Play with Dough

Flour is just the beginning.

A handful of basic ingredients can become a soft loaf, a rich bun, a crumbly cookie, a crisp cracker or something entirely your own.

It's all about the ratios.

PLAY WITH DOUGH is a hands-on workshop for getting to know dough by doing exactly what the name suggests: playing with it.

We'll use simple ratios as our starting point and explore how flour, water, fat, sugar, salt and yeast behave together. Then we'll mix, knead, stretch, flavour, colour, shape, bake and taste our way through two very different kinds of dough.

The emphasis is on touching, experimenting and noticing what changes with just enough theory to understand why.

Who is this for?

For curious people who like making things with their hands, eating baked things, or wondering why dough sometimes behaves beautifully and sometimes seems to have its own agenda.

You don't need baking experience or professional skills.

You do need to be willing to get flour on yourself, touch sticky things, experiment with your food and accept that not every shape needs a name.

How we will play

One dough wants to stretch. One dough wants to crumble.

We will start with an enriched yeasted dough: soft, elastic and alive.

You will mix and knead it by hand, learn what developing dough feels like, and watch how fermentation changes it over time. Once it has risen, we'll divide, twist, braid, knot and shape it, with plenty of room to make something less conventional.

While the yeast is doing its work, we'll move to its almost-opposite: a sweet or savoury shortbread-style dough.

Starting from a simple ratio, we'll experiment with what happens when we change flavours, textures and additions. Think cacao, nuts, seeds, spices, herbs, olives and whatever else makes sense on the day.

Same foundations. Different decisions. Very different results.

Along the way, we'll take a short look at the bigger dough-to-batter family (from breads and cookies to cakes and pancakes) to understand how changing proportions creates completely different results. This part is theory/demo; our hands-on experiments will focus on two doughs.

We'll taste and compare what everyone creates, and you'll take your own baked creations home with you.