I tried to make a sourdough starter about 3 weeks ago and it has been a tumultuous, dramatic relationship. His name is Hitchcock, and with a lot of patience and a commitment to work through our issues, I am happy to say he is stronger than ever. I’m getting a consistent rise and fall, and I’ve made at least 5 or 6 happy loaves of sourdough, all with plain all purpose white flour. I keep my neighbours well fed on carbs. I won’t give you a recipe because there are so many sourdough recipes out there, but personally I used the Clever Carrot as my sourdough starter guide. A lot of people will say to use rye and whole wheat, and while I would have loved to, I just couldn’t find any. We barely found all-purpose. And now that my starter is up and running, I refer to the Perfect Loaf as my bread making guide. I also really like the NYT Tartine recipe.

All that to say, when you’re making sourdough starter, you get a lot of discard. So much discard it feels painful to throw it all away. For a while, I had an entire shelf in the fridge dedicated to discard. Now that I’m keeping Hitchcock in the fridge, I only get get about 200 grams of discard a week, which is perfect for pancakes! Beware, this is an overnight recipe so I feed Hitchcock on Saturday and make this pancake batter then too, meaning we have pancakes on Sunday morning.

Pancake Ingredients

200 g discard
200 g flour
300 g milk
5 g baking soda
5 g salt
15 g sugar
2 eggs

Pancake Instructions

The night before, mix the discard, flour, milk, and baking soda together
Cover in plastic wrap and leave in a warm place (If it scares you to leave milk out overnight, it scares me too but after a lot of internet googling, apparently it’s fine. Also, husband’s family has been doing it for at least 2 generations and they’re all fine so I guess there’s that too.)
The next morning, add in your salt, sugar and eggs.
Fry up on a hot pan. (These aren’t big and fluffy, more like tangy flap jacks, but they’re so good with salted butter and maple syrup.) Enjoy!