The Sourdough Club

Prescribing Baking as Lifestyle Medicine

We teach a proven, evidence-based approach to baking that supports improvement to both physical and mental health. Join the club and our team will teach you to bake eat and share extraordinary bread, as Lifestyle Medicine.
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Nancy Silverton

Issue 30: The Sourdough Club Magazine ‘Sourdough Inspiration’ – Nancy Silverton

It is Sourdough September across the world this month, and to celebrate this we have an exclusive interview for you by Xanthe Clay of the Telegraph newspaper with the baking legend that is Nancy Silverton.

September also means the start of our 2022–2023 Nutrition & Digestibility of Bread Online Diploma and Bake for Health Certificate, which starts on the 22nd of the month. We always have a last-minute flurry of bookings, so if you are considering joining, please do look at both courses and make sure that, if eligible, you apply for a bursary or scholarship – this is the last chance this year.

Nancy Silverton
You can’t miss Nancy Silverton. Her red lipstick and owl-like spectacle frames are signature in themselves, a food lover’s Iris Apfel. But we see another side of Silverton every time we slice a loaf of airy sourdough or crack open a perfect baguette. With her groundbreaking bakery Brea, she’s credited with bringing artisan bread to the mainstream.

Silverton was brought up in Southern California, and enrolled in Sonoma State University to read Political Science, but dropped out in her senior year, opting instead to study at Cordon Bleu in London. A stint at restaurants including Wolfgang Puck’s Spago followed, before she headed back over the pond, this time to France to study bread-making at Ecole Lenôtre Culinary Institute in Plasir.

She opened Brea in 1989, using a homemade sourdough starter to make baguettes, rosemary olive oil loaf, olive bread, country white, whole wheat and dark Normandy rye. She sold it in 2001 for $6 million, only to lose the money in a Madoff investment.

Her restaurant Campanile, founded with her then-husband Mark Peel, had opened in 1990, but it was Pizzeria Mozza, Osteria Mozza and Pizzette that cemented her reputation. The idea was inspired by a conversation with legendary chef Jeremiah Tower over lunch at her house in Umbria, when he told her about Obika, an Italian restaurant that focused on one ingredient: mozzarella. The obsession with fine ingredients, detail and layering flavour on to an apparently bland base struck a chord with Nancy, and Pizzeria Mozza opened in LA in 2007, with a branch launching in London last year.

Vanessa Kimbell is among Silverton’s fans. ‘It’s inspiring to see a woman pushing the boundaries. When I was training in the 1980s and 1990s, it was rare to meet other women bakers,’ she told me. ‘Bakers owe much to people like Nancy, who built the foundations of how we bake bread. Her work underpins it.”

I asked Silverton some questions about her life in bread: she answered in typically acerbic style.

What’s so special about bread?

‘Is this a trick question? That’s like asking Rembrandt “What’s so special about a canvas?” or Lewis Hamilton “What’s so special about asphalt?” Bread is the foundation of food for me.  And, for the record,  I am not comparing myself to Rembrandt, although I am a far better baker than him.’

Did you eat good bread as a child? 

‘No,’ she says. For Nancy, growing up in the fifties and sixties, bread came from the supermarket, not a fancy baker, and certainly wasn’t made at home. Eating happened round the table, with her mother, a writer who wrote for the TV show General Hospital, and her lawyer father, and the focus was on the conversations about politics or writing. ‘The food that we were eating was completely secondary,’ she told the LA Times.

When did you bake your first bread? 

‘Spago in 1986.’ The first sourdough was the same year, a dinner loaf.  Successful? ‘It went well.’ So, were there any baking hurdles you had to get over? ‘Of course. Too many too list. Countless loaves lost and never to be recovered.’ She told the New York Times in 2011, ‘I didn’t know about adapting recipes. They were all failures. I had to start from the beginning, a tablespoon of this and a teaspoon of that. It took hundreds of tries.’

Any advice for new bakers?

‘Love baking. Do not bake if you do not love to bake. There will be many failures. Countless. But that is part of the beauty of baking. When it gets better. And better and better, and then, then, you get it! It’s wonderful.’

What is your favourite flour to use?

‘This is a question that needs an answer with a prefix. If I had one restaurant in one city, likely I would mention some small flour that is produced near this mythical restaurant. But, since I have restaurants just about all around the world – from California, to London, to soon, hopefully, Singapore and the Middle East, with more to come – I need to have a flour I can get to these places. I need to have some serious consistency in dough. Therefore, I will say King Arthur.’

Any particular mill or grower you’d like to give a shoutout to?

‘Like I said above, I need consistency from one of my restaurants to the other, so no particular mill or grower. Other than the widely available King Arthur.’

Describe the spot where your first bakery shop was, and the look/atmosphere.

‘624 S. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles. It was in the building that would house my husband at the time and my restaurant Campanile. It was in a bell tower-ish building, hence the name, that was built in 1929 for Charlie Chaplin. I was there so much we lived there. I mean it. We lived there. For a few years.’

nancy silvertonHow about Pizzeria Mozza and Pizzette?

‘Pizzeria Mozza is on the busy Los Angeles corner of Highland and Melrose,  about two miles south of the heart of Hollywood.  It’s a corner where there is nearly always traffic and honking horns. It’s a lively place. It will turn 16 years old this year. Pizzette is in a former newspaper building and it has a good feel, too – sleek.’

What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time?

‘Depends how far back in time you’re talking about. If you said I could go back to July 1994, I would say to myself, “Make Jeff Bezos an offer for Amazon he couldn’t refuse.” If you said I could go back only to tomorrow, I would say to myself, “Don’t take the 405, take La Cienega.”’

Do you ever regret not finishing your degree in political science? (I dropped out of university, and ask myself this question.)

‘Not lately.’

What’s on your playlist as you bake?

‘There are too many songs and recording artists on it to list. But just a smattering: Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, Drake, Cat Stevens, John Coltrane, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan.’

OR do you prefer podcasts?

‘NO, I prefer music.’

What is the secret to a great grilled cheese sandwich?

‘Quality ingredients and paying attention.’

Interview by Xanthe Clay

You can find and follow Nancy here:

Restaurants:

Nancy is the co-owner of Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, Newport Beach and now London, as well as Osteria Mozza, Mozza2Go and chi SPACCA in Los Angeles.

Books: View all of Nancy Silverton’s books here

Instagram: @nancysilverton

View all previous editions of our Sourdough Club Magazine

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All reasonable care is taken when writing about health aspects of bread, but the information it contains is not intended to take the place of treatment by a qualified medical practitioner. You must seek professional advice if you are in any doubt about any medical condition. Any application of the ideas and information contained on this website is at the reader's sole discretion and risk.

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A NEW APPROACH

👉🏻 For the past 3 years we’ve been working on something incredible … prescription sourdough bread making courses for our @sourdoughclub members 

📈We have had amazing advances in healthcare, but there is no pill to cure poor diet. The best medicine is prevention via a healthy lifestyle, and many studies have shown that people who eat healthily and exercise regularly sleep better, have less anxiety and depression, have more energy, and lower their risk of chronic illness overall.

🙌 Vanessa’s work on Bread & the Impact on the Gut Microbiome has been turned into something extraordinary. Prescription bread-making courses as a lifestyle intervention, and the Bread Protocol we teach here is designed to address the way you live, exploring behaviour related to nutrition, physical activity, stress management, sleep, social support and environmental exposures. These courses are 12 weeks long, and designed to maintain health and prevent disease not just in individuals bit in patients and populations, so we have 2 ways to enrol on a course: 

1️⃣ SOCIAL PRESCRIPTION 
If your doctor or healthcare practitioner is one of  our Sourdough School graduates and they feel that this bread-making prescription course is something that will improve your health, then they may can prescribe the course for you as a social prescription free.

2️⃣ SELF PRESCRIPTION 
You can self-prescribe these courses by enrolling yourself on a course to improve your health and wellbeing.

📰 If you are interested in learning more about the prescription courses then please sign up to the newsletters as we will be announcing their launch over the coming weeks and months. 

@vanessakimbell
@drmiguelmateas 
@dralexdavidson 
@dksherratt 

#lifestylemedicine #preventativemedicine #systemschange #socialprescribingday #socialprescribing
🧘 LAST ORDERS TODAY 🧘 I’m prepping the st 🧘 LAST ORDERS TODAY 🧘

I’m prepping the starters to post out on Thursday.

I was thinking why sourdough all these years? I guess it’s because is alive… it’s a culture of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria. We might like to think we can control it, but we can’t control everything. Things change when we bake. The flour changes, the ambient temperature changes, or something happens during the middle of the day and your baking routine changes.

We can be very critical of ourselves. Starting the day by looking in the mirror and criticising our physical appearance. Or looking at something we’ve done or said and overanalysing it. Often, without realising, some of us can be incredibly negative.
It’s the same with bread. I notice that many people are self-depreciating and, while they aspire to make beautiful loaves, they have a distinct lack of acceptance that creating a really aesthetically stunning loaves takes time. It’s an art. It takes many years to be able to understand the nuances of each flour and how each one behaves to create bread. There is no instant fix. And I wouldn’t want there to be.

If you want an instant fix, go out and buy a packet mix – that way the work is done for you. In sourdough there’s no instant fix. That is the whole point of it really. That’s why we celebrate when we do make those incredibly beautiful loaves. And what you are actually celebrating isn’t high levels of gluten or high levels of hydration. It’s that person’s ability to have understood and connected to the flour, to their environment, to the yeast, to the timings and rhythm and everything coming together to create something that is joyous to eat.

To learn more about what we do here at The Sourdough Club and the courses we teach, follow the link in the bio to read 

#mindfulbaking #sourdough #sourdoughsclub #bread #sourdoughlove #sourdoughlover #naturalleavened #leavening #realbread #breadmaking #bakebread #makebread #makerealbread #sourdoughstories #bakingforlove #bakingtherapy #sourdoughbaking
🧂 ARTISAN INGREDIENTS FOR ARTISAN BREAD 🧂 A 🧂 ARTISAN INGREDIENTS FOR ARTISAN BREAD 🧂

Artisan bread starts with artisan ingredients. Honest ingredients that have been grown and harvested with respect for both the people and the earth. The flour has to be organic, the water chlorine free and the yeast has to be sourdough, and so it follows that the salt has to be similarly harvested with principles that are in synergy with our own. Salt making was, up until the industrial revolution, an artisanal craft. Much like bread making salt is also an artisan product that has been industrialised, so we use a hand-harvested salt in our bread.
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In our shop, we sell unrefined salt specifically for sourdough - Natural salt contains all of its trace minerals and other elements that are naturally a part of its origin. Our salt is not exposed to chemicals and does not contain anti-caking agents.
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Follow the link in our bio to our shop, where you can find the best artisan ingredients for your bread! 
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#artisan #salt #iamamember #sourdoughclub #sourdough #sourdoughbread #naturallyleavened #realbread #sourdoughbaking #bakingbread #breadmaking #homebakedbread #sourdoughlove
DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN ONLINE SHOP & CAN PURCHASE DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN ONLINE SHOP & CAN PURCHASE MY WHITE SOURDOUGH STARTER?
(with worldwide delivery)
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I have several sourdough starters but The French white starter is one that I have been using since I was 11 years old and originates in the bakery I grew up baking within France. It takes a bit longer to reach it’s peak and is generally slower and sweeter, and much more forgiving of being neglected for a week, so the one I recommend for beginners. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
We have verbal confirmation that the starter originated over 115 years ago and If you swipe right in the video you can listen to me chatting to one of the older residents of the village confirming that bakery did not shut during the war either .. & it has been maintained ever since... it’s a lovely story. Although the microbes double every 20 – 30 minutes when they are refreshed ... so it is either over a century old or 30 minutes old depending on how you want to look at it. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
You can purchase a pot of my starter, along with a grey moon kilner jar & a mini video course on looking after your starter. 
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TAP THE PICTURE TO SHOP.
 
Swipe right to see the amazing video of the French bakery where the starter originated from @vanessakimbell has been baking with this starter for over 20 years … and first baked almost 40 years ago with it …#romantic 
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#breadbosses #breadporn #flourwatersalt #breadtalk #bread #breadstagram #sourdough #sourdoughschool #bread #sourdoughlove #sourdoughlover #naturalleavened #leavening #levain #realbread #breadmaking #bakebread #makebread #makerealbread #learntobakebread #breadmakingclass #sourdoughstories #bakingforlove #bakingtherapy #sourdoughbaking #bannetons #bakery
🌾 BARLEY - DO AS THE ROMANS DO 🌾
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Oats & Barley. We love both, but this week we have been diving to barley with our students, learning about nutritional value, what role plays in supporting key butyrate producers for gut health and why gladiators were call 'barley-eaters'!
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And naturally, we will be talking about how we can incorporate barley into our baking and our botanical blends.
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To find out more, become a student of the Sourdough Club! 
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#grains #wheat #einkorn #emmer #spelt #heritagegrains #freshlymilledflour #milledflour #milling #freshlymilled #botanicalblend #fromscratch #unrefined #mockmillproud #mockmill
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