I made an ebook. It’s called Sourdough & Wild Yeast Introduction, it’s the first book in what I’m hoping becomes a small library, and you can download it for free right now at steventrotter.com/ebooks.html. EPUB if you read on a Kindle or in Apple Books, PDF if you’d rather print it.
Where it came from
For a couple of years my sourdough recipes lived scattered across my notes: the loaf I bake most weeks, the discard muffins I make when the jar in the fridge starts giving me looks, the baguettes, the pretzel bites that never survive a snack night. Every so often a friend would ask for one and I’d copy-paste it out of my notes with an apology about the formatting.
This book is me finally putting them in one place. It started as a modest little collection of seven recipes. Then I stopped trying to keep it small, and it landed at 24: six proper breads, the enriched and laminated bakes (cinnamon rolls, croissant dinner rolls, a kouign amann), a savory stretch with mini pizzas and pretzel bites and crackers, and a whole run of discard bakes for the days between loaves. Muffins, scones, snickerdoodles, and a chocolate sheet cake that happens to have starter in it.
What’s inside
It’s written for someone who has never baked bread before. It opens with a short history chapter, because I couldn’t help myself. The oldest bread we’ve found is a 14,400-year-old crumb from a fireplace in Jordan, baked about 4,000 years before anyone planted a field, and every risen loaf for thousands of years after that was sourdough. The Klondike prospectors who kept starters tucked inside their coats were called “sourdoughs.” I find all of this delightful and I hope you will too.
From there it covers the craft itself (autolyse, folding, bulk fermentation, all the vocabulary, so the recipes make sense the first time you read them), then walks you through waking up a dried starter over five days, then the master loaf. Learn that one loaf and you’ve learned the moves every other recipe in the book reuses. Everything is in grams, and it closes with a troubleshooting chapter for when a bake goes sideways, because it happens to all of us.
How I made it
The whole book is plain Markdown files, one chapter each, that build into an EPUB and a print edition with Pandoc. The photos are my actual bakes, shot in my actual kitchen, which is why the lighting is honest rather than beautiful. There’s no signup and no email form on the download page, just two buttons. I tried a send-to-Kindle feature and pulled it out when it turned out Amazon requires every reader to pre-approve the sender, so: download the EPUB, send it to your own device, done.
Why free
One of my favorite things I learned while writing the history chapter is that the word “companion” comes from the Latin for “with bread.” A companion was someone you shared bread with. Baking sourdough is slow and a little stubborn, but what comes out of the oven is meant to be given away, and it felt right for the book to work the same way.
So it’s free. Go grab it, and if you bake something out of it, I would sincerely love to hear how it went: hey@steventrotter.com.