Baking Resources

Now that you have your sourdough starter and are ready to bake, here are some resources that I have found helpful. Everyone has a different way of learning but I mostly taught myself through books. Later on I watched more YouTube videos and those are super helpful to visually see what certain terms mean. I won't write down any specific recipes here, there are so many out there! See below for website recommendations to get started right away.

BOOKS
Tartine Bread Book by Chad Robertson
This is the book that got me started. It is great if you like to understand the whole process and like to dive in. You could say this is a whole book about one type of bread.

Tartine #3 by Chad Robertson
This one I like for ideas on what you can add to your basic Country loaf, using more whole grains and cooked grains. 

Flour Water Salt and Yeast by Ken Forkish
This book gives you great bake schedules. Thanks to Ken Forkish I didn't need to wake up in the middle of the night to bake/ feed/ stretch and fold what ever it was that I didn't anticipate to happen at that time of day. His overnight pizza recipe is also my go to.

Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman
The classic resource. It's where I go to trouble shoot or dive deeper on understanding some part of the process.

Baking for Beginners by Bonnie O'hara
This book was published after I already learned to bake, but Bonnie does an excellent job at making bread baking available to complete beginners. Her instructions are clear and she is unpretentious. She has an online class as well, see details below. Her book starts with yeasted breads and walks you through to sourdough loaves. It is very unpretentious. 

ONLINE RESOURCES

The Perfect Loaf 
all the resources you need for sourdough baking. Fantastic recipes, explanations of processes etc. Maurizio does an amazing job at explaining all about sourdough in a very accessible and easy to understand way.

Alchemy Bread
Bonnie has a lovely beginners online course. It follows the first chapters of her book. Her calm voice guides you though all the simple steps that we tend to overlook once you have been baking for awhile. This is not sourdough specific but she shows you how to scale, mix, fold, judge the rise and  bake your bread.

The Fresh Loaf
A community for amateur artisan bakers and bread enthusiasts, a great site to search for all sorts of ideas and find answers to your questions.

Hope these resources are helpful to you! There are a million more things out there that are useful and I am sure you will find what is most useful to you.

In the next post I will tell you about all the tools I like to use.