Heirloom Time-Honored Techniques, Nourishing Traditions, and Modern Recipes

Where cooking and baking traditions meet contemporary flavors—120 deeply nourishing, seasonal recipes and a guide to the plants and traditional preserving techniques that inspire them.

Sarah Owens is a horticulturalist, baker and a cook with an insatiable curiosity for global food traditions. Her reverence for plants fuels her passion for bringing out their best flavors in the kitchen. In Heirloom she presents ingredient-focused cooking and bread baking that emphasizes sourcing quality ingredients and relies on traditional techniques that extend the use of in-season produce and fresh food.

Organized into two parts, you'll discover the building blocks for inspired food. Part One explores traditional preservation techniques from fermenting and pickling to dehydrating, working with sourdough, and making broth, butter, yogurt, and whey. Part Two becomes a full expression of ingredients and techniques: recipes that are nourishing, flavorful, and satisfying. With recipes that layer flavors in rich and unique ways and that reflect the seasons, the dishes here are comforting, surprising, and give a feeling of abundance. Heirloom is a personal book that shares Owens' unique perspectives and stories on food.

SARAH OWENS is a cookbook author, baker, professional horticulturist, and instructor. She was awarded a James Beard Award for her first book, Sourdough, and released her second book, Toast and Jam, in 2017. Sarah believes strongly in the power of baking to foster community and social change; she is an advocate of sustainable agricultural practices to rebuild global grain sheds and believes stone milling can bring good bread back to the table. As a teacher of nourishing food traditions, she travels globally to encourage an interest in fermentation and has helped establish a bakery in Tripoli, Lebanon, working with Syrian refugees, as well as an annual Fermentation Summit in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her own subscription-based business and workshop space is Ritual Fine Foods (formerly BK17 Bakery), where she teaches the alchemy and digestive benefits of natural leavening.