The Sweet Side of Sourdough: 50 Irresistible Recipes for Pastries, Buns, Cakes, Cookies, and More

There's more to sourdough baking than the big flavorful loaves of bread Americans have been turning out lately. In this book, Caroline Schiff, the pastry chef at NYC's Gage & Tollner and famous on Instagram as @pastryschiff, provides a practical and inspiring introduction to the possibilities of sourdough sweets.

"Sourdough and I were frenemies for a long time," Schiff notes to reassure those who may have had some unhappy starts with sourdough baking. She shares her very practical approach to creating and maintaining a starter and even includes recipes for using the discarded starter that is inevitably part of the sourdough process.

Her recipes for using the actual starter run the gamut from a lemon-poppy-cream-cheese babka and a peach and ricotta foccacia to a carmelized-grapefruit and brown sugar cake muffins and a blood orange and hazelnut crumb cake. Although she is clearly making use of the subtle flavors that sourdough introduces, her imaginative combinations would be striking no matter what type of leaven she used.

Impressive.

Paperback. Color photographs throughout.