The Beginner's Guide to Sourdough: Best-Kept Secrets for Successful Bread Every Time

by Amy Coyne

A Masterclass in Sourdough

Discard your worries with this ultimate beginner’s guide to sourdough baking! Sourdough enthusiast Amy Coyne has harnessed her decade of experience and compiled her best tips, tricks, and customizable baking schedules in this collection of 50 family-friendly recipes. With long-form bakes containing step-by-step photos and links to video tutorials, anyone will be able to make sourdough without breaking a sweat.

Organized to optimize success, each chapter allows you to master a different element of

- Kick-start your journey with everything you need to know on starter.

- Craft your first sourdough loaves with confidence using approachable bakes like Easy Crusty Sourdough or Soft Rosemary Bread.

- Conquer artisanal favorites from Everything Bagel Loaves to Chocolate Cherry Sourdough.

- Bake delicious everyday sandwich loaves like Fluffy White Sandwich Bread and Honey Oatmeal Sourdough.

- Shape savory showstoppers from Classic Dinner Rolls to Sourdough Garlic Knots.

- Master stiff-levain treats like The Best Cinnamon Rolls, Caramel Pecan Monkey Bread, or Raised Sourdough Donuts.

- Never let anything go to waste with clever discard recipes.

Whether you want to take a crack at your first starter or broaden your bread baking repertoire, Amy has created a one-stop shop for beginning or continuing your sourdough journey.

Genres: Cookbooks

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 16, 2025

Reviews

[Karen Duvall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I follow her on social media and had to have her book as a beginner sourdough-er. i still have a long way to go, but I love discard recipes and she has a few!

[Squirrel]

So much really good info, and helpful images.

A few caveats - are most readers going to run out and buy a gram scale? Do most readers maintain a 70 degree kitchen?

The pictures don't always lay out with the text they're associated with. This gets confusing - looking at 4 shots of starter, having to figure out which images match which paragraphs. That's NOT helpful for a 'beginner'.

---more to come---

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very comprehensive and thorough guide to sourdough. While it says “beginner’s guide,” it covers a lot of information and also progresses through “bakes,” teaching you how to begin your sourdough journey from growing a starter, through your first loaf, and then more advanced loaves and also how to use sourdough discard in your recipes. Every single recipe includes a full-page, full-color picture of the finished product. Most of the recipes also include smaller but still full-color recipes for individual steps throughout the recipes. There are also included QR codes for several of the steps that link to videos to show you a visual process of the coordinating steps. Each recipe begins with an introduction and includes a list of special equipment (if needed), a baker’s schedule, the ingredients, and detailed step-by-step instructions, some with photos and QR codes, as mentioned. Every recipe spans multiple pages because of how thorough and comprehensive the instructions are, and I love this. The further into the book we progress, each recipe is still detailed and 2+ pages (not including the main photo), but the earlier, beginning, explanatory recipes are very detailed to help you learn the process of sourdough and what exactly to do and to expect. The baker’s schedule I have found to be extremely helpful in planning out my bakes and when I need to start different steps or when things should be ready. It is a guide and not exact, but knowing a timeline for each recipe for the ones I’ve tried so far has already been extremely helpful and made me feel much less stressed if things aren’t exactly ready but has helped me know what to watch for and the best times to do things and to work them into my day so that sourdough doesn’t “run my life” (like I’ve seen plenty of reels make fun of people who bake sourdough for! Ha ha!!). There’s a wonderful section with discard recipes, and this section also teaches how to adjust any recipe that you would like to add sourdough discard to. Amy Coyne’s most viral sourdough croissant loaf recipe is not in this book, and I would have loved to see it included in the later bakes/more intermediate/advanced loaves (it’s a phenomenal loaf of bread!!!), but the recipe is readily available on her Instagram and website. Honestly, the only downside to this book was that every recipe was described as their family favorite, so I’m sure that’s why she picked them all. It was just like reading the same intro to each recipe. :) I am really looking forward to trying every single recipe in this book. I’ve already tried multiple from this book (from her website/Instagram) and learned why my dough from following other recipes was so much stickier and how to prevent that and my loaves have improved even more since taking the time to read through all of Amy’s information about the science behind the steps and how sourdough works. Yes, I read this entire cookbook from beginning to end. It’s really well thought out and put together and with amazing information to back all of the delicious recipes! I really hope Amy makes a followup cookbook with even more of her amazing sourdough creations!