Sourdough Sweetie Brings Hands-On Starter Workshop to Hoboken Kitchen

The starter sitting on your counter is a living colony of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria, and the decisions you make in its first 72 hours determine whether your first loaf rises or flatlines. That's the practical ground Sourdough Sweetie covered at her Intro to Sourdough workshop at Shaka Kitchen in Hoboken on March 27, compressing the full beginner arc from culture maintenance through mixing, kneading, shaping and baking into a single two-hour session.

Shaka Kitchen, at 110 Washington Street, hosted the class from 7:00 to 9:00 PM. The format built around live demonstration and hands-on participation, with most of the session run standing-room style and chairs available on request. Sourdough Sweetie moved through starter feeding and maintenance before working into mixing, kneading, shaping and baking, with freshly prepared sourdough samples circulating throughout. The evening had a social structure as well, BYOB with tasting woven into the curriculum, a framing that made the class as much a community gathering as a technique primer.

The sharpest takeaway for attendees was the discounted starter kit: $35 at the class versus $65 on Sourdough Sweetie's site. The kit includes a copy of the instructor's own original starter. That detail addresses the part of the beginner experience most people abandon early: the first week of feeding an uncertain culture and reading its rises without knowing whether anything is actually working. A mature, tested starter removes that variable entirely.

After two hours with Sourdough Sweetie, a first-time baker has the operational basics in hand. The feeding schedule is the daily anchor: weigh the starter, discard a portion, refresh with flour and water at a consistent ratio, and track the peak rise window, typically 4 to 8 hours depending on ambient temperature. That window is when the culture is ready to leaven dough. The first loaf timeline runs from a morning feed to an afternoon mix, followed by stretch-and-fold sessions during bulk fermentation, a preshaped rest, final shaping, an overnight cold proof, and a bake the next day in a covered vessel at high heat. Equipment needed is minimal: a kitchen scale, a mixing bowl, a bench scraper, and a Dutch oven or covered cast-iron pot.

For bakers outside the Hoboken area who want to follow the same class structure at home, the blueprint is replicable with a single free Saturday. Source a tested starter from a local bakery or fellow baker, then work through the same sequence Sourdough Sweetie covered at Shaka Kitchen: feed at 9:00 AM, mix when the starter peaks, bulk ferment through the afternoon with periodic folds, shape in the evening, cold-proof overnight in the refrigerator, and bake straight from cold the next morning at 450°F inside a preheated Dutch oven. One session, one loaf, the full arc.

The $35 kit price against the $65 retail makes the math simple: one healthy starter, maintained with regular feedings, produces every subsequent loaf indefinitely, which means the class fee covers the entire foundation of the practice.