It’s hard to believe that it’s Christmas again, and another year has flown by. Last year, I was recovering from completing my doctorate. This year, I feel I’ve truly grown into being Dr Kimbell.
I’m excited to be introducing three new services to my work in the New Year: consultations for nutrition and digestibility, genetic testing to optimise bread for people’s unique genetic profiles, and a new gut microbiome test. This will allow my students to have their gut health assessed so that we can create and personalise the breads for their specific needs. I’ll officially announce these services in the New Year, but they’ve been a fascinating focus of my work of late
In the meantime, I’ve been busy writing, updating The Sourdough School book that I wrote a decade ago. The updated edition will be out in October 2025, and I can’t wait to share it with you.
Also, I want to introduce you to one of my major projects this year: Triple X, a new botanical blend flour. This flour is packed with polyphenols and diversity. It’s specifically developed to enhance any bake – simply replace 10% of the flour in your recipe, whether it’s for bread, pastry, pasta, puddings, pies, or of course, sourdough bread, to optimise nourishment. It has wonderful notes of cocoa, coffee, black barley, and rye. I can’t recommend it highly enough – it’s good for you and your bakes!
As we approach the holidays, I think it’s important to take a moment to be thankful. Thankful for our health, for the quiet moments baking can bring to calm the mind, for slow mornings with jam, cold salted butter, and freshly baked bread. For the simple joys – the ability to visit a bakery, stop and savour a great baking book, or rest without guilt. And of course, for the fibre in your bread that helps balance blood sugar and ensure a good night’s sleep. Let’s not forget the beauty of calm and “boring” days.
In all seriousness, it’s been a privilege this year to teach, share, and be inspired by so many incredible bakers. As always, I’m struck by their kindness and generosity, and the joy they bring to baking great bread.
I know this year, like many others, has had its challenges – rising food prices, political changes, and the pressures on farmers, to name a few. Sometimes, life can feel, well, a little overwhelming. My advice? Turn off the radio. Step away from the news. Immerse yourself in baking. Get your hands into the dough, create something beautiful, and share it with the people you love. In the end, that’s what truly counts.
Book Review: The Irish Bakery
The book for bakers this Christmas
This beautiful book on Irish baking is widely admired by cookery authors and home bakers alike. After having sold out of its first print-run in lightening speed last Christmas, I'm happy to tell you that The Irish Bakery is available once again and is, I would venture, the perfect gift for the baker in your life (which might well be you!).
The Irish Bakery is a sizeable work, the bread section alone being 70 pages long, with Scones and Biscuits, Tarts and Pies, Cakes, and Puddings being given their own similarly chunky sections in the book. To say the reader is given a great choice of recipes is to under egg the pudding somewhat. We could soon be baking many sorts of soda bread, sweet and savoury; farls; Honeyed Oaten Bread; Tea Brack; Dulse and Cheddar Scones; Fennel and Sea Salt Oat Cakes; Mince and Potato Pie; Strawberry and Rhubarb Crumble Tarts or Caraway Seed Cake, to name just a happy few. Oh, and Sticky Date and Guinness Pudding with Warm Whiskey Sauce, because you deserve to know that one is in there. I am delighted to be serving this beauty alongside my traditional Christmas pudding this year, and I feel certain that I will find the staunch pudding traditionalists of the household helping themselves to a sly spoonful when they think they won't be noticed.
Cherie says in her introduction that she intended to collect and present recipes that are the "staples of the Irish home baker"; but she gives us so much more than this. Reminding us of Ireland's history of baking, shaped by its natural surroundings and resources (for example, a richness of pastureland culminating in the dairy products, buttermilk particularly, so important to Irish baking), we are introduced to artisans from all over Ireland who take their place in the jigsaw of quality food production from around the island. We meet the home cooks too, with decades of experience in the kitchen and memories passed down from even longer before, and we are lucky enough to hear their stories and to enter their homes. The photography in the book captures these characters and their surroundings so poignantly that you might feel you've been visiting. In fact, the photography is a strength throughout the book, the images evocative, luring the reader in.
We have been generously gifted two recipes from the book to share with you, Traditional Christmas Mincemeat Slices and Guinness Bread, both of which are perfect for a festive table. The Guinness Bread is a gorgeous recipe, a nourishing soda bread full of fibre with its use of coarsely ground wholewheat flour, buttermilk and, of course, Guinness. This bread is perfect for making over the Christmas period, when you might need an extra loaf at short notice, and is fantastic with smoked fish and cheese, and also with salted butter and your best fruit preserves for breakfast. The Mincemeat Bakewells need no introduction. Here Cherie has created a simple crossover of the traditional mincemeat slice with the fragipane of Bakewell tarts, a combination that should convince many mince pie sceptics.
Named winner of Cookbook of the Year 2024 by both the Irish Food Writing Awards and the Food and Travel Magazine Reader Awards, this year has been a busy one for Cherie Denham and Andrew Montgomery. It is particularly satisfying to see an independently published book become so successful, with both the writing and photography at such a high standard and the production values throughout this publication. This book comes highly recommended, and if you are quick about it, you can grab this before Christmas in the knowledge that the New Year will be cosier and much more delicious for it.
Christmas Gift Inspiration
Vanessa's Top 20 Tools for Successful Sourdough Baking
I am Lisa, and I am the Club magazine editor, and this year I asked Vanessa what she would recommend to bakers for Christmas. Here's what Vanessa said. If you are giving a gift to a sourdough baker this Christmas, make it count and choose something that will last the test of time. Here are Vanessa's favourite products, some old, some new, some delicious; and they all work.
Under £10
Flour, a great place to start, and with Vanessa's firm favourites, Bruern Strong Wholemeal Flour and Bruern Strong White Flour. Bruern Farms in Oxfordshire produce superb quality flours from heirloom grains that are traditionally stoneground onsite at Bruern Mill. "The provenance of our grain is key... Local to us means being able to show you the field the grain came from."
A classic gift option comes in the form of a Sourdough School Baking Kit. These kits contain all the ingredients and a recipe needed for making either a Focaccia 0r a Seeded Loaf, and can be ordered as a one-off delivery or as a monthly subscription, for the recipient to incorporate these healthy breads into their regular baking schedule.
Other ingredients from The Sourdough School that are great for gifting are the Seed Mix and the Spice Blend. These blends have been formulated for nutrition and taste, and can be added to bread recipes for a boost in fibre and an extra taste and textural dimension.
Under £50
Netherton Foundry in Shropshire is a small family business, designing and building quality cast and spun iron kitchenware. Their range of iron cookware is innovative, modern classics, and Vanessa has chosen the Netherton Foundry Iron Bread Tin
and their 2lb Loaf Tin Baking Cloche as being key pieces for the sourdough baker. The latter is especially neat, with two iron loaf tins that can be locked together to form a loaf shaped cloche oven, to ensure great loaf-spring while it bakes. The 2 locking loaf tins can also be used as separate moulds, making this product very reasonably priced and optimally functional.
If you browse the Sourdough Club and Sourdough School websites, you will find photos of the bakery lined with many glass storage jars in different shapes and sizes containing grains, flours, seeds, spices, beans and botanicals all at Vanessa's fingertips to be used in her bakes. It is unlikely that we'll need quite so many jars in our domestic kitchens, but these Nkuku Glass Storage Jars are Vanessa's favourite and it is easy to see why. These recycled glass jars are all hand blown, attraactively shaped being bulbous at the base and narrowing at the neck, with mango wood airtight lids to keep ingredients fresh and dry. Pantries have never looked so inviting with these jars.
For other handsome additions to the kitchen, do consider one of the small wooden handheld tools that are used daily at The Sourdough School. The Handmade Wooden Spatula and the Handmade Wooden Spurtle are both very effective for the initial mixing of doughs. While the Handmade Wooden Walnut Lame ensures effective scoring of doughs with ease. All of these tools are ergonomically designed, easy to grip and lightweight, becoming an extension of the baker's hands.
£100 or there abouts
The Netherton Foundry Bread Pan is to sourdough boule-baking what the 2lb loaf cloche is to tin bread baking. The Netherton Bread Pan is made from lightweight spun iron, comprised of a thick griddle base with handles and a cloche that sits on top. The bread pan locks in steam to promote an initial dramatic burst for your sourdough boule as it bakes and ensures even baking throughout. This is an elegant and effective solution to the clumsier elements of using a Dutch oven as a cloche for baking, as with this cloche you load your dough onto a flat griddle which eliminates those pesky burns that come from lowering your dough into a scorching pre-heated high-sided pan.
For something completely different, you might consider the Goldie by Sourhouse a present to your starter itself, as this is a compact, perfectly warm home for it to live and grow in. In cold kitchens, Goldie eliminates uncertainty over environment and keeps your starter at the temperature you want for your baking schedule. with optimal fermentation made easy. Similarly, the Brod and Taylor Sourdough Home works along similar lines, providing the perfect environment for your starter to thrive.
Deluxe and Delightful
The Challenger Bread Oven Pan is famous in the sourdough baking world, with endorsements by many famous bakers and a hot profile on social media. This is a cast iron lidded baking pan, bigger and heavier than the Netherton cloche which is something to keep in mind if you find heavy pans hard on your wrists. However, its size does make it suitable for baking all shapes of loaves. This is a statement piece that will transform the oven-spring of your loaves, and it is a beauty to have around in the kitchen too.
Win a copy of The Irish Bakery
Win a copy of our book of the season, The Irish Bakery by Cherie Denham! This month we would like to see photos of your festive bakes destined to be given as gifts. To be in with a chance of winning this book, please send your photos and a short description of the bake to [email protected]
In the New Year's edition of the Sourdough Club Magazine, we take a closer look at the world of fermentation and what it has to offer us within our diets. Look foward to some delicious recipes for ferments and pickles, the perfect partners to our sourdough bread, to help us beat post-Christmas sluggishness and support our health. Discover new books on fermentation to take your techniques to the next level.
Merry Christmas, and see you in 2025!
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