Sourdough discard
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Viki: Up next, the Local Food Report with Elspeth Hay. This week—tips on managing discard from a sourdough baker in New Marlborough.
Recently, I’ve been making a lot of sourdough. I wake up, feed my starter with flour and water, and then, by afternoon, I can see it getting bubbly and rising. On days I bake, this is great—I spoon all this active starter into my dough, make a loaf of bread, and then feed the tiny bit of starter left in my container again. But on days I don’t bake, there’s a lot of discard—spent starter that ends up in the compost. So the other day I called my friend Sarah Reynolds North a professional bread baker to ask her: is there a way around all this waste?
To start with, she said, it’s helpful to understand what discard really is:
Sarah: The yeast and the lactic acid bacteria, those are sort of what is living in there. But when they run out of food, which you know is what the feeding does, it gives that food to kind of keep its microbiome happy, but when it’s done eating it kind of gets tired and sleepy, and that's the discard phase.
In other words, discard hasn’t gone bad—it’s just no longer effective at getting dough to rise. But it does have other uses.
Sarah: I always throw some in pancakes, I put a little bit in crepes, I put a little in kind of any batter type thing I'm making. Even a cake, I'll add some in. And I feel like it kind of works like salt. Not that it's salty, but that it brings out the other flavors that are in whatever you're baking. Kind of like a seasoning.
Discard is acidic. Just like lemon juice or vinegar, it can brighten the flavor of a baked good and make it pop a little bit, for instance, with a recipe for simple cream scones that Sarah loves:
Sarah: Like if I know I wanna make these scones that I like, which I really like the flavor of the sourdough in the scones, I will actually make extra sourdough starter and then let it get sleepy to use for that recipe. But it needs a lot. So I'll keep like a couple days’ worth of discard in the fridge.
Then when it’s time to bake, she pulls out the discard and mixes it cold into the scone batter. But you don’t have to be this organized about adding discard to a recipe—you can put it in any baked good, as long as you adjust accordingly.
Sarah: The only thing to be mindful of is that you're adding liquid and flour to a recipe that already exists. So. You need to think about what other liquids are called for in that recipe or what other flour. You might have to make other adjustments, like use less flour or use less milk or oil or water, whatever it is in order to make the consistency stay the same.
Of course these are all ways to use discard. But if you don’t bake a lot of other things besides bread, instead of creating another job for yourself, you can also cut down on the amount of discard you’re creating in the first place by feeding your starter less often or feeding it smaller amounts.
Sarah: So if you're baking once a week, then maybe keep your starter in the fridge, or even just on the counter, but feed it only like every few days. And then when you're ready to bake with it, that's when you kind of amp up the feeding. You don't have to feed it. You know, 100 grams and 100 grams every time. You could feed it a teaspoon of flour and a teaspoon of water, and that will still keep it alive and happy. And that's a very little bit of starter that you keep going instead of having these massive amounts.
Working with sourdough doesn’t have to be as rigid as many of us make it, Sarah told me—sure, it needs care, but it’s also a pretty flexible little being.
Sarah: I think the biggest thing is when I'm talking or teaching people about sourdough is that they feel like they have to be caring for this child that is needing them on a regular basis and I think yes it is, it is alive and all the romance that goes with that you should take that with you but if it feels like it's inhibiting you from baking because it's too much work then you need to like pull back a little it and think about ways to make it work in your life that already exists.
For Sarah, discard scones and cakes and pancakes are a good fit. Since chatting with her, I’ve found myself feeding my starter a little less—maybe a quarter cup of flour and water every day, and then taking the discard each morning and pouring into a hot, well-oiled cast iron skillet. It’s not a sweet pancake, and it’s not bread, but it’s somewhere in between and I like the crispiness and the sour flavor topped with a little sprinkling of sea salt and a pat of good cold butter. And as Sarah reminded me, that’s the point—to find a way to make the discard work for you. For CAI’s Local Food Report, I’m Elspeth Hay.
Here’s a link to see more of Sarah’s bread tips:
https://www.instagram.com/foundbread/
Here’s a link to Sarah’s favorite discard cream scones:
https://www.theperfectloaf.com/sourdough-starter-discard-scones/
