In three weeks’ time I’ll be running my next batch of sourdough classes at Quince Bakery in North London; two days of teaching up to 12 students each day (Sundays and Mondays, the days Quince is closed), a little three-day trip I take once a month, driving away from the sandy beaches of Margate and away from the gorgeous, rambunctious toddler with a bootful of wobbly dough, into the gorgeous, rambunctious city that I lived in and loved on for 40 years. I must confess (don’t tell the toddler) that these three days are fast becoming three of my favourite days of each calendar month.
I should also confess that before embarking upon these new post-baby, post-Victoria Park house, post-Margate bread-making workshops back in April, I was positively dreading them. Dreading them!
It was a combination of factors, really, but the main thrust of the thing was that there were so many new variables since the last time I’d taught people to turn flour, water and salt into the best damn thing in the world, and the most glorious vehicle for a four cheese and kimchi toastie. It wasn’t just one thing that was new, it was all the things. Even me. I was new! Absolutely everything was different and therefore absolutely everything was scary.
There was a brand new venue (my spectacular friend Anna Higham’s similarly spectacular bakery, Quince, in Islington), the home in East London in which I’d taught sourdough baking classes since 2017 no longer being available to me since, well, since new people now live in it.
There was a 15-month-old baby whom I had only just stopped breastfeeding and had never, ever, ever left overnight (and would have to, since she would have to stay in Margate with her dad while I was teaching, and go to nursery on the Monday so he could work).
There was the two-hour drive in a hot, air-conditioningless car (was everyone else told that car air-conditioning systems need to be regassed? For I certainly was NOT) with 12 loaves of over-proofing dough wibbling about in bannetons in the boot, and 4kg of pizza dough getting more and more billowy as we drove further and further west.
There was new flour! Lovely, wonderful, fabulous stuff from Landrace Milling that Anna uses in the bakery and which we would be using in class, which is super vibrant and super fresh and super lively and ferments super (read: mind-bendingly) fast and which, being stone-ground, isn’t as glutenous or strong or predictable or consistent as commercial flour brands and is therefore MUCH more delicious but MUCH tricksier to work with, both as a baker and, particularly, as a boxfresh student.
There were the vast bakery deck ovens instead of itty-bitty domestic ovens I usually used, and the dilemma of how I would demonstrate to students how to bake their bread to bakery standards in their significantly smaller kitchen hotboxes.
There was the flat of the incredibly generous friend nearby in which I was to stay but had never actually been to. There was the parking space in someone’s driveway which I had to prebook in order to make sure I didn’t get stung with Islington’s monumental parking fees. There was the worry I wouldn’t find a parking spot directly outside the bakery on Saturday afternoon when I would need to drop off boxes and boxes and boxes of dough and ingredients and kit and booze and flour.
There was the fact that the last time I’d taught baking classes had been 17 months earlier, when I was about 150 months pregnant with the baby, and that I’d done hardly any sourdough baking since then because a) baby and b) our kitchen in Margate has basically been a renovation site since then, with a terribly unfriendly temporary chipboard counter installed for 1.5 years, until we could finally afford to have the wooden one fitted last month.
There was the fact that Olive wouldn’t be there.
And I think that last one was the thing I was dreading most of all, dreading even more than leaving the baby for the first time.
That funny little black dog was my familiar for 10 years, and her arrival is what led to me skipping out on my career in journalism and pursuing one in food. She was by my side every day while I baked and prepped and hosted supperclubs and taught bread classes. People used to joke that the only reason they came to Muffdining or sourdough school was to meet Olive, and I actually don’t think they really were joking whatsoever.
Olive adored people coming to our house for bread school. Every time the doorbell rang she raced up the basement stairs, often tripping over her paws in a flurry of excitement, and skipped to the front door to greet our guests, her tail a fuzzy black blur of wag. When students sat down in the sitting room to eat breakfast she hopped from lap to lap, tipping back her head for under-chin scratches, lying flat on the sofa and exposing her belly for rubs, batting her ludicrously long eyelashes for buttered crumpets and bread crusts. Would people still want to come if Olive wasn’t there? Who would provide the comic relief during class? Who would collapse with me in a heap once everyone had left and help me hoover up the last slices of pizza (swiped through melted butter)?
My brain was veritably fizzing with anxiety.
And when the Saturday prep day for the first batch of classes arrived, absolutely everything that could go wrong, did.
First there was the dough. In order to stop it overproofing in the car I’d used an extremely young levain to make it. Too young. Turns out even my sweltering car isn’t hot enough to proof dough that’s barely begun fermenting. When I arrived in Islington the dough was dense and flat and sad in the bannetons. I carried 12 depressed looking loaves from up the street (obviously there was nowhere to park outside the bakery) along with boxes and boxes of class paraphernalia, crates of wine and beer, big tubs of pizza dough, and considered dumping the bread dough straight in the street bin, given that I knew what was going to happen when I baked it the next morning.
After a sleepless night, I arrived at the bakery at 6.30am on Sunday to begin more prep before the students arrived. The ovens were tricky but I got the hang of them. The toddler and her Dada Facetimed me while they were having breakfast and it was divine. My heavenly assistant Ella (just as beautiful as Olive and, actually, infinitely more helpful) turned up and helped calm my panic. Things were beginning to feel OK.
And then everyone arrived for class, and it was magical. Sure, the baked bread did, depressingly, get thrown straight in the bin after baking (as I knew it would; underproofed bread cannot be salvaged even as breadcrumbs), but with a big explainer and a key lesson to the class about why timings and happy starters and liveliness and bubbles are so important. The pizza dough (which I’d left out of the fridge until 11pm that night to continue fermenting, pizza dough being much more forgiving than shaped bread dough) was a triumph and made up for the fact that the only bread the class got to eat that morning was the stuff Anna had leftover from her Saturday bake. Landrace flour proved impossible for newbies to work with and all their bread overproofed on their journeys home, which taught me that in class we absolutely must mix Landrace stuff with something stronger and slower.
But the class! The people! The joy! I had forgotten how beautiful it is to share bready secrets with excited faces, with people who believe (like me) that turning flour and water and salt into toast truly is a kind of sorcery. I had forgotten how wonderful it is to connect with real people in real life over bowls of dough, not just over Instagram, and to feed people things you have made with your own hands that make them scream ‘Stop it! What is this witchcraft! I must eat another slice immediately!’
I had forgotten how special it is to spend a day watching people become friends, hearing their stories, learning about them as they learn about flour. I had forgotten how the dynamic of each bread class is just a little bit different, how I can never tell at 10am exactly how I’ll be feeling at 4pm when people leave. But I tell you what, it’s always, always better.
Going into my fifth month of classes at Quince, the days now run as smoothly as they did when I taught in my house in Victoria Park. The bread always bakes up fluffy and proud, golden and burnished. The pizza is always FAR too plentiful and gets wrapped up in baking paper and taken home by students for partners, roommates, children, themselves far too stuffed to contemplate anything whatsoever for supper. The crumpets are always fat and speckled with butter holes. The students always leave bubbling over with new knowledge and skills and friends and flavours and wine.
I had forgotten how buoyed I feel by these classes, that making bread, for me and for so many others, truly is a sort of therapy. Lots of my students tell me they take up baking while they are going through a turbulent time, and that getting their hands wet in a bowlful of dough, folding and turning and shaping, feeling the weight of the thing in their hands, and turning a white powder into a crackly loaf to be sliced and lathered with butter provides them with a precious moment of calm, a peaceful episode of mindfulness, a window where everything else goes quiet and it’s all about you and that squishy, slippery dough.
Taylor Swift told us all on her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s podcast New Heights last week that she has essentially swapped performing for making bread since finishing her Eras tour.
‘The sourdough has taken over my life in a huge way. I’m really talking about bread 60% of the time now. It’s become a huge, huge factor.’
She’s not the only one. Sourdough does have this curious ability to make you a little bit (totally, utterly, dementedly) obsessed with it; once you start making it, you really cannot stop. It’s something most other foodstuffs don’t do; I haven’t heard of any huge popstars becoming obsessed with making scones or salads or succotash, but bread really does sink its feelers into you once you start and refuse to let go.
I started making bread simply because I really, really, really like toast, but it’s become more than that. It has become this grounding, meditative process, a lifeline that leaves me feeling calm and centred and level, my cortisol levels dramatically lowered, and with a really great bonus snack at the end of it all.
And you don’t get that after a yoga class.
I’ll be teaching sourdough workshops at Quince Bakery in Islington on Sunday 7 and Monday 8 September. Classes run from 10am-4pm and cost £180pp. Email me at martha@marthadelacey.com for more information or to book your spot.