residential weekend course making bread, butter & cheese

venue: Redfield Community, Bucks

This residential weekend course starts on Friday evening learning about cheesemaking with Judy King, who milks goats and makes cheese on a small commercial scale on her own farm. Judy also makes cow and sheep cheese and teaches how to make them.

On Saturday, you will have an opportunity to make simple hard and soft cheese, ricotta and acid curd, plus butter; you will also find out what hygiene precautions are needed, where to buy starter and rennet and how to tell when the curd is ready for the next stage. Except for hard cheese, the equipment you need is available in an average well-equipped kitchen, so home cheesemaking can become a fascinating hobby. If you are interested in making cheese on a larger scale, this day will act as a useful introduction to the craft.

On Sunday we will be looking at bread making, with Kath Hallewell, who bakes bread for a living in Stroud.

In this part of the course you will be making a range of delicious breads by hand and from scratch.  Both savoury and sweet recipes will be explored, with a focus on long fermentation processes that improve flavour, texture and keeping qualities of a loaf.  You will be returning home with plenty of goodies to impress family and friends with!  If time allows, we may even get to bake off some of our loaves in a wood fired oven - including a sourdough loaf, which tases gorgeous from a wood-fired oven.

The aim of the day is to send you home with a thorough understanding of how to make a fantastic loaf of bread every single time you bake.

dates: see 'book online' below

more on baking bread           more on cheesemaking