What Actually Happens in a Billy Bread Sourdough Class

I get a version of this question a lot: I bought a starter, I killed it, what did I do wrong. And the honest answer is usually nothing dramatic. Most people are not missing a technique. They are missing a reference point. They have never seen properly fermented dough in person, so they have nothing to compare their own bowl to.

That is really what the class is for.

The short version

It runs about two and a half to three hours, at my place in Newbury Park. Small groups, because there is only one of me and one kitchen. You leave with a live starter, a banneton, a printed guide, and a much clearer idea of what you are looking at.

Why there are three doughs going at once

This is the part that makes the difference, and it is why I do not just film a video.

When you come in, I have dough at three different stages already going. One that is barely started, one in the middle of bulk fermentation, and one that is ready. You get to put your hands in all three. Within about ten minutes most people can tell them apart by feel, and that is a thing that is genuinely difficult to learn from a book, because every book describes it with words like “billowy” and “alive,” which mean nothing until you have felt it.

Once you know what ready feels like, you stop needing the timer. That is the actual skill. Everything else is just following steps.

What we do with our hands

You mix. You do a set of folds. You shape, which is the part that most people are quietly doing wrong at home, and it is much easier to fix in person in about ninety seconds than in any amount of written explanation. You score a loaf, and you find out that scoring is harder than it looks on Instagram and that the blade angle matters more than the pattern.

We talk about the timeline while things rest, because a sourdough schedule is the real barrier for most people, not the dough. Once you understand that you are working around the dough rather than the other way round, the whole thing stops feeling like a second job.

What you take home

• A live starter, from mine, which has been going for years
• A banneton, so your loaf has somewhere to proof that is not a mixing bowl lined with a dish towel
• A bench scraper and a dough scraper
• A printed guide with the schedule and the ratios, so you are not trying to reconstruct it from memory on a Tuesday
• Practice dough, and a finished loaf

Who it is for

Complete beginners are fine. Genuinely. If you have never touched a starter you are in a slightly better position than someone who has been fighting one for six months, because you have nothing to unlearn.

It is also good for the middle group: people who are getting bread that is edible but flat, or dense, or fine on the inside and pale on the outside. That is almost always fermentation timing or shaping, and both are much faster to sort out in a kitchen than over email.

People come from around the Conejo Valley, and a fair few from further out in Ventura County and the valley. It has turned into one of my favorite parts of this whole thing, partly because I like teaching and partly because I get to hand somebody a jar of my starter and know it is going to end up on a counter in Oak Park making bread I will never see.

When

Classes run roughly monthly and they are small, so they tend to fill. The class page has the next date, and if it says sold out, get on the bread list and I will let you know when the next one opens up before I announce it anywhere else.