Student Sourdough Baking Project

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Cristina on 17 Mar 2019 at 16:55

Our Sourdough Bread Baking Project was a resounding success!!

A little background ... I received a donation from the KAF "Bake for Good" kids program.  But I put a little twist on it.  I had my advanced biology students create their own sourdough starter as part of our cell respiration unit.  The plan was to get the starters going and then bake bread with it.  But as a new sourdough baker myself, I came on this forum to ask for help on just about everything! The biggest challenge was that I was only with the students for about an hour each day and they would only be have access to their bread every 24 hours.  But, we worked it out! I am so thankful for everyone's tips and advice!  Here's the link to that original thread:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/59346/students-baking-sourdough-please-help-teacher-out

The students had SO MUCH FUN with this project. As you can see from the first picture, they named their starters and one group named theirs "Kanye Yeast". When he saw how nice his loaf of bread came out, he exclaimed, "I AM SO PROUD OF KANYE!"  Hahahaha!

They were not the prettiest loaves of bread you've ever seen, nor did they have the best crumb. But they tasted darn good and they were just beaming with pride. After they were baked, we had a "Bread Party" ... We had 2 toasters going and several slicing stations.  Students brought in all sorts of toppings and we shared it with other teachers in our school.  Everyone was so impressed!  Here are some photos of our journey! (I forgot to take photos of some stuff like shaping the loaves).

 

The smiles on the students say it all. What an outstanding success! I can’t imagine how your class could have turned out better.

I hope there are many more bread classes in your future

Danny

Hello: I just came across your post now (3/17/19 @9.05 p.m. )  Your students ' faces said it all. What a nice teacher you are!  I bet your students love the challenge and get to eat good bread too. Great job. 

   

And the bread looks better than some of my first loaves from decades ago.

Plus there is really no such thing as bad warm bread.

I remember seeing your post asking for help. Glad to see it turned out well.

When I took biology in high school in grade 11, I remember one of our experiments fondly. We swabbed various surfaces and then agar and incubated the culture. The highest count resulted from under the fingernails (didn't think about this back then, but of all the swabbed things, fingernails probably had the closest temperature to the incubator). Might've gotten into bread years earlier if I had your lesson instead! I had a great time in biology though, and it's great to see your students having the same!

to combine curriculum (biology) with life skill (baking).  I'll bet this is a lesson they will remember for the rest of their lives, as well as the cool teacher who set it up for them.

Paul

Cristina,  first,  congrats for pulling it off, it looks like you did a great job.  I don't see any mixers in the photos, if all the kneading was done by hand, kudos to you for that.  Finally, while I am sure all the bread tasted great,  I also saw some loaves with some pretty good oven spring - which is pretty hard to nail ,  especially with sourdough, so you should be proud of your instructional skills.   On the other post you mentioned having some issues with the time lapse video.  I actually have never done it myself, though others here have and posted some amazing videos.    On top of their education,  I hope you might have planted a seed that in a few years will spring a home baker or two.   

 

PS,  I saw you have them using scales to measure ingredients,  bonus credits for that.  When a new poster comes along saying they are having problems with a recipe, it is typical to ask whether they weighed the ingredients, and if not, getting a scale is often the first recommendation. 

Hello, I am a Family Consumer Science teacher. I want to do your "sourdough lesson" with my students. If you still have the process your students followed, will you please share it with me?

If you have a lesson plan and are willing to share, I've been wanting my senior commercial cooking students to build their own starters and then create something with them.  I have them for an hour per day and am trying to see if there is a way they can do this without me having to feed multiple starters.

Contact Barb Alpern at King Arthur Baking Co. She's been working with high school teachers to develop this very type of program. But to be honest, it hasn't worked out too well to have the students making their own. As you can imagine limited class hours and preoccupied teenagers aren't a good mix with the unpredictable nature of sourdough creation.

I recommend that the teacher do the creation part as a demo, or at least as a backup if students want to try their own in parallel, and when it's ready, build it large enough for everyone to take a portion of that to do their individual baking projects. If everyone uses the same starter at the same stage, they're more likely to get similar results within the same time and make class go smoother.

I also recommend that you run through the whole process from creation to baking at least once to see how long each stage is likely to take and what hurdles need to be overcome. A sort of dress rehersal.

Good luck :)
dw