Book Review: Sourdough Without Fail

Last October I contributed to a Kickstarter for one of my favorite homesteading authors. The other day I received my rewards copy of her newest book.  

Sourdough Without Fail

by Kate Downham

I've dabbled with sourdough a few times in the past, because if I can master sourdough, I'll never have to buy baking yeast again. I had some success with enough failures to finally give it up. I had two basic problems:

• Amounts, including amounts of flour and water to feed and the amount of starter it made. I always seemed to have way too much.
• Room temperature, which is said to be 68°F to 77°F (20°C to 25°C). Without central heating and cooling, my kitchen only maintains this range in spring and autumn. The rest of the year it's either hotter or colder than that.  

All of that might have been a reason to ignore the Kickstarter and ignore the book. But Kate's books are exceptional in both the information she presents and the way she presents it. Her A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen was fantastic and her Natural Small Batch Cheesemaking is the best book I've ever read on cheesemaking. So in spite of my past sourdough failures, I had every confidence that with Kate's help, I could succeed. 

Sourdough Without Fail is loaded with information I had no idea about. She not only discusses the art of sourdough making, but also the science. The amount of information is almost overwhelming! But Kate's encouraging attitude basically tells the reader, You don't have to actually know all this stuff, it's just here if you ever want it, feel free to jump right in on the recipes. 

With that I turned to page 16 and followed the instructions for making a sourdough starter from scratch. Then I sat down to read through the book. I was delighted that she addresses both of my problems. 

My first problem had been with amounts. Recipes varied quite a bit with the amounts of flour and water to add. Some included a sprinkling of yeast or a bit of sugar. Many recipes had you throwing away most of the starter and feeding only a little bit of it. From Kate I learned that I don't have to be making and feeding large amounts of starter to begin with. Yes, it increases from feeding, but Kate also includes "discard" recipes, i.e. recipes using the starter before it's fully matured, things like crackers, flatbread or pancakes. No waste!

My second problem was with inconsistent room temperature. Kate herself lives off-grid, so she had the answers. I'm learning how to help my starter thrive even when the room is too hot or too cold. An excellent little chart summarizes everything I need to know and do to keep my starter at its best no matter the season. 

More things I'm learning:

• why bakers fail with sourdough
• types of sourdough starters and their feeding ratios
• types of flours and other ingredients
• all about hydration (moisture content) of the dough and how it affects the bread
• stages of sourdough ripeness (and what each is useful for)
• the difference between a starter and a pre-ferment
• tips for mixing, kneading, proofing, baking, and cooling sourdough bread
• baker's percentages

Numerous recipes discuss various types of whole grain flours: rye, wheat, spelt, white, and gluten-free such as buckwheat, oat, rice, quinoa, polenta, and chia. How about scalded flour? That's a new one for me!

What I love about her recipes is that each one presents amounts in a chart for you to select how much you want to make. Since I just cook for two, I don't need 4 loaves, 4 cakes, or 4 dozen muffins very often. Especially not with starter always growing and at the ready. With Kate's charts I can scale down the amounts I bake so that we can have fresh bread and baked goodies whenever we want. 

One word of warning. The photos are in color and are guaranteed to make your mouth water! Seriously, I want to try every one of them.

The book is only available on pre-order at present. You can see it at Amazon here. I believe Kate is planning an announcement and giveaway on Permies later this year, so I'll be sure to let you know when that is. She'll be available then to engage with readers and answer questions.

In the meantime, we'll see if I can have success practicing my newly learned skills. 

Book Review: Sourdough Without Fail © 2026

by Leigh at https://www.5acresandadream.com

The Legacy of Books

 I recently had some of my father's books passed down to me. Not his entire library (he was an avid reader) but a sampling of things it was thought I would enjoy, because I inherited many of my interests from him.

Any of these can be clicked to enlarge, in case you're curious about the titles.

I'm guessing most people have a variety of interests. Some of these change over time and some stay with us for our lifetime. We can pursue them through a variety of means: magazines, clubs, internet content, borrowed books, etc. And then there are the books we collect, the books that make up our personal libraries. 

I can't tell you how much I appreciate that these are print books. I've always been a fan of real books. But when Kindle first came out, I got one. It pushed the popularity of electronic books, so much so that technophiles were saying that digital was the future of books and  print books would soon be obsolete.

I found my Kindle useful for fiction, and I liked the mobility. I could read a book while standing in a long line at the grocery store. But for nonfiction and research, I thought it left much to be desired. It boasted search and note-taking features, but I found these time consuming to use and inconvenient to find things again. I especially missed being able to flip back and forth between passages on several pages. And of course, the device was constantly nagging to be fed, and it was fussy about format. The Kindle will only read mobi formatted books. Other eReaders want different formats. Eventually my Kindle became outdated and obsolete. At that point, all the books I had stored on it were lost to me. That's pretty much when I abandoned digital books.  

My dad's books are part of his legacy to me. They aren't just the outline of his life, i.e. name, dates, places, and major events, rather they document the person he was. A peek into his soul, so to speak. They are a sampling of the things he was interested in, the things he cared about. He listed page numbers in the fly-leafs, underlined passages that spoke to him, and made a few notes in the margins. 

A few of them were my grandparents' books: my grandmother's Gregg Shorthand (1916 revised edition), Applied Mathematics (1939 for a National Defense Training program my grandfather was enrolled in), Child's Christ Tales (1896, a Christmas gift to my 4-year-old grandmother from her mother), and Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey and An Inland Voyage (1916, signed by two of my grandfather's brothers).

All of these are precious to me. They give me a sense of belonging. Rootedness. Groundedness. A sense of my personal heritage. They represent my father's legacy to me. 

What legacy of books will I leave to my children? Gardening, homesteading, permaculture, historical fiction, science fiction, biblical hermeneutics, natural animal care, herbs, historical bibliographies, classical literature, historical farming, traditional skills, DIY, cookbooks, nature identification, food preservation, history, fiber and textile arts. 

Do you have a book legacy to pass on to those behind you? 

The Legacy of Books © 2026 by Leigh

at https://www.5acresandadream.com

Southern Style Celtic Stew

 We've had days of lovely spring-like weather this month. It's highly motivating, until the next front pushes through and reminds us that winter is still here. Our winter menus include a lot of soup for lunch and stews for dinner. It was a recent cold weather menu planning that prompted me to try a variation on one of my ancestral cuisine meals - Celtic Lamb Stew. 

The base recipe for that stew makes it really easy to adapt:

• 1 pound meat
• 1 cup legumes
• 1/4 pound chopped nuts
• 1/4 pound butter
• 1 cup onions
• 1 and 1/2 cups greens
• 3 cups liquid
• 1/2 tbsp salt
• 1/2 tbsp mustard seeds

For the original recipe, I offered two variations: a pre-Roman-invasion version and a post-Roman version. My southern style uses ingredients common to the region of the world I live in, the southeastern U.S.

Southern style Celtic stew and yeast-raised cornmeal rolls

Southern Style Celtic Stew

• 1 pound ground pork
• 1 cup cowpeas (I used homegrown Ozark Razorback)
• 1/4 pound chopped pecans (our premier southern tree nut)
• 1/4 pound butter
• 1 cup chopped onions
• 1 and 1/2 collard greens (from the greenhouse)
• 3 cups water
• 1/2 tbsp salt
• 1/2 tbsp mustard seeds

Soak the peas overnight. Next day, discard the soaking water and rinse the peas. Melt half butter in a stew pot and toast nuts. Add remaining butter and onions, and cook for 5 minutes. Add meat and mustard seeds. Brown meat. Add greens and soaked cowpeas, stir till greens are wilted. Add water. Simmer until the peas are tender, about 40 - 45 minutes.

Recipe notes

• Serves 4 as a main course. We got two meals out of it. Usually, I add any leftovers to the soup pot, but there were no leftovers. 
• The nuts add interesting flavor and a hearty texture without being crunchy. 

Yeast-raised Cornmeal Rolls

Skillet cornbread is typically southern, but I was curious to try a yeast-raised version for something different. The cornmeal is homegrown and home milled.

• 1 cup warm water, milk, or whey
• 2 tsp dried yeast
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 & 1/2 cup corn flour (finer than corn meal)
• 1 & 1/2 cup flour (I used unbleached)
• 1/4 cup softened butter
• 1/2 tbsp salt

I actually mixed the dough in my bread machine. To do it by hand, add the yeast and sugar to the warm liquid and let proof. Then stir in the flours, salt, and butter and mix. Knead well and let rise until doubled. 

Shape rolls and let rise again. Bake 400°F (200°C) for about 15 minutes or until golden brown. Serve plain or with butter.

Recipe notes

• The other thing that's typically southern about cornbread is to add so much sugar so that it tastes more like cake than bread. Most people love this, but I don't. Unless I'm eating it for dessert, I want my cornbread to taste like corn, especially because cornmeal from homegrown corn is exceptionally tasty. Eating chili or stew with cake doesn't appeal to me. My skillet cornbread contains no sugar, and for this recipe, I used only enough to feed the yeast. 
• This doesn't rise as much as wheat bread dough, but it rises well enough for a good texture.

With our temps gradually creeping upward, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be serving stews and soups. We haven't tired of them yet, but I am looking forward to daily fresh garden salads when growing season arrives.

What about you? Does your menu change with the seasons? Any favorites you'd care to share?

Southern Style Celtic Stew © 2026 by Leigh

at https://www.5acresandadream.com