About

Mayfield Farm Bakery School:

Mayfield Farm Bakery & School was established in 2010 by Nick and Jane Anderson. Nick has been a baker all his life having worked for his family business for many years and more recently opening his own bakeries in Epping and Cambridge. The bakery was opened in a farm yard setting with the aim of being very experimental and fundamentally different from a typical High Street Bakery pushing the boundaries of the excepted usual breads.

Skills and Techniques Baking Course:

This course is suited to home bakers who have either no experience or limited experience, also those who perhaps have made a fair amount of bread but get inconsistent results and they are not sure why.
Nick will teach you how to make a really good white dough, learning the skills to knead and prove effectively. Much of the bread making process is understanding how the structure and texture of the dough changes through the process and it is important to ‘feel’ the changing texture of the dough to understand when it has been kneaded sufficiently and proved correctly.

You will make a dough by hand, from scratch. Half the dough will be used to make traditional shapes as you see in the bakery such as bloomers, cobs, cottage loaves and plaits.
The second half of the dough is used to make a speciality bread, once you can make a really good dough there are plenty of different breads you can make with it so using the second half to make a stilton and raisin bread is an introduction to speciality bread making.

The course includes your apron, tea towel, ingredients, recipe sheets, etc.
You will enjoy lunch or supper in our coffee shop and take home all the bread you have made, this is usually 4 or 5 loaves.

Bread Making Skills and Techniques course is £95.00 per person per course.

Master Class Baking Course:

The Master Class builds on the Skills and Techniques course and teaches further skills to help your bread making. In addition to building on the skills learnt on the earlier course this class takes in making wholemeal bread and using the dough to make further speciality breads.

Nick will teach the students to make minor adjustments to allow for the additions that have been added.
A Spanish Country bread is also made – this is a bread with a very high water content. It is a very useful bread, ideal for dipping and eating with anti pasta. The texture of the dough is quite different from a traditional white bread and learning to make a high water content bread is invaluable for various speciality breads.

You will take home both the wholemeal speciality – often Cranberry and Pecan and the Spanish bread.
The course includes your apron, tea towel, ingredients, recipe sheets, etc
You will enjoy lunch or supper in our coffee shop and take home all the bread you have made, this is usually 4 or 5 loaves.

Bread Making Master Class course is £95.00 per person per course.

Professional Baking Course:

We are very happy to organise bakery courses for chefs of a professional level. We have recently arranged courses for a major employer of chefs who are keen their staff should be able to produce scratch baked breads for their customers.

We have also designed courses for various other companies and organisations who are keen to achieve specific outcomes.

We are also able to custom design courses for corporate events which would usually include breakfast on arrival and lunch.

At Mayfield we believe:

We believe in good, wholesome food, traditionally made without the use of unnecessary preservatives and colourings. We are keen to use the very best ingredients and from the closest source, keeping food miles to a minimum and our impact on the environment as small as possible. We use flour milled by the Essex firm of Marriages, they are a sixth generation family business who are leading experts in producing top quality flour, much of which is grown in Essex. Whether you are looking for the very best quality bread for yourself, for a gift, or you’d just like to try something different, why not come and see what we have to offer. We also believe everyone should do what they can to reduce their impact on the environment. To this end we try to source the best ingredients as locally as possible, keeping food miles to a minimum and our carbon emissions as low as we can.

History:

Nick Anderson is from a family with a very long history in baking, it’s in the blood as they say! As a boy of about ten, during the school holidays Nick went with his father to the bakery early in the morning, that is when his first interest in the family business was sparked. Father, uncles, cousins, grandfather and great grandfather have all been bakers.

Tracing Nick’s family tree back to 1680 we found no less than 32 bakers, some bakery owners others journeymen working where needed at various different bakeries.

The family started off in Devonshire in the village of Dunchidicock – famous for treacle mines. By the early 1800’s some of the family started moving and eventually settled in North East London. We found the majority of the men in the family described as ‘bakers’ in the census, although there was also an accounts clerk and book keeper. Perhaps John Vooght 1839 – 1897 saw an advantage to having a couple of his sons looking after the business side of the bakery.