Newsletter: 🍞 A spotlight on sourdough + celebrating Australian community cookbooks📚

🍞 A spotlight on sourdough + celebrating Australian community cookbooks📚

🍞 Celebrate Real Bread Week & Save 25% on ckbk subscriptions!🥖

Learn from the best for
Real Bread Week

Esteemed professional bread instructor Michael Kalanty honed his teaching methods over years teaching students at the artisan bread course he designed at the California Culinary Academy. He has a unique approach, breaking the subject down into different ‘families’ of bread, and then carefully setting out a structured process which can be adapted to all breads within that family. When he set down this highly successful approach into two educational texts, he hardly expected to win Best Bread Book in the World at the Gourmand awards for his debut, but win it he did!

We have been fascinated to work with Michael to release a new and updated version of his second text How to Bake Sourdough Bread. We spoke to Michael about the reasoning behind his singular approach and how much it delights him when novice bakers find success thanks to his formulas. He also talks us through how the book can work for you, whatever stage you are at on your sourdough journey.

After a general introduction, the book leads with detailed step by step instructions on creating and maintaining a starter, building a levain, and then making sourdough bread.

Using Pain au Levain as his master recipe, he walks you through from starter beginnings to finished loaf, after which there are additional recipes and formulas for different types of bread. As he puts it:

‘The collection of breads are all based on the same process so that once you have mastered the Pain au Levain, you will have confidence to take on any of the other breads. And you have a high probability of turning out a successful bread at the end.’

How to Bake Sourdough Bread offers the reader all the benefits of a detailed and structured approach refined by the considerable know-how and experience of this great baker and educator.

Armed with that knowledge and for more great recipes you could go on to explore our bread bookshelf.

Read our Q&A with Michael Kalanty

Pictured above: Rosemary Raisin Bread from How to Bake Sourdough Bread by Michael Kalanty

Community cookbooks—a great Australian tradition

‘the books that best reflect what many Australians cooked and ate at home for most of the twentieth century were put together by people you have never heard of, usually in the name of helping others. Known as community cookbooks, these publications have raised what is likely to amount to millions of dollars for Australian charities and causes.’ Liz Harfull

Bestselling author and chronicler of rural and regional Australian food and community histories, Liz Harfull learned to cook from recipes gathered together from family and neighbours. Whether created informally and organically, or through organised collaboration, community cookbooks are at the heart of cooking culture and recipes in the South Australia that Liz grew up in.

Documenting these recipes, and Australian farming and country shows, resulted in The Blue Ribbon Cookbook, which went on to be a runaway bestseller.

Francene Connor, a marketing consultant and an enthusiastic ckbk user, has known Liz Harfull, for many years. Francene told ckbk, “I first came to know Liz when she was a journalist for the South Australia-based Stock Journal and I was running publicity for the Royal Adelaide Show”. Francene later went on to act as a recipe-tester for Harfull’s most recent book Tried, Tested and True: Stories and Recipes Celebrating the Traditions of Australian Community Cookbooks,

Now newly added to ckbk, Tried, Tested and True continues this work, bringing us stories about the creation of these precious books, and recipes annotated with details of their origins and top tips from Liz.

Try Weiner Schnitzel, followed by Rum and Coffee Pavlova.

There is also some excellent home baking—who could resist this recipe for Cream Puffs.

Find all 56 recipes from Tried, Tested and True

Tech Tip: Printing in the iOS app

Good news for iPhone/iPad users—you can now print recipes directly from the app. Just visit the app store and upgrade to the latest version to benefit from this latest improvement.

Ingredient focus: bananas

The banana is a fruit from the tropics, with its origins in South East Asia. It is likely that there have been edible bananas for many thousands of years. Their history is complex, as is their biology. The banana ‘tree’ is actually a form of perennial herb, with the capacity to grow a new ‘trunk’ annually. This trunk is a column of tightly wrapped leaves that is much less stable than a true tree trunk, and prone to suffering under the weight of fruit.

Bananas grow in ‘hands’, of between ten and twenty bananas that grow in a half spiral around a stem. While there are many varieties of banana, most of those eaten in temperate countries are similar, one of a few types that ship well and meet acquired expectations of banana looks and taste.

Bananas are very good raw, rich in fibre and carbohydrate. They are a vital component of that universally loved bake Banana Bread, but they are also highly adaptable in sweet and savory dishes. Try Chicken and Banana Korma, this Caramelised Banana Breakfast Parfait, or any of these recipes in our collection of 12 Ways with Bananas.

6 of the best loaves

This week it is Real Bread Week, an annual celebration of the great joy that is proper bread—made with good ingredients, time and care. To get you started, here are 6 lovely loaves.