Lee.org

After the wildly successful bread classes at IUH, Maker Faire, and WhatWillYouLearn, I’m having another bread baking workshop. Sign up and put on your calendar!

Real Bread in 10 Minutes, Saturday June 25th 2011 10am-1pm
Learn how to make fantastic home made bread that is easier, less expensive, faster and better than going to the store!

Sign up by sending me an email at “Lee at Lee dat org” or sign up on Skillshare.com

Update: I’ve added a second date to the class, for weekday people!
Real Bread in 10 Minutes, Tuesday June 28th 2011 7pm-10pm

Real Bread in 10 Minutes on Skillshare.com

About the Class
Making bread is easier, faster and more flexible than you thought. You can make fantastic bread every day inexpensively with less than 10 minutes effort, including cleanup! In this class, you’ll learn techniques to minimize the ordinary and maximize the extraordinary parts of making all kinds of bread at home. We’ll talk about things like: instant yeast vs sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb, shaping, amendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit! While our bread bakes, we’ll make our own specialty butter! You will eat and bring home what we make in class.

Teacher
Lee Sonko
San Francisco, CA
Website
Lee Sonko is an entrepreneur, educator, machine artist, organizer, hacker, geek and baker. Those attributes often team up in his life to help explore the world. He is a founding member of SWARM, a San Francisco based mechatronic art robot group. He is also a member of the Flaming Lotus Girls and is the Head of the Kinetics and Electronics Department at The Crucible in Oakland. Lee’s love affair with good bread goes back as long as he can remember. Making and eating bread is his daily reminder of the simplicity and purity of the experience of creation.

Another successful Real Bread class. There are 4 more people in the world ready to go out and make some friggin bread!

And darn it, the home made specialty butters came out terrific! Cinnamon butter is surprisingly awesome.

This class came by way of WhatWillYouLearn.com which is gearing up to be something supremely cool.

My class sat between “Sequence Your Own DNA” and “Introduction to PCB Layout” on the calendar, which is pretty rad!

It's neat seeing "Lee's Kitchen" on the calendar next to all those other great spaces

The classes at Maker Faire went splendidly. The 30 minute format required me to tighten everything up dramatically to get the message across. The students didn’t get all the info I wanted to give them but they certainly got the spirit, and some laughs! Afterward, I received email comments like this:

I was lucky enough to catch your talk at the Maker Faire this afternoon… I really enjoyed your “organic” way of approaching baking… Your teaching style was also excellent, a little humor goes a long way in education.

– James Peters

Lee,
Thanks for teaching us how to make bread at makersfaire! It came out delicious the first time and we shared it with our neighbors. It was a fun way to bring the whole apartment building together!
Cheers,
Sarah and Evan

I’m teaching another bread baking class on Sunday, from 3-5pm in the Mission. Sign up at wwyl.net/bread!

Here are some emails I got this week about last week’s Maker Faire class:

I was lucky enough to catch your talk at the Maker Faire this afternoon… I really enjoyed your “organic” way of approaching baking… Your teaching style was also excellent, a little humor goes a long way in education.
– James Peters

Lee,
Thanks for teaching us how to make bread at makersfaire! It came out delicious the first time and we shared it with our neighbors. It was a fun way to bring the whole apartment building together!
Cheers,
Sarah and Evan

This weekend, May 28 & 29,  there are a whole bunch of taster classes going on in the Bay Area. Here’s a tiny sample of what’s going on:

• Eat fire (3 hours, $95)
• Sequence your own DNA (1.5 hours, $39)
• Learn the basics of woodworking (2.5 hours, $28)
• Create a cast glass sculpture (3 hours, $95)
• Arduino with a Wood & Nail Breadboard (2 hours, $82)

See the whole catalog, go to WhatWillYouLearn.com!

Where will Real Bread in 10 Minutes be taught? Click me!

I’ll be doing a brief 30 minute version of my “Real Bread in 10 Minutes” class at Maker Faire on both Saturday and Sunday!

Find me at the Maker Square Demo Tent (located in the Homegrown Village, West Lot)
Saturday, noon to 12:30pm
Sunday, noon to 12:30pm

Real Bread in 10 Minutes Lee Sonko
Making bread is easier, faster and more flexible than you thought. You can make fantastic bread every day inexpensively with less than 10 minutes effort, including cleanup! Lee will talk about and demonstrate techniques minimizing the ordinary and maximize the extraordinary parts of making bread at home. We’ll talk about: instant yeast vs sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb, shaping, amendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit!

Real Bread in 10 Minutes on the Calendar

See My Maker Profile

Last night I taught my “Real Bread in 10 Minutes” class at the Institute of Urban Homesteading. It went splendidly. At the beginning, not one of the 9 students felt comfortable baking bread. At the end Ruby, the owner of the school asked, “Do you think you can bake bread now?” There was a rousing, smiling “YES!” from every student!

I’ll be teaching a class with the Institute of Urban Homesteading in Oakland on the evening of May 18th :-) Wanna learn how to make bread the EASY way?

Here’s the description.

Making bread is easier, faster and more flexible than you thought. You can make fantastic bread every day inexpensively with less than 10 minutes effort, including cleanup! In our class, you’ll learn a set of techniques that will let you minimize the ordinary and maximize the extraordinary parts of making bread at home.

Some things we’ll talk about: instant yeast vs sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb, shaping, amendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit! We will eat and bring home what we make in class.

I’ll be teaching a breadmaking class at the Institute of Urban Homesteading Open House on May 16th. Hopefully that will lead to many more bread making classes :-)

My biography is now on the Faculty page of the IUH website (was here)    :-)

Lee Sonko http://lee.org
Lee Sonko is an entrepreneur, educator, machine artist, organizer, hacker, geek and baker. Those attributes often team up in his life to help explore the world. He is a founding member of SWARM, a San Francisco based mechatronic art robot group. He is also a member of the Flaming Lotus Girls and teaching faculty at The Crucible in Oakland. Lee’s love affair with good bread goes back as long as he can remember. Making and eating bread is his daily reminder of the simplicity and purity of the experience of creation.

I make a lot of bread.
I believe that in the last 2 years I’ve gone through 3 25 lb bags and 1 50 lb bag of flour. It’s time to start taking better notes. Here we go!

I just added the “Bread” Category to this blog. I have retroactively put all my bready posts into this category.

I just finished a 25 pound bag of First Street Bread Flour from Smart and Final. It was about $12. Standard loaves come out a bit softer and sweeter than with the previous Hotel all-purpose flour (I forget the exact name, it’s from Smart and Final and has the word “hotel” in it). I like it.

I just made some focaccia with it and it was very easy to flatten out. The Hotel flour has a strong tendency to spring back.