Rye Sourdough Bread Making Masterclass

Try buying a proper loaf of dark rye in Sydney.You'll find plenty of pale, soft supermarket loaves with "rye" on the label and almost no rye inside. Now and then, you'll find the real thing at a specialty bakery - dense, dark, properly sour, twelve dollars a loaf, and sold out by ten in the morning.If you grew up with German, Polish, Baltic, Scandinavian, or Jewish bread on the table, you already know exactly what I mean. You've been trying to describe that loaf to people for years.In this class, you'll make it yourself.Here's what nobody tells you about rye: almost everything you know about bread stops working. Rye has very little of the protein that makes wheat dough stretchy, so there's no windowpane, no springy ball, nothing to knead. It drinks far more water than wheat flour and handles more like thick clay. It ferments faster and turns sour sooner. Treated like wheat dough, it fails. That's why most home bakers try rye once, pull a brick out of the oven, and never try again.Treated like rye, it's honestly easier than a sourdough boule. Fewer steps. No shaping tension to master. No scoring nerves. It simply asks you to understand what it is.That's what this morning is for.And because rye bakes faster than a big wheat loaf, we do something here that no other bread class in Sydney does: we bake mini rye loaves during the class, and you eat yours warm, in the room, before you go home. Not a sample of mine — yours, out of the oven, with butter and good salt. You'll also shape a full-size rye loaf to take with you.I've been baking sourdough for over twenty years, and the starter you'll work with has been alive in my kitchen for sixteen of them. Rye was the bread that taught me the most because it refused to behave. Everything I learned the slow way, you'll learn in four hours.What you'll learn:

• Why rye behaves nothing like wheat - in plain English, with no food-science lecture and exactly what to do differently
• How to build and keep a rye starter, alongside your white one or instead of it
• How to handle a dough closer to clay than bread dough, without panicking and adding flour (the mistake that ruins most first attempts)
• How to read the ferment. Rye moves fast and the window is narrower than wheat. I'll show you what to look for baking in a tin for a dense, even, properly moist crumb that keeps for a week
• The rule that saves most first rye loaves: why you must not slice it for 24 hours, and what happens when you do
• How to flavour it, and the sweet-sour Baltic style that surprises everyone

Who this class is for:Complete beginners are genuinely welcome. This isn't an advanced class — it's a different grain, and in some ways a more forgiving one. You don't need to have baked sourdough before.If you have baked sourdough, this is the natural next thing to learn. Rye is where flavour lives, and it's higher in fibre and lower GI than white flour, which matters to a lot of the people who come through my studio.Five - six seats. You'll have your hands in dough the entire time, and there's no question too basic — my students will tell you I mean that.Ready to bake the bread you've been missing? Book your seat at Hankerie in Ryde and come and get your hands dirty.

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Save $10 per guest, when you book 20+ days before a session

• One full-size rye sourdough loaf to take home to bake the next day
• Mini rye loaves baked in class - eat one warm, take the rest with you
• A jar of my own active mature starter to keep culturing at home
• My printed rye recipe booklet, yours to keep
• Freshly baked bread, butter, and the things that belong with rye to share over the morning

Bonus #1: 20% off the Hankerie Starter Tool Kit for attendees Read more details