Sourdough Without Fail (Kate Downham)

The publisher’s presentation

100% Whole Grain Sourdough Bread, Pizza, and Pastries for Any Kitchen

Discover the joy of sourdough baking without the frustration. Whether you’re a complete beginner who’s never made a loaf or a seasoned home baker ready to take sourdough to the next level, Sourdough Without Fail is your foolproof guide to crafting delicious, nutritious breads, crispy pizzas, and flaky pastries using 100% whole grains. 

Packed with over 75 easy, adaptable recipes that work beautifully with both freshly milled flour and store-bought whole grain flour, this cookbook breaks the boundaries of traditional sourdough, showing you how to work with what you have in your kitchen – no fancy equipment required. 

These wholesome recipes prioritise flavour, nutrition, and simplicity. Bake better – every time – with full instructions that demystify the process and empower you to create bakery-quality results at home. 

In Sourdough Without Fail, you’ll learn: 

Foolproof Sourdough for All Levels: Created for absolute beginners to experienced bakers, from a no-fail beginner recipe with step-by-step photos, through to inspirational recipes for anyone. From simple everyday loaves to advanced pastries and perfect pizza, all designed to work in real-life conditions. 

100% Whole Grains: Every recipe uses 100% whole grain flours, including wheat, ancient grains, and gluten-free options. No white flour, no yeast, and no white sugar, bake healthy bread with slow fermentation techniques that prioritise flavour, nutrition, and digestibility. 

75+ Versatile Recipes: Covers everyday essentials like sandwich bread, rustic hearth loaves, and pizza dough, plus creative options such as flaky pastries, crackers, pasta, pancakes, tortillas, cinnamon rolls, and even cakes – all adaptable to your schedule and kitchen setup. 

No Fancy Equipment Required: Work with basic tools you already own. No need for a stand mixer or any single-purpose kitchen gear. 

Practical Tools for Success: Starter maintenance guides, flexible scheduling, and endless variations to fit busy lifestyles. 

Homestead Inspiration: Written by an author who bakes every day using home-milled flour, empowering cooks to create bakery-quality results with simple, nourishing, real food ingredients. 

Multiple Batch Sizes: Handy ingredients tables will help you out, whether you’re baking just one loaf, or need to feed a crowd. 

Never Waste Starter Again: Real-life feeding schedules, simple recipes for using up discard, and clear instructions to help you perfectly store your starter for later. Learn to nurture your sourdough starter to create the best possible bread, without finicky instructions or waste.

My reading experience

No matter what the many books say, sourdough is not an easy thing to make. I have experimented many times with it, followed recipes from various books, and the results have been mixed.
The first key to sourdough is really the commitment and any beginner sourdough baker needs to know that, as the author rightly says: “With any kind of lifestyle, the key to successful sourdough baking is making it a priority, or even a necessity“.
There is everything one needs to know in this book. Of course, there are all the basics that one finds in any of the other books. But the author has also tried to give a lot of tips to fit sourdough baking to your own lifestyle and to your environment, as well as the seasons. There is a lot of information about the various flours, the hydrationthe way to tune a starter for quick use or later use, how to play with temperatures in your house, all the techniques for preparing your dough and baking it. The book is not using complicated applicances or utensils. Everyone can follow these recipes, although some of the tips are a little more advanced like milling your own flour and the benefits of doing that.
The recipes are precise and they can be adapted to any size of loaf, thanks to the baker’s percentages. There are also plenty of recipes for sourdough discards, and an interesting chapter about gluten free starter and recipes.
The book starts with some basics and an introduction for beginners, which are very useful.
Many books give the impression that sourdough baking is easy and that one can follow some straightforward recipes. But it is not the case and I found this book helfpul because it teaches us to follow our intuition (with a little chapter dedicated to that) and guides us to understand what happens to a starter or to a dough depending on many factors, and to learn what to look for in our own environment to make the recipes our own. So we are not just given a recipe and left to wonder why it did not work. We also get a lot of advice to find our way through the many parameters that will make our sourdough a success.
I was impressed by how complete and helpful this book is and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to commit to sourdough baking.

Thank you to Netgalley, Booksgosocial and the author for the free copy. This review is my own opinion.

You can learn more about the author by visiting her interesting website.