Reddit reviews Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur: A Cookbook

I don't know of any "brands" of sourdough starter. It's ridiculously easy to make your own. Mix water and flour together and tend to it. Eventually you'll have a wild yeast colony you can maintain.

If your starter is sour, it means that the yeast are starving. You do not really want your starter to be super sour. That said, it's not the starter's sourness that determines the sourness of the bread. You need to allow your bread the time to ferment. This is where it's going to develop its dynamic and characteristic flavors.

If you're interested in sourdough baking at home, I would recommend reading Nancy Silverton's Breads from La Brea Bakery

My SO has been brewing for 4 years and has now also gotten into breakmaking; we're now looking into making our own yeast starter for the bread (commercial yeast only rises so much). This is a great book if you're interested in making bread yeast starters: Nancy Silvertons Breads From The La Brea Bakery

I got so tired of looking for good bagels in the city that I decided to learn to make them myself.

It is a multi-day process and you need a pretty heavy duty mixer, but [this book(
https://www.amazon.com/Nancy-Silvertons-Breads-Brea-Bakery/dp/0679409076/) is in the central library and I use a modified version of its bagel recipe.

I also quickly realized that learning to bake starting with Bagels what's like trying to start mountain climbing by scaling Everest, but dammit I wasn't going to be without good bagels.

Breads from the La Brea Bakery is also very good.

The key to brunch for me is the mix of sweet and savory foods. This panini dish definitely walked that line perfectly. I didn’t make the suggested waffles, opting for the sourdough waffles from Nancy Silverton’s La Brea Bakery book. We have been making these waffles for years and I’ve never had better. In a nod to the recipe, I added some maple syrup to the batter and it was actually really great. I will definitely be adding syrup to this batter in the future. The final dish was really interesting. I liked the punch of mustard that was slathered onto the waffles. The only thing I would like would be to find a way to make the paninis more crispy. They were pretty soggy.

For my MetaTheme, I went for the classic brunch cocktail, a Bellini. I liked this recipe because it wasn’t overly sweet or syrupy. The peach puree (had to buy this online because the peaches here aren’t very good at the moment) was nicely tart. I added a splash of simple syrup to sweeten it up a little. Next time I think I will go for some Cava instead of Prosecco so it has a built-in sweetness and there is no need for added sugar.

Here’s the link to the book Nancy Silverton’s

Nancy Silverton's book gives the step-by-step.