We meet in Burford, a honey-stone village in the Cotswolds boasting a lively main street dotted with pubs, cheese shops and churches.. 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 Prince of Burford, our 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 a proper British Roast, fish and hand-cut chips, salads of fresh vegetables and baskets of sourdough bread.

Enjoy a leisurely breakfast at The Prince 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 of produce, meats, cheeses and baked goods from FarmED and the local area. You’ll have some free time to explore Burford before we head out to the gastro-pub Chequers in Churchill for another modern take on classic pub fare.

Today we explore the powerful role the humble stone plays in baking. 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. For lunch, we return to FarmED where our guide Rich Payne will show you he has many skills. A professional pizza maker, he’ll lead you in a long afternoon of outdoor pizza making with an incredible view and plenty of wine. Rich uses Matthews Cotswold Flour, some of the grain for which is grown at FarmEd. It is also the flour we will use all week in our baking projects. Full from a big late lunch, the evening is yours to explore on your own. We can recommend walking paths to wander or pubs to enjoy.

We’re city bound! After breakfast at The Prince, 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. Then we’ll gather at Honey & Co Daily for a private baking lesson with legendary chefs Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich. Sarit and Itamar are great friends of Milk Street and after we bake, they’ll treat us to  a big family-style mezze-style meal.

Our hands-on baking education begins today. We’ll meet the lead instructors of the National Bakery School, the UK’s oldest baking institute and our guide Sophie (an NBS graduate), for the first of two days of intensive baking. From morning to evening we’ll move between sourdough and quick baking, taking advantage of the long resting and rising times sourdough demands to make quicker cookies, crackers 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. Lunch provided by NBS and the sweets you make will fuel our work throughout the day. After hours 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.

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 and baking with chemical leaveners in addition to wild fermentation. While our sourdough breads bake and cool, we’ll head out to a private lunch at Kaieteur Kitchen – the founder Faye is a highly sought after chef who designs elaborate Guyanese menus for some of London’s busiest people. Back at the NBS, we’ll taste our sourdough loaves and package up any bakes you want to take home. This is another long day of baking and eating, so the evening is yours again to enjoy as you please. After all our baking, you may just want to put your feet up with a glass of wine at the stylish Hoxton.

Notting Hill is fast becoming the London Neighborhood for artisanal baking and today we will experience why. We’ll start with a private tour of the appropriately named Notting Hill Bakery’s production bakery (get ready to try your hand at shaping croissants or other pastries) and then meander through the neighborhood stopping at several small bakeries to sample everything from pastel de nata to kouign-amann. You’ll have time to shop at the famous Portobello Road Market before heading back to the hotel for an afternoon break. That evening we’ll head to Hackney for Uyen Luu’s acclaimed Vietnamese supper club. Over a five-course Vietnamese feast cooked by Uyen and her mother, we’ll take a break from the sourdough bread and toast our week together.