At The Sourdough School, we are not just about baking bread. We are about baking bread with a purpose, fostering health and wellness, nurturing resilient communities, and caring for our planet. Bread is our basic food and our most inexpensive, and yet it has been so changed in the past century that it is no longer even recognisable as bread. To understand bread you need to start with the soil.
The gardens are part of your learning experience and connect you to the soil, growing grain, understanding the whole system. Vanessa is renowned for inspiring people to bake through understanding, not just the fermentation of bread, but the interconnectedness of the microbes. Central to her teaching is understanding the gut microbiome, and the connection to the microbes, so many of her classes start in the garden or the barn.
The classes are about more than just teaching people to bake bread. To support our students to use the knowledge of how to bake bread that nourishes and becomes a medium of health, understanding the environment is the start point of how we make bread and how to bake in a way that encourages all microbes to flourish.
