Your First Sourdough: A Beginner's Guide to Your First Great Loaf

You have never made a loaf of bread. This book takes you from that to a crackling, open-crumbed sourdough you made yourself — and, more importantly, to understanding why it worked. Sourdough is not difficult. It is slow, and people confuse the two constantly. Almost everything that goes wrong for a beginner is a timing problem wearing the costume of a skill problem. Inside: One master loaf, explained step by step, with timetables for a weekend, a working week, or a single day Growing a starter from scratch in seven days, written day by day — including the week most people give up A photographic gallery of what goes wrong and why: hold your own loaf next to the page and find the match Fifteen problems beginners actually hit, in the order they hit them Ten simple recipes — wholemeal, seeded, tin loaf, focaccia, pizza, rolls, English muffins, and three that use discard Keeping your bread: the board, the freezer, never the fridge, and how to bring a stale loaf back Every recipe sits at 70% hydration or below, deliberately. At that level a beginner's dough holds its shape, takes a score and behaves predictably. Weights are given in metric and imperial throughout. No alternatives, no hedging, one method for each thing — because you cannot learn to read a process you keep changing.