What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Each lecture runs the same day as that week’s Bake and does the thinking the bench has no time for: why 65% hydration behaves the way it does, what gluten actually is, why a levain finishes faster at 29 °C than at 24 °C. The Bake then tests it — you carry the mechanism straight from the lecture into the dough. Every week has a slide deck, linked from its lecture page.
Flour, water, salt, yeast
The first lecture — bakers' percentages, what gluten actually is, and why the straight dough is shaped the way it is
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Lean dough, and what the oven does to it
Flour, water, salt and yeast taken seriously — autolyse, poolish, surface tension, and why the first ten minutes of the bake need steam
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Hydration and the open crumb
What changes between a 65% dough and a 78% one, why folding replaces kneading, and where the holes in a ciabatta actually come from
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Fat, and the cold
The week 4 lecture — what 5% olive oil does to a gluten network, and what two days at 4 °C do that three hours at 26 °C cannot
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
The oven as the variable
Why a Neapolitan dough is the plainest thing you will mix all semester, and what 480 °C does in ninety seconds that 250 °C cannot do in ten minutes
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Wild fermentation, and how to read it
What lives in a starter, which acid each organism makes, and why the end of bulk fermentation is a thing you look at rather than a time you set
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Pentosans, amylase, acid
The week 7 lecture — why rye cannot build a gluten network, what holds the loaf up instead, and what the acid in a rye sour is actually for
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
The skin set in water
The week 8 lecture — why a stiff dough behaves nothing like a wet one, and what ninety seconds in a pot does to the starch on the outside of a ring
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
Tender, and slow
The week 9 lecture — what butter, sugar and egg each do to a gluten network, and why an enriched dough needs more yeast, more time, or both
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
The window butter works in
The week 10 lecture — butter plasticity between 16 and 20 °C, the arithmetic of folds, and why a laminated dough has a temperature ceiling
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
Leavening by chemistry
Bicarbonate is a base looking for an acid, baking powder arrives with its own, and gluten has stopped being the goal
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
Heat from one side
The last lecture — conduction instead of an oven, the pita pocket as pure physics, nixtamalised maize, and an audit of what has been holding up your bread all semester
Week 12 · 10 May 2027