The Sourdough School

PIONEERING A NEW APPROACH TO BAKING AS LIFESTYLE MEDICINE

Learn to bake, teach & prescribe Baking as Lifestyle Medicine
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Vanessa Christmas
mindfulness retreat

7 day in person Retreat + Certificate in Baking as Lifestyle Medicine 15th-21st May 2023

£3,999.00

Combined Course

Enrolling on this course registers you for:

1 Week (7 day) in-person Retreat here at The Sourdough School +

12 Month Online  Baking as Lifestyle Medicine Certificate starting  September 28th 2023 RRP £1999

OR a Pre-course Baking Syllabus to follow before you attend your Retreat.

FOR: Bakers & Healthcare Professionals

 

It takes more than just a week to learn sourdough. It’s about both understanding and practice. Our courses are fully supported by our online learning platform, and our books, with over 70 video tutorials, features, regular new recipes, articles & a Forum to include you in our baking community, helping you to continue your practice so that you will keep on learning.

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Pay a 34% deposit per item (100% payable over 3 months)

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  • Description
  • Additional information
  • What will we make? 
  • What will I learn?
  • What is included?
  • What is the teaching style?
  • What is not included?
  • Essential reading: Why we check your baking level 2 months before your retreat.
  • General about the week here

This in-person Retreat includes a 1 year online Certificate in Baking as Lifestyle Medicine course, or a pre-course syllabus whichever is the most appropriate depending on the time of your booking.  Before you enrol you must read the Tabs below with guidance and explanation of what you can expect.

Monday 15th to Sunday 21st May 2023

Additional information

Retreat dates

July 22nd – 28th 2024

What will we make? 

What recipes will we make?

All recipes will be based on the recipes in the Sourdough School books.

  • Create a Botanical Blend flour
  • A sourdough fizz
  • Sourdough Pizza
  • 10 minute Focaccia
  • A sourdough Boule
  • A fermented cake and a probiotic accompaniment such as cultured butter
  • A symbiotic recipe such as a soup to eat with the bread
  • Vegetable or fruit probiotic pickles such as kimchi or sauerkraut
  • Fruit compote

What will I learn?

You will learn more than you even knew there was to learn, just by being here for the week.

  • Every step of making sourdough
  • Starter refreshment
  • Blending and milling flour
  • Timings
  • Familiarisation of the variables affecting fermentation
  • About fibre, protein & gluten in the flour
  • An overview of nutrition & digestibility of bread
  • Eating symbiotically for optimal gut health
  • Why diversity is key to gut health
  • About the gut microbiome and why the kind of bread you eat matters
  • Probiotics & prebiotics
  • How to make sourdough central to your lifestyle

What is included?

What is included:

  • An exclusive ceramic jar with breathable wooden lid & some of our sourdough starter to take home
  • A set of sourdough record cards
  • A personalised signed The Sourdough School book worth £24.99
  • A Botanical Blend flour that you will create and mill on your course
  • You can also book a wine tasting & tour of the vineyard (providing the proprietors are available)
  • All trips, food & drinks whilst at the school are provided, including lunches and supper at the windmill

What is the teaching style?

Retreat Teaching Style .. some modules are quiet…

All courses are run in the same style and it is really important that you understand that our teaching style is not that of a cookery school.   We teach using a participative demonstration style,  making sourdough, and working with one mixer, Vanessa will make larger batches of dough.  There will be ample opportunities to touch, taste, smell and feel the dough. It is important, however to understand that The School is a classroom, and the teaching style is about understanding the principles of sourdough rather than each of our students individually making bread. Some classes are taught in silence to allow students to connect to the process.

The practical side of learning to shape is supported by the Sourdough Club video tutorials for when you get home. This teaching style enables us to still run courses by maintaining a safe learning environment for both students and the team at the school.  We ask that students are considerate of this approach and that you read and agreed to follow our COVID-19 guidelines before attending the school.

What is not included?

You will need to budget for your:

  • Travel
  • Accommodation
  • Insurance
  • Food outside of teaching hours

Essential reading: Why we check your baking level 2 months before your retreat.

General about the week here

The retreat itself is about baking for the joy of it.  A retreat, to bake and laugh and de-stress, and before you come you join the 1 year Baking as Lifestyle Medicine starting 29th September 2022. So please do book your place on the Retreat before September 2022 to ensure you are able to start the ‘Bake for Health’ course on time.

We have a beautiful week planned of sourdough baking, wild swimming, making fruit compotes, cultured butter, fermented cakes and of course our classic sourdough boules.

You will immerse yourself in connecting to the Botanical Blend flour concept this week, and make your own blend.

We have a visit to a flour mill to find out more about how stone ground flour is still being milled today in an incredible historic mill, followed by a pizza evening.

We have yoga, and a life coach to plan how to use sourdough and the schedule to re-centre your priorities.

Places on this course are limited – if you are unable to attend please do request a copy of our prospectus to see if you are able to attend any other course options we have.

Please note all visits and non-baking events within the course are subject to change depending on their availability. We reserve the right to change them to suitable alternatives as and if required. Thank you.

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A NEW APPROACH

👉🏻 For the past 3 years we’ve been working on something incredible … prescription sourdough bread making courses for our @sourdoughclub members 

📈We have had amazing advances in healthcare, but there is no pill to cure poor diet. The best medicine is prevention via a healthy lifestyle, and many studies have shown that people who eat healthily and exercise regularly sleep better, have less anxiety and depression, have more energy, and lower their risk of chronic illness overall.

🙌 Vanessa’s work on Bread & the Impact on the Gut Microbiome has been turned into something extraordinary. Prescription bread-making courses as a lifestyle intervention, and the Bread Protocol we teach here is designed to address the way you live, exploring behaviour related to nutrition, physical activity, stress management, sleep, social support and environmental exposures. These courses are 12 weeks long, and designed to maintain health and prevent disease not just in individuals bit in patients and populations, so we have 2 ways to enrol on a course: 

1️⃣ SOCIAL PRESCRIPTION 
If your doctor or healthcare practitioner is one of  our Sourdough School graduates and they feel that this bread-making prescription course is something that will improve your health, then they may can prescribe the course for you as a social prescription free.

2️⃣ SELF PRESCRIPTION 
You can self-prescribe these courses by enrolling yourself on a course to improve your health and wellbeing.

📰 If you are interested in learning more about the prescription courses then please sign up to the newsletters as we will be announcing their launch over the coming weeks and months. 

@vanessakimbell
@drmiguelmateas 
@dralexdavidson 
@dksherratt 

#lifestylemedicine #preventativemedicine #systemschange #socialprescribingday #socialprescribing
🧘 LAST ORDERS TODAY 🧘 I’m prepping the st 🧘 LAST ORDERS TODAY 🧘

I’m prepping the starters to post out on Thursday.

I was thinking why sourdough all these years? I guess it’s because is alive… it’s a culture of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria. We might like to think we can control it, but we can’t control everything. Things change when we bake. The flour changes, the ambient temperature changes, or something happens during the middle of the day and your baking routine changes.

We can be very critical of ourselves. Starting the day by looking in the mirror and criticising our physical appearance. Or looking at something we’ve done or said and overanalysing it. Often, without realising, some of us can be incredibly negative.
It’s the same with bread. I notice that many people are self-depreciating and, while they aspire to make beautiful loaves, they have a distinct lack of acceptance that creating a really aesthetically stunning loaves takes time. It’s an art. It takes many years to be able to understand the nuances of each flour and how each one behaves to create bread. There is no instant fix. And I wouldn’t want there to be.

If you want an instant fix, go out and buy a packet mix – that way the work is done for you. In sourdough there’s no instant fix. That is the whole point of it really. That’s why we celebrate when we do make those incredibly beautiful loaves. And what you are actually celebrating isn’t high levels of gluten or high levels of hydration. It’s that person’s ability to have understood and connected to the flour, to their environment, to the yeast, to the timings and rhythm and everything coming together to create something that is joyous to eat.

To learn more about what we do here at The Sourdough Club and the courses we teach, follow the link in the bio to read 

#mindfulbaking #sourdough #sourdoughsclub #bread #sourdoughlove #sourdoughlover #naturalleavened #leavening #realbread #breadmaking #bakebread #makebread #makerealbread #sourdoughstories #bakingforlove #bakingtherapy #sourdoughbaking
🧂 ARTISAN INGREDIENTS FOR ARTISAN BREAD 🧂 A 🧂 ARTISAN INGREDIENTS FOR ARTISAN BREAD 🧂

Artisan bread starts with artisan ingredients. Honest ingredients that have been grown and harvested with respect for both the people and the earth. The flour has to be organic, the water chlorine free and the yeast has to be sourdough, and so it follows that the salt has to be similarly harvested with principles that are in synergy with our own. Salt making was, up until the industrial revolution, an artisanal craft. Much like bread making salt is also an artisan product that has been industrialised, so we use a hand-harvested salt in our bread.
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In our shop, we sell unrefined salt specifically for sourdough - Natural salt contains all of its trace minerals and other elements that are naturally a part of its origin. Our salt is not exposed to chemicals and does not contain anti-caking agents.
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Follow the link in our bio to our shop, where you can find the best artisan ingredients for your bread! 
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#artisan #salt #iamamember #sourdoughclub #sourdough #sourdoughbread #naturallyleavened #realbread #sourdoughbaking #bakingbread #breadmaking #homebakedbread #sourdoughlove
DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN ONLINE SHOP & CAN PURCHASE DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN ONLINE SHOP & CAN PURCHASE MY WHITE SOURDOUGH STARTER?
(with worldwide delivery)
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I have several sourdough starters but The French white starter is one that I have been using since I was 11 years old and originates in the bakery I grew up baking within France. It takes a bit longer to reach it’s peak and is generally slower and sweeter, and much more forgiving of being neglected for a week, so the one I recommend for beginners. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
We have verbal confirmation that the starter originated over 115 years ago and If you swipe right in the video you can listen to me chatting to one of the older residents of the village confirming that bakery did not shut during the war either .. & it has been maintained ever since... it’s a lovely story. Although the microbes double every 20 – 30 minutes when they are refreshed ... so it is either over a century old or 30 minutes old depending on how you want to look at it. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
You can purchase a pot of my starter, along with a grey moon kilner jar & a mini video course on looking after your starter. 
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TAP THE PICTURE TO SHOP.
 
Swipe right to see the amazing video of the French bakery where the starter originated from @vanessakimbell has been baking with this starter for over 20 years … and first baked almost 40 years ago with it …#romantic 
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#breadbosses #breadporn #flourwatersalt #breadtalk #bread #breadstagram #sourdough #sourdoughschool #bread #sourdoughlove #sourdoughlover #naturalleavened #leavening #levain #realbread #breadmaking #bakebread #makebread #makerealbread #learntobakebread #breadmakingclass #sourdoughstories #bakingforlove #bakingtherapy #sourdoughbaking #bannetons #bakery
🌾 BARLEY - DO AS THE ROMANS DO 🌾
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Oats & Barley. We love both, but this week we have been diving to barley with our students, learning about nutritional value, what role plays in supporting key butyrate producers for gut health and why gladiators were call 'barley-eaters'!
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And naturally, we will be talking about how we can incorporate barley into our baking and our botanical blends.
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To find out more, become a student of the Sourdough Club! 
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#grains #wheat #einkorn #emmer #spelt #heritagegrains #freshlymilledflour #milledflour #milling #freshlymilled #botanicalblend #fromscratch #unrefined #mockmillproud #mockmill
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