Sourdough Discard Pancakes

Sourdough Discard

If you maintain a starter, then you’re familiar with the continual need to “feed the starter”. This is where you provide the starter with fresh flour to keep the cultures active. To keep the starter size under control, a portion of the unfed starter is discarded.

Sourdough discard is best used in recipes where you want sourdough flavour and do not need leavening. They’re commonly found in recipes such as: pancakes, waffles, quickbreads, crackers, pizza.

Pancakes

Pancakes are a great way to use sourdough discard.

The acidity of the starter reacts with baking soda to leaven the batter.

The high hydration starter works well for pancake batter, whereas other baked goods would require additional flour, making this a highly efficient recipe to use up discard. Nothing is worse than trying to use up an ingredient and introducing 3 more ingredients that are perishable as well.

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Sourdough Discard Pancake:

This recipe was adapted from What’s Cooking America. I’ve converted the units to weights and scaled it to a single serving.

Recipe

Ingredient	Baker’s Percentage (%)	One egg recipe (g)	Single serving (g)
flour, from starter	100	250	50
water, from starter	100	250	50
sugar	12	30	6
egg	20	1 egg	10 g (can use a touch of egg white or omit)
oil	20	50	10
salt	1	2.5	0.5
baking soda	2	5	1.0 (less than 1/4 tsp)

This assumes a 100% hydration starter. Calculations are based off the flour portion of the starter. There are no additional liquids in the recipe, the 100% hydration starter provides both flour and water.

If needed, can add some flour to increase the viscosity, which will result in thicker, fluffier, and taller pancakes.