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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sourdough pizza

Issue 14: the Pizza Issue

I think everybody likes pizza. It’s because it’s so personal – you can get creative and add toppings to suit your own tastes. And there are so many toppings to choose from… as many different toppings as there are ingredients in the world.

I’m often surprised at how this one food can be so different around the world. Maybe I’ve been spoiled. I have an Italian mother and grew up eating classic Italian pizzas. More recently, I’ve spent a lot of time in Rome with Gabriele Bonci, the man who is considered to be the Michelangelo of pizza. What I’ve learned through this is that there are two kinds of pizza: good pizza, and really great pizza!

sourdough pizza

This Month in Sourdough

This month, I’m sharing my base recipe and techniques for making an ambient sourdough pizza. It’s not the only approach to making pizza, but it is one that’s easy, inexpensive and absolutely delicious. Included with our tutorials is a brilliant set of videos by the fantastic baker, Adam Pagor. Adam has shared his extensive knowledge and experience with us and provided lots of tips on baking the perfect pizza. I hope you’ll enjoy these videos.

We’ve started off our series of summer pizzas with the classic Margherita, which features our delicious raw pizza sauce. As Adam points out, using a simple, intense tomato sauce and seriously good-quality mozzarella and basil will make a fantastic difference to the finished pizza. We’ve also shared our top tips for getting the most from your sourdough pizzas to really take them to the next level.

Collaboration

This is perhaps an opportunity for me to highly recommend Neal’s Yard cheeses, a great option if you’d like to try some fantastic British cheeses on your pizzas. If you can’t get to one of their shops in London, they do offer online shopping. When you make your own pizzas, it’s an opportunity not just to feed your friends and family, but to explore locally produced ingredients. Perhaps you will be able to source flour from a local mill, or discover some unusual cheeses. We’ll certainly be featuring some of the Neal’s Yard cheeses in the coming months, and I would highly recommend having a look at the Dairy Box subscription they offer.

Chat with Dmitry Alexeev

I hope everybody enjoyed my chat with Dmitry Alexeev on Instagram live. If you missed it, you can catch up through the Sourdough Club Instagram.

Next Month's Recipe

Next month’s recipe is more pizza – we’re going to be concentrating on different toppings over the summer, so you can look forward to enjoying a lot of pizza.

Shopping List

Over the summer, there will be recipes for pizza bianca, pizza Fiorentina, pizza puttanesca and pepperoni pizza, so stock up on essentials like tomato sauce, cheeses and salami.

This Month's Competition

This month, we have teamed up with Gozney to give you the chance to win a Roccbox pizza oven, along with a 12-month membership for the Sourdough Club. Find out more about this amazing giveaway over on our competition page.

A Conversation with Tom Gozney

Guest: Tom Gozney
Watch it here: https://www.instagram.com/sourdoughclub/

Tom Gozney, inventor of the Roccbox Pizza Oven, joined me on our Instagram live earlier today. We talked about how his quest for the perfect home-cooked pizza led him to creating his pizza oven, which is now our favourite way to cook sourdough pizzas here at the school.

Product of the Month

One thing I think is very important in getting the texture you want from a pizza base is creating a balance between the amount of water in your dough and the heat in your oven. Domestic ovens need to be heated to their highest possible temperature. Pizza ovens are a great option if you are regularly baking your own. We highly recommend the Gozney Roccbox Pizza Oven. Earlier this afternoon I talked with Tom Gozney, the inventor of the Roccbox, about all things pizza over on the Sourdough Club Instagram live.

Find out more about Gozney Roccbox Pizza Oven

Here’s to a summer of pizzas! Don't forget to share your bakes with us using #sourdoughclub and #iamamember.

Happy baking!

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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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