Anita Šumer - Sourdough Mania

SOURDOUGH MANIA

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO SOURDOUGH BAKING

Anita umer

Grub Street London

Thank you!

I dont know where to start: there are so many people I would like to thank for their help and encouragement in baking and in creating my first book!

First of all, I wish to express a huge thank you to my late husband Sao: it is thanks to you that I started baking bread and pastry. Thank you for all your advice and understanding, None of this would have been possible without your support and help. When I was having doubts, you quickly chased them away.

Thank you to my family , especially my mother and grandmother , who, from my earliest childhood, have awakened in me a love for cooking and baking.

From the bottom of my heart, I would also like to thank all my friends, who have collectively managed to eat large quantities of baked breads and pastries.

Thank you, dear Barbara , for all your help and support throughout my sourdough journey, as well as for all your friendly editorial advice.

Thank you, Primo , for the great photos, conversations, laughter and sessions dedicated to eating bread.

Thank you, dear Manca , for a wonderful redesign of this hugely successful book!

David , thank you for the section on cereals.

Thank you, Miriam , for your editing and advice.

I would also like to thank Dr. Janez Bogataj and Brigita Rajter for their professional reading and critique of the book.

Thank you very much to all the supporters in the Facebook group Droomanija ( sourdough_ mania ) I believe that more and more of us are getting into the baking spirit every day.

Thank you to the media who have wished and still want to meet me. To all of us, spreading the love for sourdough baking around the world.

Thank you to my sponsors , Puratos, SPAR Slovenia, Miele Slovenia, Spilars Mill and EKO365, companies that have made this publication possible through their support.

Together, we have succeeded in creating a unique book. Thank you very much!

Thanks to all the sourdough maniacs and those of you who are about to become one.

A hearty and fragrant sourdough greeting,

The extraordinary success of the Slovenian first edition of this book is so remarkable that it has surprised everyone. Although we had secretly hoped the book would sell like hot cakes, we never imagined that it would have sold out in only three months after its release on 7 December 2017, or that we would sell almost 7,000 books so far. Thank you, dear sourdough lovers, for spreading Sourdough Mania together with us!

This is the third edition of Sourdough Mania, which has been updated and extended with new photography, two new chapters and an index.

Sourdough Mania is a project I started with the support and encouragement of my late husband Sao. Sourdough baking had become a way of life for us that we loved to spread to others, and I will continue to do so in his memory. Together we organised more than 80 workshops attended by more than 1,000 participants, each time in a location carefully selected for its friendliness and warmth. These locations have contributed to making our sourdough workshops an unforgettable experience, and fortunately there is no shortage of them in our beautiful country.

We have also shared our knowledge abroad, where I am more and more often invited. My husband and I have travelled to several foreign countries: in September 2017 we accepted an invitation to Lisbon, in Portugal; in November of the same year we baked in Moscow; in January and February 2018 we took sourdough with us to Jamaica, in the Caribbean. In March I flew with my sourdough to Asia, first to Singapore and then Thailand. In April 2018 we proved that baking with sourdough can bring neighbours closer together: a workshop in Zagreb delighted the Croatians. After a brief rest, we flew to the UK and Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeares birthplace, where we held a workshop. In September 2018, our journey took us to the Netherlands, where the Dutch got excited about sourdough in a workshop in Amsterdam.

Our journey took us to Paris in March 2019, where the Sourdough Mania book was exhibited at the UNESCO premises at the Gourmand World Summit.

Namely, the book Sourdough Mania was the Slovenian winner of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in two categories: Bread and Charity Fundraising and ranked among the nine best books for 2019 in these categories. In Macau, China, the book was voted the best bread book in the world and also received a charity fundraising prize (Europe).

In this short period of time, the number of my followers on Instagram (@ sourdough_mania) jumped to more than 80,000. And all the videos posted online ( Daily Mail , Business Insider UK, UNILAD, BuzzFeed and others) had already exceeded 40 million views. At the same time, the number of sourdough enthusiasts in Slovenia increased significantly. I hope this is partially due to this easy-to-understand, richly illustrated book.

Our Droomanija (Sourdough_Mania) Facebook group now has more than 22,000 members! When I see the enthusiasm for making bread, sharing tips and helping each other, I am really proud because it fulfils the aim of the book: to spread the love and passion for this healthy baking style.

We decided not only to meet through virtual social networking but also to meet in person, to shake hands, to be able to exchange experiences and tips live. With the support of sponsors and partners, we organised the first Slovenian meeting for sourdough enthusiasts on 12 October 2019 in Mislinja, in Carinthia, and about 500 people participated in this event. The whole day was dedicated to sourdough, with expert lectures presented by Karl de Smedt from the Puratos company and Brigita Rajter from the Slovenj Gradec Carinthian Regional Museum, a demonstration of decoration with Morgan Clementson, a short documentary The Forgotten Recipe by JRVisuals production company, and stalls with baking products and ingredients. We were pleasantly surprised by the response from the visitors, which gives us hope that this meeting will become traditional.

More and more people are paying attention to the bread they eat. So invite your friends, acquaintances and relatives, gift them a loaf of bread and share the sourdough with them so that the enthusiasm for sourdough will win them over too! By sharing this knowledge about the quality of sourdough, we ensure its wide dissemination.

Your baker,

Anita umer

This very precise Slovenian proverb simply confirms that making bread requires knowledge. If it is not flour that makes bread but the hand, it means that the hand is guided by knowledge. And it is precisely this knowledge that has enabled our ancestors to make bread. The more we look back to our distant historical past, the more unknowns come to light, even about the food we today refer to as bread. It is now generally accepted that the oldest bread was made of only flour and water. Some researchers consider, for example, the flat, essentially round, yeast-free Slovenian flat bread known as mlinci as one of the oldest methods for making and shaping bread. Yeast, or specifically brewers or bakers yeast, brought about a new development in bread and bakery culture much later, and began to dominate from the second half of the 19th century.