My book is out! A book? What book? Since October 2024 I have been working on a book called The Baker’s Percentage about how to make sourdough bread at home. A culmination of over 15 years of home baking led to this. But how it came about was also pure serendipity, for, a few years back, I attended a yoga class in Hepburn, met an editor there & asked for their number at the post yoga drinks event we all attended.

Then, during Covid I noticed absolutely heaps of people were baking sourdough bread at home. It was so fascinating to see how when time permitted, communities all over the world, were expressing a deep love for sourdough bread baking.  I was also following and still follow a Facebook page dedicated to sourdough bakers and saw all the questions people were asking on that page and all the answers I wanted to give. So a few years after that chance yoga editor meeting I called the editor and blurted out my desire for a book… unbeknown to me the editor I had called said “ah yes I was trying to bake sourdough during Covid as well with mixed results’ and as I explained my book idea & it’s contents, they said ‘perhaps you should call the book The Baker’s Percentage’ and I said ‘yes!’ absolutely ‘yes!’ and finally after doing my full spiel I realised that I was not talking to just an editor but I was speaking with a publisher who publishes cooking books among other genres!

Ralf & I after a cherry harvest. One of the few photos I have of us.

Well! Had I known all that prior to the call I would have been very nervous and my pitch would have surely come out less lucid and articulate. Within 24 hours of that call I had put my pitch in writing, sent it to my dear friend Amber Stephens in Melbourne for review and feedback, she sent it back asap with the most loving and enthusiastic support and hence off it went, the pitch, into the email box of Smith St publishing. From there the publisher made the process soooo amazing and easy that I can’t stop thanking them.

But the bread baking journey started such a long time ago, well before Covid & a chance meetings at a yoga class… it all started with my beautiful inspiring friend Lise Temple, more on this in the book & even before Lise with my partner Ralf who worked at a sourdough bread bakery in Melbourne. In fact, I just realised something just now as I write this…sourdough bread led me to Ralf, my love of 25 years… for I met Ralf on Rushall Crescent Melbourne, I was 27 and he was this absolutely gorgeous young man holding sourdough bread in his arms as a gift for our share house, and on that day, when I answered the door, I was in one of my super extroverted moods and could not stop talking with him and invited him in for long chats and a look at my brand new sustainable architecture books! Ha!