Emma Rousseau

Emma Rousseau

@demoemma

Bake bakery-level bread & pastry from your home kitchen

I'm Emma — a Lyon-based home baker who's taught 14,000+ students to master sourdough and French pastry since 2017. No professional oven, no fancy mixer — just method, patience, and a well-floured counter.

Free download

The 7-Day Starter Rescue Guide

The free guide that has revived thousands of 'dead' starters. A day-by-day schedule with exact feeding ratios, the temperature fix that solves most stalls, and the four-point checklist that tells you it's finally bake-ready. If your jar has been silent for weeks, start here — it's almost certainly rescuable.

Free

Instant download

The Home Baker's Sourdough Blueprint

My complete sourdough method in one guide: flour selection, the only hydration math you'll ever need, fermentation you can read by eye, and the Dutch-oven bake that delivers a true bakery crust at home. Refined over 2,000 loaves and trusted by hundreds of home bakers. Includes my crumb-autopsy troubleshooting chapter and the bake-log habit that makes every loaf better than the last.

$29

Online course

Sourdough Confidence: From First Starter to Bakery-Level Loaves

My signature eight-lesson course, from a reliable starter to consistently excellent loaves. Close-up video for every hand skill, three real-life baking schedules, the aliquot-jar method for perfectly judged fermentation, and weekly crumb feedback in the student community. Lifetime access, bake at your own pace — most students pull their best-ever loaf out of the oven within a month.

$129

Instant download

Styled & Shot: Food Photography for Bakers

Everything I know about photographing bread and pastry with one window and a phone — the angles, the light, the crumb-shot technique, and the ten-minute edit that keeps bread looking like bread. Written for bakers who want a feed (or a bakery Instagram) that actually sells. No camera gear required.

$19

45-min 1:1 call

1:1 Bake Troubleshooting Call

Forty-five minutes, just your bread and me. Send photos and your recipe in advance; on the call we diagnose exactly what's going wrong — starter, fermentation, shaping, or oven — and you leave with a written action plan for your next three bakes. Most gummy-crumb mysteries are solved in the first fifteen minutes.

$95

Live · Aug 20

Croissant Lamination, Live: One Evening, Real Dough

A 90-minute live masterclass on croissant lamination — the butter block, the lock-in, three letter folds, and how to keep everything cold enough in a home kitchen. Bake along in real time or watch and take notes; every ticket includes the replay, my lamination temperature cheat sheet, and a live Q&A at the end.

$24

Membership · billed monthly

The Proofing Box — Monthly Baking Club

My monthly baking club. Every month: one new seasonal recipe with full video (brioche in December, fruit galettes in July), a live bake-along where we make it together, and a feedback thread where I personally review your crumb shots and photos. Plus the complete archive from previous months. Cancel anytime; the recipes are yours to keep.

$15/mo

Link

The Sunday Crumb — Free Weekly Newsletter

My free Sunday letter to 22,000 bakers: one technique explained properly, one seasonal recipe, and the best crumb shot from the community each week. Written on Saturday nights with flour still on the keyboard. Join free — unsubscribe anytime.

Open link ↗
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The August cohort of Sourdough Confidence opens Monday — and enrollment closes Sunday at midnight. Live feedback rounds are capped at 200 bakers so I can review every crumb shot personally, and the current price retires with this cohort. Your starter has waited long enough.

From a rented Lyon kitchen to 14,000 home bakers

I baked my first sourdough loaf in 2016 in a Lyon apartment with a temperamental oven and no counter space — it came out flat, gummy, and completely addictive. Two years of obsessive practice (and a part-time apprenticeship at a neighborhood pâtisserie) later, friends started asking for lessons, and I realized the thing I loved teaching most wasn't recipes — it was confidence. Since 2017 I've helped more than 14,000 home bakers stop guessing and start reading their dough: what the bubbles mean, when fermentation is truly done, why the crumb came out the way it did. Everything I teach assumes a normal kitchen, a normal oven, and a normal life. No mixer, no proofing cabinet, no 6am alarms — just method, a scale, and the patience bread rewards so generously. If you can keep a houseplant alive, I can teach you to bake bread you'll be proud to slice in front of people.

What students are pulling out of their ovens

“My starter had been flat for a month and I was ready to give up. Emma's rescue schedule had it doubling by day five, and the following weekend I baked the first loaf my family has ever fought over.”

Priya S. · Sourdough Confidence student

“I set up the window-light routine from Styled & Shot in one afternoon. Three months later our bakery's Instagram had tripled and a local food guide featured us. Weekend preorders now sell out by Thursday.”

Marcus T. · Owner, Grain & Co. microbakery

“One 45-minute call fixed what three years of YouTube tutorials couldn't. She spotted my problem in ten minutes — underproofed, wrong flour — and my very next bake was the best loaf of my life.”

Helena V. · 1:1 troubleshooting client

Before you ask

Do I need a stand mixer or special equipment?+

No. Every recipe and lesson I teach uses a digital scale, a mixing bowl, a Dutch oven, and your hands. A banneton and a lame are nice upgrades later — a bowl lined with a floured tea towel and a plain razor blade do the same jobs perfectly well for your first months.

I've already killed three starters. Is this really going to work for me?+

You haven't killed them — starters are far harder to kill than the internet suggests, and 'dead' is almost always just cold or underfed. Start with my free 7-Day Starter Rescue Guide; if your jar shows any bubbles at all within a week, you're in business. Students who arrive convinced they're cursed are reliably baking within a month.

How long do I get access to the course and guides?+

Forever. The course, the PDFs, and all future updates are lifetime access — buy once, bake at your own pace. The Proofing Box membership is the only subscription, and you keep every recipe from the months you were a member.

Are your recipes in grams or cups?+

Grams, always. Baking is chemistry, and cups measure volume, not weight — the same cup of flour can vary by 30 grams depending on how you scoop it. Every recipe includes a short equipment note, and a $12 digital scale pays for itself with your first non-frustrating bake.

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