Come learn the Art of Baking with master baker, bread enthusiast and Waldorf teacher educator, Warren Lee Cohen. In this hands-on workshop we will explore the development of bread and the culture around breaking bread together. Our endeavors will span the gamut from the earliest flat breads, to hearty hearth loaves, to the flakiest of croissants. We’ll work with unleavened dough, natural leaven, sourdough, commercial yeast and chemical rising agents to make a variety of tasty and nutritious breads that will help us understand with all of our senses how humans’ relationship to both food and consciousness has evolved over time. We will wrestle with how this most basic staff of life has also served as a central symbol in cultic and religious rites that inspire many spiritual traditions around the world.

Real bread demands our attention at this time in history. It is under threat and has been reduced to a processed foodstuff. Yet bread—simple grain, water and leaven bread—still has much more to offer humanity if only we can delve into its potential for physical, soul and spiritual nourishment.

Our morning baking sessions will be offered an added leaven by afternoon painting sessions with Kevin Hughes. Kevin will lead us through a series of painting exercises to help us imagine more deeply into the alchemical process that allows the baker to transform wheat, water, leaven and salt into life giving and spirit nurturing bread.

Suggested Reading: Warren Lee Cohen, Baking Bread with Children (Hawthorn Press), Wendy E. Cook, Foodwise: Understanding What We Eat and How It Affects Us: The Story of Human Nutrition (Clairview Books),  H. E. Jacob, Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History (The Lyons Press)

 

Warren Lee Cohen Web Links

 warrenleecohen.com, rsct.ca

WARREN LEE COHEN is a bread baker, oven builder and Waldorf teacher. He began baking twenty years ago in order to create life-sized sculptures in bread. Currently, he directs the Teacher Education Program at the Rudolf Steiner Centre Toronto and leads baking workshops internationally. His books include Baking Bread with Children, Raising the Soul and Dragon Baked Bread.