A belated Christmas present
Last Christmas I gave presents that centered around spending quality time with the receiver. The primary motivation was to create memorable experience together with my nearest family members prior to us getting busy with our baby’s arrival in late June. My mom and I were supposed to go to a spa together and my big brother and I should have had dinner at a specific restaurant we’ve talked much about. However, the outburst of Covid-19 made all of these experience-based gifts hard to realize during spring and will have to wait until baby is here. But, recently it was finally possible to realize my father’s gift: attending a sourdough baking masterclass with chef and baker Jesper Gøtz.
Previous experience with sourdough baking
My dad has always baked a lot and has even milled his own flour for the past many years. I would say, his speciality is cold raised wheat buns and bread, as well as the typical danish rye bread. But with sourdough baking techniques developing and becoming increasingly more popular over the past couple of years, I thought he might benefit from getting some new inputs since he is naturally a very curious and motivated learner always eager to improve.
As for myself I had just begun to research and play around with sourdough techniques sometime last year. I had gotten a sourdough from a friend in September and managed to bake a couple of trays of buns, but then the pregnancy nausea kicked in and I couldn’t stand the smell of the sourdough, so it lost its life sometime between October - December.
GØTZ BREAD PROJECTS by Jesper Gøtz
Early December I stumbled upon Jesper’s work on instagram– at that time he had just started hosting tiny sourdough bread workshops in his private home. I knew Jesper peripherally from the danish culinary scene as former souschef at 108 and later as co-founder of Lille Bakery, and was very motivated by the chance to learn from him in such an intimate learning setup.
When I contacted Jesper to buy gift certificates for his workshops he had already out grown his private space and was working behind the scenes on a new and more established workshop space in Raadvad ateliers planning to open up in the beginning of March. Excited and also trying to avoid getting too close to my due date, my dad and I booked some of the earliest dates in March.
But, along came Covid-19 and the need for social distancing – pausing all social activities including the workshop.
Online workshop
As a way of catering to the isolating times Jesper developed an online course which takes you through some of the basics of sourdough baking.
Not knowing when and if it would be possible for me to participate in the physical course before the baby’s arrival, I joined the online course and had immediate great results with my baking. My first sourdough bread ever made even fooled a handful of my girlfriends into thinking I had bought it. I call that a success!
If it sounds like something for you, you can check out the course here
The masterclass
As Covid-19 got under control in Denmark it was responsible enough and thus allowed to again gather in smaller groups around mid May – making the physical course a possibility yet again. So, finally on the 30th of May (with less than a month till due date), my dad and I had the immense joy of five hours of hands-on learning from Jesper in his workshop in Raadvad.
The tenets and outcome of the masterclass
To be very specific about the tenets and learning outcome we acquired the methods to bake a range of delicious breads: a classic sourdough loaf, a traditional Danish rye bread, buns and a sourdough flûte – including everything from how to control fermentation of dough, use of flour, to shaping and baking techniques.
I would say that the masterclass is very much an exclusive hands-on course, where you will learn to bake amazing sourdough bread that tastes and looks just as good as the ones you can buy at high profile bakeries. I haven’t bought a single bread or bun ever since I attended the class. I really enjoyed the fact that the course rests on the key principles of Jespers baking philosophy which centers around hands-on learning in an intimate environment side by side with the “master” with enough time for personal sparring and attention. As I experienced it, Jesper’s baking takes a very calm, relaxed and intuitive approach, not to be mistaken with unstructured or random, which I highly appreciated. In this way all of the complicated measures and kinds of stuck-up ideas of correct sourdough baking are removed and along comes the fun, which allows for it to be integrated in my every day life rather than confined to rare occasions.
Intimate experience with your baking partner
Needless to say, it felt really special to spent this time learning something new along side my dad. Attending courses like this one is not something we’ve done much of before and I could tell it meant a lot to him as well.
More so, he took a lot of new knowledge and methods with him home from the course and were very quick to put it in to practice as he baked a beautiful bread load for his birthday just a couple of days after we attended the course. He was obviously proud and it was heart-warming.
Shaping techniques
Worth mentioning as a final note, you’ll get to take home all the recipes to make everything taught in the class as well as instructions on how to develop your own recipes as you get more and more experienced.
Not to forget the huge bag loaded with all of the baked goods! There will be more than enough to host a dinner party in the evening and a brunch the following day.
