Twelve weeks at the bench, one bread a week. Take each loaf apart — what the flour is doing, what the fermentation is doing, what the oven is doing — then bake it and find out whether the theory held.
What you will do
Most weeks you carry in something you fermented at home — a poolish (flour and water left to ferment overnight with a trace of yeast), a levain (a spoonful of sourdough starter built up the day before), a whole dough out of the fridge — and the Bake itself is shaping, baking and arguing about the result. You weigh in grams, write every formula in bakers' percentages, take the temperature of the dough instead of guessing at it, and keep a log of timings and room temperature, so that when the croissants leak butter onto the tray in week 10 you can name the decision that caused it. Each Bake has a lecture to read first: scoring and steam before the baguettes, the fold schedule before the ciabatta. Almost every loaf is cut open and tasted before you leave. The rye is not allowed near a knife for two days, and the brioche goes home raw in your fridge.
The order is deliberate. Lean doughs first, then the wet ones, then a starter you feed yourself, then a bagel dough stiff enough to fight back, then butter and eggs, then lamination, then a banana bread raised with soda, and last a flatbread cooked in seconds on a hot surface rather than in the air of an oven. Three bake-offs carry the marks: lean doughs in week 4 (20%), fermentation in week 8 (30%), and a showpiece you propose at Bake 11 and bake a fortnight after teaching ends (50%). Each is judged on a loaf the markers cut in front of you and on the notes that produced it, never on a photograph. You leave with twelve Bakes logged and formulas in percentages, which means you can scale any of them to the tin you actually own.
Who it is for
A level-3 course that assumes you can cook and assumes nothing about your baking. If you can follow a recipe and read a thermometer you have enough to start, and week 1 begins with flour, water, salt and yeast in a tin. If you already bake sourdough most weekends, weeks 1 to 3 will be revision and weeks 9 to 12 will not be.
You need a kitchen of your own as well, because dough does not wait for a timetable. The kit is a digital scale that reads to 1 gram, a plastic scraper, an instant-read probe, a 900 g loaf tin, a lidded cast-iron pot big enough to hold a 900 g loaf, and fridge space for an overnight retard — the dough finishing its rise in the cold, not on the counter. A banneton (a cloth-lined basket that holds a soft dough's shape while it proofs) and a lame (a slim blade for scoring, not a knife) join the list at the sourdough in week 6. A domestic oven is enough, as long as it will hold 250 °C, because every bake-off loaf is baked in your own oven and carried in finished. Wheat is unavoidable here, and the marking involves eating what you baked. If gluten is a problem for you, so is this course.