The Complete Sourdough Cookbook

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing intro to sourdough breads
Review: Excellent recipes. Our family was brought up on "the old doctors sourdough bread"and it's our granddaughter's favorite.The english muffins and the pizza dough are well worth trying.The chocolate cake is superb.The anecdotes make for easy reading.I just bought two copies as our original-bought in the early seventies is just about worn out.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing intro to sourdough breads
Review: I bought this book hoping to get started making my own sourdough bread. Instead, I found a mildly interesting collection of anecdotes, lore, and "recipes" concerning the history of sourdough in the American West. The instructions for making a starter were vague and brief. Most of the recipes called for commercial yeast anyway, making me wonder if the starter was even responsible for any rising that took place. I tried 5 of the recipes in the book and found them all to be bland and disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: Great basic recipes
Review: I have several sour dough recipe books, this is one I use most often. My husband loves the banana nut bread, chocolate cake and pancakes from this book.

Rating:
Summary: Good stories, not so good recipes
Review: If you want an interesting book about the lore of sourdough - and the experiences of Don and Myrtle Holm, this is a great book.

If you want authentic, useable, sourdough recipes this is not your best choice. All the recipes use baker's yeast in them. Baker's yeast wasn't available to the sourdoughs who made sourdough famous, and it doesn't belong in sourdough.

Don and Myrtle admit you can make sourdough without adding baker's yeast, but they get vague on the details. I'd rather stick to a purist approach to sourdough and just use sourdough to raise and flavor my bread, and for that goal, this book was disappointing.

Instead, look at the books by Ed Wood, Peter Reinhart, or Allan Scott and Dan Wing.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: This is a nice little book, with Don Holm's humor & interesting stories regarding Sourdough Lore. The recipes are pretty good, too. Well worth the price!