, a shaped loaf to bake at home, plenty of baked goods and the recipes so you can bake it all again.

This is Day 5 of The Confident Home Cook, a six-workshop program at Otao Kitchen, but you can book it on its own.