Sourdough

By: Sarah Owens

Published by Shambhala Publications, 2025-10-14

A James Beard Award Winner for Baking & Desserts Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, 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. In Sarah Owens’s pioneering Sourdough, she demystified using sourdough starter for maximum flavor and easy digestion, showing us just how simple it can be to create a healthy starter from scratch. Moreover, she showed how to use home-grown sourdough starter in dozens of baked goods, including cookies, cakes, scones, flatbreads, tarts, and more—well beyond bread. Ten years later, sourdough is more popular than ever. To celebrate, this refreshed anniversary edition includes an updated introduction and expanded resources section. Sarah Owens spent years baking conventional baked goods, only to realize she had developed a crippling inability to digest or tolerate their ingredients. Unable to enjoy many of her favorite foods, she knew she must find a health-sustaining alternative. Sarah started experimenting with sourdough leavening, which almost immediately began to heal her gut and inspire her anew in the kitchen. Soon after, she launched an artisan small-batch bakery, and with that, a new way to savor and share nutritious sourdough breads and treats with her Brooklyn community. A botanist and gardener as well as a baker, Sarah accents her recipes with brief natural history notes on the highlighted plants and ingredients. 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.