Sourdough

Sourdough offers 101 luscious recipes using natural, made-from-scratch sourdough starter for more nutritious, tastier results—going well beyond bread into a wide range of other baked goods.

Sourdough is a James Beard Award Winner for Baking & Desserts.

It provides 101 recipes for baking with whole and sprouted grains, making the most of the seasonal harvest, and healing the body through naturally fermented food.

Sarah Owens spent years baking conventional baked goods, only to slowly realise she had developed a crippling inability to digest or tolerate their ingredients. Unable to enjoy many of her most favourite foods, she knew she must find a health-sustaining alternative. Thus, Sarah started experimenting with sourdough leavening, which almost immediately began to heal her gut and inspire her anew in the kitchen. Soon after, her artisan small-batch bakery, BK17, was launched, and with that, a new way to savour and share nutritious sourdough breads and treats with her Brooklyn community.

Sourdough and other fermented foods are making a comeback because of their rich depth of flavour and proven health benefits. In Sourdough, Sarah demystifies keeping a sourdough culture, which is an extended fermentation process that allows for maximum flavour and easy digestion, showing us just how simple it can be to create a healthy starter from scratch. Moreover, Sarah uses home-grown sourdough starter in dozens of baked goods, including cookies, cakes, scones, flatbreads, tarts, and more—well beyond bread.

Sarah is a botanist and gardener as well as a baker—her original recipes are accented with brief natural history notes of the highlighted plants and ingredients used. Anecdotes from the garden will delight naturalists and baked-goods lovers among us. Laced with botanical and cultural notes on grains, fruits and vegetables, herbs, and even weeds, Sourdough celebrates seasonal abundance alongside the timeless craft of artisan baking.