How I Ran a Sourdough Workshop for 40 Women

Forty women, one Saturday afternoon, and it cost me $78 to run.

I did not charge for it. It was for our local church and I volunteered my time, which I would do again, but it means I now know exactly what one of these costs and exactly what it takes.

Here is the whole thing, start to finish.

How forty people happened

One post. On a community noticeboard, in a women-only group for Kalgoorlie, two weeks out.

That is the entire marketing. No budget, no lead time, no clever graphics. I expected maybe twelve.

I have written elsewhere about why small towns work like this, so I will not repeat it. The short version is that there is far more appetite for this stuff out here than anyone realises, and almost nobody is putting anything on.

The week before is the actual work

The workshop is two hours. The preparation is a week.

Sourdough is awkward to teach because you cannot show someone the whole process in an afternoon. It takes days. So the only way to teach it properly is to have dough at every stage sitting on the table at once, which means starting different things on different days and having all of them peak at the right moment on Saturday.

Wednesday night I fed my starter up to a much bigger volume than usual, enough for all the sample loaves.

Thursday I mixed the samples, staggered fifteen minutes apart so I was not wrestling several doughs through their folds at the same time. Folds all afternoon, shaped in the evening, into the fridge overnight.

Friday I mixed the loaf I would score and bake live at the workshop, folded it through the day, shaped it, fridged it. Then from six that evening I baked all the samples, in batches, one at a time in the Dutch oven. That took until about nine.

Saturday morning I fed the starter at six so it would peak at the right time, mixed another dough at eight so it would be ready to shape live in front of everyone, packed the car at half twelve, and was at the venue at one to set up and get the oven going.

Eight sample loaves covered forty people comfortably, which surprises people. They are tasters, not lunch. Four plain, two jalapeno cheddar with honey, two chocolate, all sliced so everyone can try each one. There was still enough left over that people took some home, which is a nice way to finish.

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I ran short, and it did not matter

I had prepped for thirty. Forty came.

So I ran out of starter packaging and workbooks, which sounds like a disaster and was not. Some women did not want to take starter home anyway, which covered part of the gap, and I emailed the workbook out afterwards to everyone who missed a printed copy.

Over the next month or so I gave fresh starter to the few who had missed out. Which turned out to be a nicer way of doing it than handing it over on the day, because they got in touch when they were actually ready to bake, and I heard how they went.

Nobody minded. Not one person mentioned it.

That is worth knowing if you are worried about numbers, because the mental image is that running short ruins the day. It does not. Take names or email addresses on the way in, and anything you run out of becomes a follow-up rather than a problem.

Nothing else went wrong, and that is not luck

I want to be careful here, because “it went perfectly” is a useless thing to read.

Nothing else went wrong because I had prepared to the point of tedium, and because by that stage I had made well over two thousand loaves. I was not learning sourdough in front of forty people. I was doing something I could do in my sleep, in front of forty people.

That is the actual lesson. Confidence on the day is bought in advance, and mostly it is bought with repetition. If you are thinking about teaching something, the question is not whether you know it. It is whether you know it well enough to talk while you do it, and answer a question halfway through, and still not lose your place.

Teaching a room of forty

This was the bit I had to think hardest about, because sourdough is a close-up thing and forty is a lot of people.

We set the room up with tables of about ten, all facing forward. That gave everyone a clear line to the front and kept it feeling like a room of small groups rather than a crowd.

For the demonstrations, the front of the room works fine. Mixing a dough, doing a set of stretch and folds, shaping a loaf, scoring it. Those are big movements and people can see them from a distance.

The problem is the small stuff, and the small stuff is the most important. The starter at its peak, domed with bubbles through the side of the jar. The difference between fresh dough and dough that has finished bulk fermenting. You cannot see any of that from the back of a hall.

So I had someone carry them around. The starter jar went from table to table so everyone could look at it up close and smell it. Same with the dough at its different stages. It takes a few extra minutes and it is worth every one of them, because that is the thing they are trying to learn to recognise in their own kitchens.

If you take one practical thing from this post, take that. Work out in advance which parts of your workshop need to be seen up close, and plan a way to get them to people rather than making people come to them.

What it cost

$78, and here is the whole invoice.

Bakers flour, 2 bags at $14, so $28.

Packaging for the starter samples, 30 at 50c, so $15.

Workbook printing, 30 at 50c, so $15.

Inclusions for the sample loaves, the chocolate, cheddar and jalapenos, $20.

That does not include equipment, because I already owned all of it. If you are starting from nothing, a Dutch oven is the one real expense, and it lasts a lifetime.

Under three dollars a head, and that is prepping for thirty. Sourdough is cheap to teach because it is cheap to make. That is half the reason people want to learn it.

What I would charge

I gave this one away and I do not regret it. But I would not do that every time, and neither should you.

For a workshop like this I charge $1,000, plus travel if it is out of town. That covers about twelve and a half hours of work once you count the week of preparation, not the two hours in the room, and it is still a fraction of what a sourdough class costs per person anywhere else in the country.

I have written a whole post on how I got to that number, because the working is more useful than the figure. But I mention it here because women undercharge for this constantly, and it usually starts with not having any idea what it is worth.

The part I did not expect

Months later, women still message me photos of their bread.

That is the bit that gets me. Loaves coming out of ovens all over town, in kitchens I have never been in, made by women who would not have tried before they spent two hours watching someone do it in front of them.

Forty women in a room for one afternoon, and it is still going.

What to do next

If you have read this far, there is a decent chance you have been wondering whether you could run one yourself. Most women who wonder that talk themselves out of it in the same breath, usually with some version of “but I am not an expert.”

You do not need to be. Here is what you actually need.

Read: Could your sourdough become a workshop? You do not need to be an expert