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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Certificate in Baking as Lifestyle Medicine.

£1,499.00

Check if you qualify for a Bursary

“This is a journey. And these aren’t just courses. Kimbell wants to change the bread we eat, one loaf at a time. She’s the real deal: a total inspiration.”–Diana Henry, The Telegraph.

  • FOR: Bakers & Healthcare Professionals this certificate is the practical application of BALM
  • TYPE: Online
  • AVAILABILITY:  Applications open again in 2023 and close 20th September 2023
  • ENROLMENT DATE: 21st September 2023
  • COURSE STARTS: 28th September 2023
  • TUITION FEE: £1,499  (part payment option available)
  • FOCUS:  Baking as Lifestyle Medicine (BALM)
  • LEVEL: From beginner
  • SUPPORT: Live weekly clinics keeping you on track & a supported community forum
  • HOURS: Total of 600+ hours available. Minimum 4 hours a week to graduate.
  • Speak to me directly  – Request a callback.
  • Download The Prospectus 2022- 23.
  • Learn more about scholarships, bursaries and discounts.
  • Optional extra: 5-day in-person workshop where you can consolidate your knowledge with Vanessa and the team at The Sourdough School (when available) you may upgrade to an in-person course/workshop – email bookings@sourdough.co.uk for details.

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Categories: Baking As Lifestyle Medicine, Featured
  • Live Sessions & Support
  • What is the Bake for Health Certificate?
  • What will I learn?
  • What recipes are included?
  • Where is the course taught from?
  • More details
  • Your last lesson on the course
  • What do I need to prepare before I begin my online Course?

Live Sessions & Support

While most online courses will leave you to it, we don’t. Your course is supported with regular live baking clinics and tutorial sessions with Vanessa live from The Sourdough School.

We teach as part of  The Sourdough Club, and our style is all about building community, so it is very interactive. We have a fun and lively baking forum, which is supported by both Vanessa and a professional baker who is part of our baking team. Our club has an alumni membership and we have students who have been members now for 10 years – it is lovely.

What is the Bake for Health Certificate?

Not all bread is created equal, and while most sourdough bread-making courses focus on big holes, we go far beyond the crumb structure of your bread. Of course, it goes without saying that you will learn how to make beautiful, open-structured bread, but this course is about applying the science and understanding to the bread that we bake, empowering you to bake and eat bread that supports gut health using the bread protocol to bake you will be baking advanced high hydration loaves, baguettes, pizza, brioche, cakes, pastry and pasta by the end of the course.

Gain a unique insight

You will be baking according to the Sourdough School Bread Protocol, so on this course you will be given the option to gain an insight into your own gut microbiome and physical and mental health.  You will be able to buy a gut microbiome test and test your biome ideally at the beginning of the course and again in late January; and when you get your results back, you can request a feedback session with the Research and Medical Directors at the Sourdough School and discover how you have responded.

*please note that there is a recommended shopping list of baking equipment, ingredients and tests that you will advised to purchase in order to fully take part in the course, and these costs will be in addition to your course fees. 

What will I learn?

It would be too limiting to try and list everything covered on the course here, but you will learn how to bake bread and baked goods that support health. Sourdough baking skills include lessons in:

  • Creating, refreshing and maintaining your starter
  • How and why to change your starter into a chocolate or sweet starter
  • Mixing, shaping, scoring and baking techniques
  • Why different flours all behave so differently
  • How to assess and recalibrate your baking
  • How to get a wonderful, open, honeycomb crumb structure
  • The flavour and nutritional properties of heritage grains, including einkorn, emmer, spelt and khorasan
  • How to recognise when your bread is under- or over- proved, and how to rescue over-proved bread
  • What to do when things go wrong with your bakes
  • Why wholegrain matters
  • The differences between roller-milled and stoneground flour
  • The mechanisms to control fermentation, and digestibility
  • How to bake to suit your schedule
  • How milling your own flour increases nutrition and diversity
  • Why your gut microbiome is important
  • How to use up left-over starter to make every day easy

What recipes are included?

There are over 130 recipes on this course (you can pick and choose from the library), and there are guided baking lessons through out the course.  Recipes include:

  • High-hydration sourdough boules
  • Baguettes
  • Sourdough brioche
  • 10-minute sourdough technique
  • Pastries
  • Buns
  • Focaccia
  • Pancakes
  • Waffles
  • Pizza
  • Pasta
  • Cakes
  • Sourdough fizz
  • Cultured butter
  • Pickles, compotes and soups to serve with your bread

Where is the course taught from?

The Certificate  taught online and is run from the Sourdough School. The School is a centre of research and development, set in two-thirds of an acre of organic gardens in Northamptonshire, UK. Vanessa and the team apply nutritional, medical evidence lifestyle evidence to baking and also teach The Diploma in Prescribing baking as Lifestyle Medicine

More details

The science

We apply nutritional, medical and lifestyle evidence to our recipes and techniques for baking bread for optimal health. Our Bread Protocol is supported by the many years of research and development by Vanessa Kimbell and the Sourdough School team. You will learn to bake bread that helps to reduce bloating and balance blood sugar, while also being good for your mental health. Changing your approach to this most basic food will help you understand how sourdough can enhance your gut health, weight management and mental health, and improve the way you feel.

A living syllabus

The course is structured with a week-by-week lesson plan, but there are new recipes, magazine features and tutorials added in real time throughout the year.

A library of resources

You can also use the Club as library of teaching resources and support, as well as simply enjoying the community and content – you will discover a wealth of video tutorials, sourdough recipes and tips and techniques, as well as a glossary. Each recipe is fully referenced with the studies used to create them.

Who does this course appeal to?

The course is suitable for anyone with a passion for baking who wants to learn to bake for others.  Some student just want to learn to bake to share bread with their friends, family or neighbours but Manu on the course are baking for people in their community.

This course always attracts have a amazingly wide range of students, from professional bakers, home bakers and farmers, to a student helping her community in in South Africa learn to manage their blood sugar levels, a student who runs as prison rehabilitation bakery, a chef who runs a charity that teaches people with cancer to eat food that tastes good when taste is altered on chemotherapy.

The baking certificate is also part of the Diploma in Prescribing Baking as Social Prescribing and students also include GPs, nutritionists, dieticians, other healthcare professionals and microbiologists.

Why are the numbers limited?

We provide dedicated support and guidance to our members, and we limit numbers to enure that we allow enough time for Vanessa and the team to do this well.

How does the course work?

The course uses a combination of self-guided learning and live sessions, supported by the forum.  There are lessons, tutorials, recipes, detailed videos and a paced pathway, enabling you to build your skills each week. The recipes progressively become more technically challenging, beginning with sourdough pancakes, flatbreads and tin loaves, and advancing to high-hydration boules.

The course will build your confidence, prioritising understanding and knowledge.

Your last lesson on the course

of the course is being a member of our Sourdough club, and the very last lesson of your course we set the final task for you to continue your learning by supporting and sharing your knowledge with someone you are connected to.

So as you graduate we invite you to enrol in The Sourdough Club for another year and we gift a membership code that we ask that you to give a young baker that you nominate as the final step in your syllabus. It means you can keep baking and learning from your course and you can support a young baker anywhere in the world virtually through the club and the forum – because our connection to each other is the real secret of why sourdough is good for us.

What do I need to prepare before I begin my online Course?

Related products

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    Teaching Diploma in Baking As Lifestyle Medicine

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  • 1 Day Baking as Lifestyle Medicine Workshop April 2023 – applications open February 20232 Day (Copy)

    £199.00
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  • Sourdough School Retreat

    £3,999.00
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  • One To One Student Support Pack

    £2,000.00
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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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