Description
The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking — signed by Dr Vanessa Kimbell, with a personal book plate.
The book that almost didn’t happen.
When Vanessa took the idea of baking and fermenting diversity into cakes in the same way as she did her signature Diversity bread to her publishers, they did not want it. There was no shelf to put it on. Sweet sourdough was not a genre, because it did not exist, and publishers prefer to follow success — they told her so. Books that break into new territory tend to fail, they said, because the ideas in them are too unfamiliar. They suggested she write something more like everybody else’s books. Vanessa fought for it. She knew that people needed to understand that the same knowledge for bread applied to their sweet baking and more — she knew that what she had found was useful to people. They published it because her previous books had been international bestsellers, and Vanessa invented a genre of baking — sweet sourdough. As is her usual signature style, this book shares what had never been done before, making ordinary bread, bakes and cakes into food that nourishes your gut and your brain.
Cakes, doughnuts, brioche, mille-feuille, pastries, a sweet sourdough pasta — until Vanessa worked it out, no one had ever published a method for any of it. Bakers used sourdough for bread, and that was it. Sweet bakes were still made the conventional way with commercial yeast and chemical raising agents, and anyone with a digestive condition that ruled out conventional cake stayed politely hungry at weddings.
The book began with Vanessa using leftover starter as was the conventional approach to using sourdough discard in the late 1990s. One afternoon in 1999, Vanessa was making a lemon drizzle cake for her soon-to-be mother-in-law with discard from her sourdough starter when a family member had an accident. The phone call came and Vanessa dropped everything, leaving for the hospital with the unbaked cake still in its tin. Twelve hours later she came home expecting nothing, but it had risen. She baked it, and realised that this was extraordinary, because she could eat it without any digestive discomfort. The technique was incorporated into her classes, and she began applying the sweet sourdough principle to all the cakes, bakes and sweet things, mostly successfully with the exception of laminated dough, brioche and doughnuts. These eluded her, always being compromised. It seemed that fermenting laminated dough with her usual starter was impossible. For over a decade she tried, but the breakthrough came with the chocolate sourdough starter, built from the last bar of chocolate her late friend Mott Green — the chocolatier and fair-trade activist — ever gave her. Again, another breakthrough — Vanessa is the first to create a chocolate starter and the first to create a sweet starter. The science behind it all was worked out by reading Marco Gobbetti on heterofermentative and homofermentative bacteria papers in her work on understanding digestion, and understanding how manipulating starters with sugar and cocoa changes the proteolytic activity of the starter, and she developed the technique until it held. You might call this a book born from obsession.
The next level of groundbreaking work in this book is the application of gut knowledge: long, slow-fermented live crème pâtissière in the doughnuts, designed to deliver psychobiotics to the people eating them. Sweet sourdough used as a fibre delivery system, helping people get the 30g a day their gut microbiome needs.
And then the Botanical Blends. Dr Annie Elliot, one of Vanessa’s first Sourdough School Diploma graduates, said that Vanessa’s work on botanical Blend flour is “perhaps the single most groundbreaking change to baking this century.” A multi-grain, multi-herb, multi-flower flour that builds diversity into every bake — the kind of diversity the gut microbiome evolved to thrive on. Sweet Baking is where they were first published.
Tim Spector wrote the foreword. Nigella Lawson called it “impossible to read without wanting to scuttle off into the kitchen.” Diana Henry said Vanessa is “the real deal: a total inspiration.” A GP, a gut health Professor, a world-famous baker, and one of the most respected food writers in the country — all behind this book. Read it and you will understand why.
The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking is an indispensable guide to the techniques and ingredients of successful sweet sourdough baking. A companion to the international bestselling The Sourdough School, it focuses on sweet recipes that are gut-friendly and rely on natural sweetness wherever possible. Classic recipes and new flavour combinations cover sourdough cakes, tarts, pancakes, doughnuts, panettone, pretzels — and as Vanessa likes to say, anything else that rises. There are fermented compotes and syrups to accompany your bakes, an explanation of how sourdough nourishes the gut microbiome and through it the mind, and the launch of Vanessa’s Botanical Blends: a groundbreaking approach to dramatically increasing the diversity of our diet in every single bake.
When you order a signed copy from us, Vanessa signs the book plate herself. We tuck it loose inside the book for you to fix in.
Cost includes UK shipping. If you are outside the UK, please get in touch and we will calculate postage for your country.
