Milk Street Digital Class: Three-Part Sourdough Baking Intensive with Peter Reinhart

What’s on the Menu: 
Care and keeping of your sourdough starter
French Baguettes and Bâtards
Marbled rye sandwich loaf
Sourdough Bagels
Pane Siciliano 
Irish Stout Sandwich Loaf with Cooked Barley
Plus, sourdough discard inspiration recipes

It’s never too late to become a great home sourdough baker—or to deepen your knowledge, increase your confidence and boost your creativity. Through this pre-recorded three-part series with guest teacher Peter Reinhart, a baking instructor at Johnson & Wales and author of “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice,” your relationship with sourdough baking will be transformed. 

This series is made up of three sessions; you’ll received recordings of all of them when you complete your purchase. 

Our first session focuses on how to take good care of a healthy, strong sourdough starter that generates great flavor and reliable leavening. We use your starter to make two essential French breads: a baguette and a bâtard. Both of them employ specific methods to shape, score and bake successfully, which Peter shows you in slow motion and at full speed. You’ll learn ingenious ways to generate steam in your oven—essential to good rise and the development of a proper crust—without spending a fortune. And we make super-quick batches of discard waffles using your starter, proving that it can do much more than make loaves of bread. 

We start our second session with an introduction to one of Peter’s favorite homemade versions of one notoriously uninspiring grocery-store bread: marbled rye. When you taste a great marbled rye, you’ll be ruined for the storebought stuff forever. We also make a batch of sourdough bagels, including their unique shaping, boiling and topping techniques. Your challenge between watching session two and session three will be to continue the striking visual theme and try your hand at Peter’s swirled loaves, which combine Peter’s go-to dough recipe with either cheddar cheese or plenty of butter and cinnamon.

In the final session, we get into truly advanced concepts for the confident home bakers you will have become. Peter explains why his favorite Irish stout bread doesn’t actually use stout beer; instead, roasted barley powder and cooked barley give this “porridge loaf” extraordinary flavor and texture. We also make a classic pane siciliano, which gets its unique texture from a generous amount of semolina. Both of these doughs are exceptionally high-hydration, which can make them frustrating to work with—but not when you have this much sourdough baking practice under your belt. 

What's Included: You will receive a .zip file that includes the cooking school video as well as PDFs of the recipe instructions.