Milk Street on the Road: Baking Intensive in the Cotswolds & London -

Day 1

Arrive and meet your fellow travelers and guide

Step off the train and into Ascott-under-Wychwood, a honey-stone village in the Cotswolds. Just two hours from London, the Cotswolds enjoy a very different pace of life, one centered around agriculture, small towns, contemporary innovations and great food. Get settled in your room at The Swan, the 16th century inn we call home for three nights and then meet the group for our welcome dinner right in the pub below. We’ll walk through the week’s itinerary, answer your questions, and enjoy a hearty meal of local ingredients presented imaginatively. Expect the famous Swan cheeseburger, fish and hand-cut chips, salads of fresh vegetables and baskets of sourdough bread. Our baking teachers Elaine Boddy and Sophie Carey as well as Matthews Cotswold Flour owner Bertie Matthews will join us.

Day 2

Soil: Immerse yourself in the genesis of all great baking

Enjoy a leisurely breakfast at The Swan before we learn about the genesis of all great sourdough bread: soil. During a full-day immersive experience at the nonprofit FarmED, we’ll learn about wheat growing practices and their effects on your morning loaf. We’ll tour the farm, get our hands dirty in the fields, meet some lovely and important worms and compare wheat grown via different farming practices – all fueled by ample tea, coffee and a seasonal lunch. At the end of our day, Scott Deley will give us a dough-to-pie wood-fired pizza lesson on the farm. Scott uses Matthews Cotswold Flour, some of the grain for which is grown at FarmED. It is also the flour we’ll learn how to mill tomorrow and use all week in our baking projects. We’ll be full after our pizza party and the evening is yours to enjoy as you like. We can recommend walks, pubs, shops and more.

Day 3

Stone: Turn grain into flour at an 8th-generation mill

Today is all about the stone. We’ll spend our morning at Matthews Cotswold Flour Mill, where eighth-generation owner Bertie Matthews will lead us in an interactive learning tour of the property. Bertie will teach us how flour is milled on traditional stones and via more modern technologies, demonstrate why farming techniques affect the milling process, and show us how different wheats produce different flours. We’ll also learn about the local and national grain economy, a system Matthews is actively working to support and improve. We’ll put your learning to the test during a hands-on flour fun quiz and evaluation. Our learning complete, we’ll drop you in a charming local village to find a late lunch on your own and spend some time walking through this picturesque Cotswolds setting. That evening we gather at Chequers in Churchill, a highly acclaimed gastro pub featuring local ingredients and, you guessed it, sourdough bread in another beautiful Cotswold village.

Day 4

Travel to London and feast at a private dinner

We’re city bound! After breakfast at The Swan, we say goodbye to the Cotswolds and travel to London via private transfer. We’ll check into the Hoxton Southwark, a chic urban hotel walking distance from Tate Modern, London Bridge, Borough Market and our baking school. We’ll have a few hours this afternoon to visit a museum or take a walk in a park. For the willing, we’ve designed a bakery scavenger hunt that will take you to some of the best bakeries in town. We’ll gather that evening at Uyen Luu’s private Supper Club in Hackney. We’re taking a break from sourdough to indulge in Uyen’s five-course Vietnamese feast. You won’t miss the bread.

Day 5

Sourdough & Sweet: Feed your starters, make cookies. Repeat

Our hands-on baking education begins today. We’ll meet Elaine and Sophie at the National Bakery School, the UK’s oldest baking institute. From morning to evening we’ll move between sourdough with Elaine and quick baking with Sophie, taking advantage of the long resting and rising times sourdough demands to make quicker cookies and yeasted breads. Everything we make will use the same flours we saw start as grain at FarmEd and milled at Matthews, completing our field-to-oven education. To gild the lily, resident chocolatier Kieran Slator will also help us understand how to best incorporate chocolate into our bakes – sourdough and yeasted, savory and sweet. Lunch provided by NBS and the sweets you make will fuel our work throughout the day. After a long day on our feet, the evening is yours to enjoy as you like. Book tickets to a play, take an evening stroll or enjoy a glass of wine, cocktail or a pint at one of London’s many bars.

Day 6

Sourdough & Sweet: Turn yesterday’s starters into today’s loaves

Over morning tea, we’ll review the day’s plan, which includes learning several methods for shaping and baking the sourdough loaves we started yesterday with Elaine and scone and hot-cross-bun baking with Sophie. One of the advantages of being in a professional baking school is the variety of home and professional-grade equipment we’ll have to use, and we’ll take time to talk about and use it all. The scones we make early will become our mid-morning snack, served with fresh jam and cream and we’ll end our day with our hot crossed buns and a parade of our freshly baked sourdough loaves. This is another long day of baking and eating, so the evening is yours again to enjoy as you please. You may just want to put your feet up with a glass of wine at the stylish Hoxton.

Day 7

Get personalized instruction with Elaine and Sophie

Curious about sprouted rye flour or building a 100% whole wheat starter? Want to update your chocolate chip cookies with whole grains or toasted flour? Need help with your scoring technique or curious about the life of a professional baker? Sign up for a 1:1 tutorial with Elaine or Sophie (or, time allowing, with both!). We’ve set up dedicated time for you to meet with our two expert baking teachers and get their help with your personal baking projects. Before and after, the day is yours to explore London before we meet at Honey & Co Daily. Honey & Co founders Sarit and Itamar are great friends of Milk Street and we’ll get to tour their bakery where they make traditional and contemporary Middle Eastern cakes, pastries and breads for their four restaurants. We stay at Honey & Co to celebrate our week together with a big family-style multi-course dinner.