The class, written down.
Rahoma Grains is Lauren Zumwalt, who teaches sourdough and fermentation in south Mississippi. She doesn't sell bread — she teaches people to make it, in seasonal classes out of Soso.
What everybody forgets on the drive home
A week after a class, most of us can't remember whether the leaven rests overnight at 68 or 70 degrees, or quite what the letter fold looked like.
Lauren had no web presence at all. Everything she taught existed in the room while she was teaching it, and nowhere afterward.
Build the reference first
The original brief was a site to promote classes, but a more useful job emerged: give students somewhere to go afterward. The same recipe archive can introduce the classes to people who have not taken one.
Somebody who finds the country loaf recipe, bakes it, and gets a decent crumb out of it is far likelier to sign up than somebody who only read a page about classes.
Every step, weight, temperature, and timing
The signature country loaf runs 16 steps across 5 phases — leaven, mix, bulk fermentation with a fold schedule, shaping, bake — with gram weights, target water temperatures, timings, and a named equipment list.
It is the class, written down, and the part of the site people come back for.
The question every student asks on the way out
What should I buy?
~30 items across sourdough, kefir, and cultured vegetables — thermometers, a scale, a Dutch oven, a lame, proofing baskets, the right salt — plus the books Lauren recommends. It's the answer to a question she was already handling by text.
Proof in the students' own words
“My husband now maintains a sourdough starter and bakes sourdough bread weekly. Lucky wife right here!”
What persuades a future student is what people are still doing months later.
Between seasonal classes, the site works as an archive for former students and an introduction for people who have never taken one.
Technical details
Recipes stored as structured content.
Each recipe is a typed entry. Adding a seventh takes one file, and future filtering, categories, or search can use the same structure.
- Built with
- Astro, compiled to static HTML
- Content
- In the repo
- Recipes
- Six, as a structured collection
- Third-party scripts
- None