Five Novels That Spark A Craving For Fresh-Baked Bread

We share five comforting novels where bread, small towns, and second chances meet, then walk through a simple sourdough method that drops the rules and keeps the flavor. The joy is in the making, not perfection, and we invite you to bake along with us.

• Jenny Colgan’s Little Beach Street Bakery as coastal escape and renewal
• Evie Woods’s Rue des Paris with magical realism and hidden baker
• A community mystery led by older women after a death on the tracks
• The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living as a Vermont second chance
• Bread Alone trilogy as night-shift healing and craft
• Starter care that lives in the fridge
• The no-fuss formula: 50g starter, 325g water, 500g flour, 11g salt
• Overnight rise, minimal folds, and flexible timing
• Bake at 450°F, covered then uncovered, for a crust that sings
• Realistic results, real pleasure, permission to skip perfection

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Transcript

Jenny Colgan’s Little Beach Street Bakery

The Mysterious Bakery On Rue Des Paris

A Bookstore, A Death, And Older Sleuths

City Baker’s Guide To Country Living

Bread Alone Trilogy And Takeaways

Why Sourdough Doesn’t Need Rules

Starter Care The Easy Way

The No-Fuss Dough Formula

Overnight Rise And Minimal Folding

Bake Setup And Timings

Results, Expectations, And Community Invite

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Novel and Notch, where books and food come together. Today I'm going to share with you five books that will get you in the mood to bake some fresh bread. The first one is The Little Beach Street Bakery series by Jenny Colgan. This was one of my first series that really got me into loving food and books, like reading about food. I really enjoy this series where it's about Polly, and Polly ends up breaking up with her boyfriend, everything goes wrong. She decides to drive away to this small coastal England town, which I mean, wouldn't we all want to do that? She ends up finding an abandoned shop and decides that she is going to create a bakery because the one thing the town does not have is a bakery. It's all about the people in the town and how she ends up just kind of getting her life back together. The second one is the summer at Little Beach Street Bakery, and here she has now moved on to a lighthouse. She's living in a lighthouse, which sounds fascinating to me. There is a pet puffin, and then there is a handsome beekeeper. These stories are a lot of fun. They are just kind of an escape. And definitely, if I were to have to do it all over again, this is kind of the route that I'd want to take. Find that little coastal town, sneak away, start a bakery, and just spend your time making baked goods all the time. The second one is this mysterious bakery on Rue des Paris by Evie Woods. And this is about Evie, and she leaves her town in Ireland because life has just become too much for her, so she wants to start new. And she had seen an advertisement about working at a bakery on Rue des Paris. Now she doesn't speak French, so she thought this was a Paris bakery, but what she did not realize is Rue des Paris actually means road to Paris. So she is now in this small little town with tons of quirky characters, and she is going to be working in this tiny little bakery. She, of course, lives upstairs in the bakery, never gets to see the baker. The baker is downstairs in the basement making delicious treats that she is selling in the bakery. This has magical realism, it's a lot of fun, quirky characters. That's something I always love to read about. And then delicious food. And what happens here, there is Nora, and she owns a bookstore, and she is um great at helping people. If they come in with troubles, she will help find the book that will help kind of heal their, you know, solve their problems or help heal whatever they are um struggling with. So for whatever reason, she's unable to find that book right away. And she has the gentleman come back like the next day, but he never shows up and he's found unalived on the train tracks. So her and a few of the women in the community are gonna try to solve this. And what is fun about this is um they are older women that are solving this crime, this mystery. And then they're also, again, quirky characters. They all have to share what brought them to this town. So what occurred in their life that brought them into this town. So it's a lot of fun. I enjoyed it, and I think you might as well. I think you might be already figuring out a theme to my stories that I enjoy. But the next one is The City Baker's Guide to Country Living by Luis Miller, and this is another one where Olivia is a pastry chef that works in this Boston supper club. She ends up setting a flambe on fire, which then sends the flames into the restaurant and ends up losing her job and has to leave, and she moves to this small town in Vermont. She heads to this town to spend time with her best friend Hannah, and while she's there, kind of escaping life, she ends up being offered a job to work at the Sugar Maple Inn as their pastry chef. So she decides to move in. She ends up living in the sugar house in the back, and it's about her experience there, why she's actually there, and who she ends up meeting in the town, and all of their quirks. And then the last one, this is a three-book trilogy. Um, the first one is Bread Alone by Judith Ryan Hendricks. The next one is The Baker's Apprentice, and then I saw where a third one just came out as well, so I've got to go grab that one. But this was now I mentioned that Jenny Colgan was like kind of my start of food and books, but really honestly, Bread Alone was the very first book I have ever read about books and food, and it did not disappoint. Again, it is one where a woman ends up leaving her hometown because life has just uh become too much, and she is ending a relationship and she moves to Seattle. She ends up becoming a bread maker at the Queen Street Bakery from the first one, and it is about her just kind of starting all over by breaking by baking bread in this bakery, working the night shift, and it just made me, I just loved it. It it is one of those books that will make you want to open a bakery and will make you want to eat some bread right away. So um, these are the five books that I think you will enjoy if you like books about food and especially about bread. And then I want to also share with you how I make sourdough. It is a little bit different because I'm not as picky um with stretch and fold, so this is a quick cheat to making sourdough bread. I want to make sure that you know that you can make sourdough. I know most people are very nervous about making sourdough if you've never made it, and I'm going to try to make this as easy as possible for you. I do want to say that I got the original recipe from the Artisan Sourdough Made Simple by Emily Rafa. And she's the one who I think it's called the Clever Carrot. She also has, yeah, the Clever Carrot is a blog, and she also has a recipe, a sourdough recipe with cinnamon swirl that I I'll put a link for as well. That is so good. But she is kind of where I learned how to make sourdough from, and then I've just over the years I've been making it um years. I've only been making it a little over a year now, but I have gotten to where I've done the lazy way of making sourdough. So hopefully, this will provide you some tips if you're nervous to try it for yourself. Okay, so the first thing that you're going to need is sourdough starter. So a lot of people talk about sourdough starter, how you have to keep it alive and do certain things with it. And I'm gonna be honest with you, I have had sourdough starter now. I I got this from my hairdresser. And if you get some, it is much easier than making your own. So get some, start working with it a little bit, read up on how to keep it alive, and then the thing is, I no longer follow those rules. So I did follow the rules in the beginning to make sure my starter was a strong starter, but now I do not keep it out on the countertop because I live in a very humid area and it just makes me nervous. So, what I do now is I keep this in the fridge at all times. When I'm ready to bake with it, I will pull it out and I'll let it sit on the countertop. Now, this had um not a lot, so I actually added some flour and water to it. I do not measure the flour and water, I put some flour in it, I mix it up, it becomes like this globby paste, and then I add enough water to make it, you know, like a pancake mix. And then you'll see that this is bubbly, so this is ready to bake with. So once your starter is ready to bake with, you are going to need a scale, and you are going to put 50 grams of starter in the bowl. Now, I will let you know that, like I mentioned, I put mine in the refrigerator. I keep it in the refrigerator all week until I need to use it. I take it out and I let it sit on the countertop for just a little bit. Usually it kind of, as it warms up, it'll start to get bubbly. If for some reason it doesn't and it kind of is what I would call lazy, I will then add a little bit of flour in water, stir it up and let it sit out for another hour or two. But honestly, you don't even have to do that because once you add flour and water to your starter, it will reactivate. So you don't need a bubbly starter. It is not a requirement. You can use a starter that is not bubbly and it will just take longer for it to rise. Okay, so I'm going to pour my starter in the bowl. 50 grams of starter. Then I add 325 grams of water. I use a tea kettle where I will always have um water that has been boiled, and then I just let it rest and come back to room temperature there. I will usually, usually use room temperature water. You can also um you can also use slightly warm water. You just don't want it too warm because you don't want it to kill off the bacteria in the starter. So I usually just use room temperature water and it's 325 grams. Then I add 500 grams of flour and 11 grams of salt. I stir that all up. I get my hands in there, I mix to make sure that it's completely mixed up, right? So as much flour and I'll just that's kind of where I'm doing, I wouldn't say stretch and folds, but I'm doing like a little bit of folding over top of each other, just taking um the flour because you know you're gonna have some sticky parts. If for some reason you live in a humid area like myself, you may need to add some additional flour to that sticky um paste. It's not a paste, it's a dough at this point. So you may need to add a little bit of flour. But then you're just gonna set it off to the side. You can, after 30 minutes, once it's rested, you can go back and do stretch and folds. I don't. Like I mentioned, this is the lazy way of doing this. So I don't. I let it sit overnight. In the morning, I make sure that it's risen. Um, it's doubled. If it hasn't doubled, I'll let it sit until it doubles. Sometimes it's in the morning, sometimes it's mid-afternoon. It just kind of depends on, you know, like I mentioned, whether the water was warm enough, one's my starter, what kind of starter I started with. But sometimes it's ready first thing in the morning when I wake up. And I will then take it out, put a little bit of flour on a board, and then that is when I stretch and fold. I stretch and fold, I put it back in the bowl, let it sit for another hour, maybe 30 minutes to an hour, or I'll put it in the fridge, go to work, work all day, come home, take it out. If you put it in the fridge, let it come out to room temperature before you cook it. But if you don't, and you've let it sit on the countertop for like an hour, then you can just put it in the oven. Um, and what I do at that point, I do not heat up my um many people will heat up like their pot that they're using. I don't, like I said, how many times am I gonna say this is a lazy way? Um, I don't heat up my pot before I turn on my oven to 450. If my um bread is in the fridge, I take it out, I let it sit on the countertop. And once the oven comes up to 450, I will then put it in the oven on a piece of parchment paper in a pot. I use a large pot with a lid, I put it in the oven at 450 for 20 minutes. Then I take off the lid and I let it continue to cook for 28 minutes. Simple. It is so simple. I would encourage you to try it. I will let you know that I've also posted a YouTube video of this exact um procedure so you can see how I do it physically if you want to. It's Novel and Nosh on YouTube, YouTube. So you can go there if you want to. You can also um join me in my community. Just head to novelandnosh.com, click on the join the community or the book and bake club. Um, I'm happy to share information if you have questions. But, you know, like I said, I am no pro. I'm just a mom who wanted to bake bread for herself and started working on it and um learned that there are a lot of rules that do not need to be followed, and you'll still have delicious bread. Is it gonna be the amazing bread with the ear and um the crust is beautiful? No, not always, if I'm honest. But it's I mean, we immediately, I mean, we don't immediately cut it because you do need to let it cool down and sit for a little bit, but once once we um have let it rested and cooled down, then I cut it up and it sits in a plastic bag. So it really doesn't matter what it looks like, it all matters what it tastes like. And I believe that this makes a delicious sourdough bread. So I hope you all have a wonderful day. Make sure to join the community, head over to novelandnosh.com for more information, show notes, and links, and um enjoy your day.