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An open gift box from above: a cane banneton, a starter sachet and a bag of flour, beside a fresh round loaf

Posted from Castlemaine

Give someone their first loaf.

Choose a box
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$9 in Victoria, $14 elsewhere, free over $100

One starter, fed every day for fourteen years. Posted Mondays and Thursdays.

What's in each box

The boxes

Three ways to start.

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The First Loaf box laid out: a starter sachet, a bag of flour, a cane banneton, a scraper and a recipe card

What's in The First Loaf box

Everything but the oven.

  • A sachet of my starter, dried to travel
  • 2kg of stoneground flour, milled in the Central Highlands
  • A round cane banneton, for the rings on the crust
  • A dough scraper and a recipe card
  • Seven short videos, one for each stage, filmed at my bench

How it works

A week from the box to the bread.

  1. Stirring flour and water into a jar of starter

    Wake the starter

    Five days of flour and water, a few minutes each morning. The first video shows you what bubbly looks like.

  2. Floured hands stretching and folding dough in an enamel bowl

    Mix, fold and wait

    Four folds across an afternoon, then a night in the fridge in the banneton. Most of the work is waiting.

  3. A round sourdough loaf on a cooling rack beside a cast iron pot

    Score and bake

    One confident cut and forty-five minutes in a hot pot. Then the hardest part: an hour before you cut it.

Sending it to someone

It goes to them. Your note goes in the box.

  • Send it straight to their door, anywhere in Australia
  • Write a message at checkout and I'll tuck it in, handwritten from your words
  • No prices in the box, ever
  • Postage is $9 in Victoria and $14 elsewhere, and free over $100
Choose their box
A brown parcel tied with string, a blank card under the string, at a front door

For the second loaf, and the tenth

Refills and tools.

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Jo shaping dough at her bench, loaves cooling behind her

About Jo

I've fed the same starter for fourteen years.

I baked in other people's bakeries for twenty years before I started this from the back room of our cottage in Castlemaine. The starter came with me from the first one.

Most people who try sourdough give up in the first week, usually because nobody showed them what "ready" looks like. So every box comes with me, on video, at each stage. Email me a photo of your dough and I'll tell you what it needs.

Jo Harlow

Questions people ask.

How long does it take to arrive?

I post on Mondays and Thursdays. Most of Victoria has it in two days, the rest of Australia in three to five.

Do they need any special gear?

An oven, a big bowl and a pot with a lid that can go in the oven. Everything else is in the box.

What if the starter doesn't wake up?

It nearly always does by day five. If it hasn't by day seven, email me and I'll post another sachet.

Can I choose the day it arrives?

Not exactly, but tell me the date in your gift message and I'll post it to land the week before.