While working as a horticulturist in Brooklyn, Sarah Owens faced digestion issues with whole grains and turned to vegetable fermentation for probiotics, discovering sourdough's prebiotic benefits for digestibility and nutrition. She experimented extensively, challenging the gluten-free trend by emphasizing ingredient transparency.
Her innovative baking with diverse grains and flours led to this cookbook — now released in a 10th anniversary edition — as a way to document her cottage bakery's artisan loaves and promote fermentation's ties to soil health and flavor. The book demystifies sourdough starters for home bakers, highlighting baker's math (percentage-based recipes) and seasonal variations in starters.