Baking Class at Bread Ahead: £115 Doughnuts, Borough Market

Bread Ahead Bakery & School sits inside Borough Market, on Cathedral Street, London SE1 9DE, and its doughnut workshop is the class most people mean when they search for a baking class in London. The workshop costs £115 per person, lasts three hours and is suitable for all levels, with morning sessions from 9:30am to 12:30pm and afternoon sessions from 2:00pm to 5:00pm. Borough Market dates for the last weekend of October and the first weekend of November were already sold out when this was written, so book before you plan the rest of the day.

Bread Ahead began in 2013 when founder Matthew Jones, a chef who spent his first fifteen working years in British restaurant kitchens and set up his first bakery business in 2000, brought his bread to Borough Market. The Bakery School opened in February 2014 with a simple promise, to show the public how easy it is to bake good bread. The mailing address for the school is Bread Ahead Bakery & School, Borough Market, Cathedral St, London SE1 9DE. The school has since grown beyond the original room: the company's own locations page lists a second London school site at 26-28 Olympic Way, Wembley, HA9 0NP, and the course pages mark each date as Borough Market or Wembley, so check the venue on the date you select before you travel.

The doughnut class is built around the product that made the stall famous. According to the course page, an expert baker shows you how to turn a few basic ingredients into finished doughnuts, guiding you from start to finish, and you leave with the custard-filled 'custard grenades' you made yourself. You also make a butter-rich brioche loaf from the same dough, which is the part that surprises people: the doughnut dough is a versatile enriched dough, not a one-trick recipe. Expect to knead, shape, prove, fry, roll in sugar and fill. The course uses wheat, dairy and egg, and the school states plainly that it cannot tailor recipes for substitutions or alterations, so this is not the class for anyone who needs a dairy-free or egg-free swap.

The doughnut and the Introduction to Sourdough Baking workshop are both £115 per person for a half day of three hours. If you would rather start with bread, the sourdough class has you create your own starter, then use the school's starter to produce a brown levain and a 100% rye, and shows a no-knead sourdough process. The Croissant Workshop is also £115 for three hours and teaches you to enrich and laminate a croissant dough. The Complete Sourdough Workshop is a full day at £240 and, in the October listing, ran from 10:00am to 4:30pm at Wembley. For a weeknight, the two-hour Pizza & Tiramisu Workshop is £75 per person and runs 6:30pm to 8:30pm on its listed Friday date, and booking two or more places takes £10 off each place automatically.

Dates are released in blocks and the popular ones go quickly. The doughnut page shows Saturday and Sunday sessions at Borough Market through early November marked sold out, with a Wembley session on Friday 6 November also full, so the practical move is to choose a Friday, a Thursday or an afternoon slot at Wembley rather than hunting for a Saturday morning. Sourdough has more air: its Wembley dates on Thursday 5 November, Sunday 8 November and Friday 20 November still showed spaces, and several 2027 dates are marked coming soon. If the class you want is full, the Croissant Workshop on Wednesday 28 October from 9:30am to 1:00pm is the weekday option with spaces left at Borough Market.

Classes are taught by the school's own bakery teachers, and the school's team page names tutors who trained in very different places: a French baker who has worked in London restaurants and bakeries since the late 1980s, a teacher who trained at Leith's and the Cordon Bleu, a South African pastry chef, and an Italian who started as a pastry chef in Milan and moved to London twenty years ago. That mix explains the menu of regional workshops, from Danish, Portuguese and Greek baking to Japanese and Jewish baking. Workshops are mixed ability, so the person next to you might have never turned on an oven or might bake sourdough weekly. Bring a friend if you can, because the evening dining classes are built around a shared table.

Children under 12 may not attend, because the class and equipment are not suitable for them. Under 18s must be accompanied by a paying adult, and the school says that if a tutor believes a child is disrupting the class, both the adult and child will be asked to leave. Allergen details are listed on every course page, and the school asks you to contact it before booking if you need ingredient information. Questions about the bakery school go to admin@breadahead.com, which is the address given on the contact page; the school publishes no telephone number for class enquiries. Gift vouchers are sold for half and full day workshops all year round, which makes a doughnut class an easy present.

Borough Market is the best part of the day out, because you are already standing in it. The school's own contact page points visitors to its locations page for the opening times of the market stalls and shops, so check that page for the stall you want rather than assuming a schedule. Southwark Cathedral stands beside the market, and a loop around the arcade before or after class lets you see the same bread and pastry you have just learned to make being sold across the counter. If you finish a morning class at 12:30pm, you are in the market at lunchtime with floury hands and a box of doughnuts, which is exactly when to eat something savoury as a counterweight.

If one class leaves you wanting more, the school's debut cookbook, Bread Ahead Baking School, was published in August 2017 and sells for £25.00 on the school's site; it covers international breads, cakes and pastry as well as Great British bakes. A second book, The Expert Home Baker, followed in 2021. Many students treat the doughnut class as a starting point and return for the sourdough or croissant sessions at the same £115 price, or for the full-day French and Italian workshops. Whichever you pick, read the allergen line, check whether the date is at Borough Market or Wembley, and arrive ready to stand for three hours in an apron.