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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Jenny Cooper

Preferred Name: Jenny

Location: United Kingdom

Profession: Home Baker

About Me

I trained as a Home Economist but I cannot work due to my health. I live with ME, broke my neck in 2019 and have joint issues.
Whenever I am able I bake bread for family and friends. Our family all live locally to each other so we share whatever we make or bake.
My favourite way to eat bread is spread with lightly salted cultured butter and a fresh soup. In the mornings I love toasted sourdough with avocado, chilli and eggs.
I have always cooked food from scratch and consider a meal I have made from the freezer as 'cheating'. I am passionate about food, starting with how the table is set, the quality of raw ingredients, how the food is presented, the flavour and sharing of eating of food with others. As a family we have always eaten at least 2 meals a day together at a table. I am passionate about helping others to help themselves, knowledge is power and if I have knowledge then I can pass that knowledge to whoever I come into contact with so they have the power to change their lives.

My Work

I am based in Otford, Kent in the beautiful Darent Valley.

Passionate about Baking as Lifestyle Medicine

I have a personal interest in Baking as a Lifestyle Medicine as I want to support my own health and those I love. I studied Human Biology and have always been interested in how the body functions, so the discovery of the Gut Microbiome was fascinating to me and it joined many of the dots in my health journey.
My gut microbiome was impacted eating a very high sugar diet for 2 years in my professional role as a food selector/taster. I now understand that my gut microbiome will have been out of balance, I was ill bacterial and viral infection, given multiple antibiotics and then became unable to digest many foods. This was over 30 years ago and I started using probiotics before I understood what they were. I was advised not to eat wheat and to follow a high protein diet, but I have always eaten a balanced diet and realised that I could eat some of the bread in France but none of the UK commercial bread.
I want to gain knowledge so that I can make informed choices and I can also spread that knowledge to others.
I feel like Baking as a Lifestyle Medicine brings together all the threads and is explaining many of the decisions I was making because of a 'gut' feel but research had not yet explained.

My Community

I live in an area where many people are busy, house prices are high and many people commute. People might make time to exercise in a strenuous way, but many feel they are too busy to stop to bake bread. Many people have heard of Sourdough but do not understand the 'what, why, where, when or how' about Sourdough.
What makes a good loaf of sourdough bread and what should you eat it with?
Where to get good ingredients?
When people should rejecting poor quality bread and demanding better.
Why should they be eating it and making it?
How they can support their own health by making and/or eating good sourdough.
If people can be educated they can make more informed choice and take more control of their own heath.

How I Will Use The Knowledge

I talk about food all the time and I share the health benefits of sourdough and gut health with everyone I come into contact with, be it doctors who are treating me, friends or random people I bump int, they leave with more knowledge about sourdough. I would love to be able to teach but I realise that my body is not currently in a state for me to do that so I will pass my knowledge on to as many of the next generation as I can.

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Current Modules

  • Diploma

All reasonable care is taken when writing about health aspects of bread, but the information it contains is not intended to take the place of treatment by a qualified medical practitioner. You must seek professional advice if you are in any doubt about any medical condition. Any application of the ideas and information contained on this website is at the reader's sole discretion and risk.

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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