Sourdough Cookbook for Beginners
Resources & Errata
This page is a resource for readers of our beginner’s sourdough cookbook.
We realize that some of the dough handling techniques described in the book can be a little hard to visualize from just a written description.
Below you will find short videos demonstrating each of the gluten development and dough shaping techniques described in the book, along with some videos demonstrating dough scoring as well.
Gluten Development
Rolling Dough
Rubaud Mixing
Stretching and Folding
Coil Folding
Laminating
Mixed Technique
This technique is a combination of lamination and stretching and folding. It works well for a loose, early-stage dough when you don’t have the time or space for a conventional lamination.
Slap and Fold
Shaping Dough
Shaping a Round Loaf (Boule)
Shaping an Oval Loaf (Bâtard)
Shaping an Oblong Loaf
Shaping a Demi Baguette
Shaping a Sandwich (Pan) Loaf
Basic Dough Scoring
Round Loaf Simple Scoring
Oval Loaf Simple Scoring
Oblong Loaf Double Score
Demi Baguette Scoring
More Resources
Errata
First, our apologies if it was difficult for you to find your way to this page from the book. Our original manuscript had a link to this page included in many different places in the book where it seemed it could be useful. At the last minute our publisher chose to delete all those references and put a single link in the back of the book, disconnected from those locations in the book that might be confusing without a visual aid. If you would like to provide feedback to the publisher about this decision, we encourage you to email them.
Second, throughout the development of our manuscript, we included many process photographs to illustrate techniques along the way. In the end, the publisher chose to eliminate all of these informative photos and include instead only decorative ones. We love the photos in the book, but wish they had also included the informative process photos as well. On our website here at breadtopia.com we have hundreds of recipe and technique posts which include many process photos. We hope that browsing the content here on our site makes up for the omitted photos in the book.
Finally, and somewhat inexplicably, in addition to the beautiful cranberry walnut boule that Melissa baked, it appears that our book on sourdough bread has a jar of frothed milk on the cover of it. We did offer to deliver some active sourdough starter to the publisher but it appears they prefer the frothy milk. For the record, we don’t recommend attempting to leaven your bread dough with frothed milk.