Music and Cats

Now that I have a working sourdough starter, I’m looking for recipes in which to use it, other than in bread. Oh, I’ll be baking bread with it regularly, but the process of feeding it can produce more starter than I can possibly use for bread, and I’m loath to throw away the wonderful local flour that I’m feeding the starter.

When I mentioned to Paul that I’d seen a few recipes for sourdough pancakes, he got excited. The cook at his first college used to make sourdough pancakes for the students, and he loved them. While I wasn’t sure I wanted to compete with the 30-year-old memory of sourdough pancakes, I was glad to know that there was a good chance he’d happily eat any sourdough pancakes I might make. After looking at several recipes, I came up with an adaptation of these two recipes. The resulting pancakes were tender, light and moist. (Fortunately, they reheat well, as the recipe made many more pancakes than two of us could eat for one meal.) We ate the pancakes topped with amazingly sweet, enormous local blackberries, warmed just to the point of releasing their juices in a little bit of honey. Scrumptious.

Sourdough Pancakes

1 cup sourdough starter
2 cups of water
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup AP flour
1/2 cup emmer flour
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup butter, melted and cooled
1 teaspoon baking soda

Eight to twelve hours before you want pancakes, combine the starter, water, and flours in a large bowl (large enough that the sourdough mixture will have plenty of room to rise). Cover bowl with a kitchen towel, and set aside.

After the fermenting period, whisk together the remaining ingredients. Heat a griddle or large skillet over medium heat; grease lightly with butter or oil. When the griddle is hot, add the egg mixture to the sourdough mixture, and combine well. The baking soda will react with the acid in the sourdough to make the batter rise. Drop 1/4 cups of the batter onto the griddle, and cook until the bubbles on the top of the cakes have begun to break. Flip the pancakes and cook until lightly browned on the other side. These pancakes cook fairly quickly, so they’re not suited to kitchen multi-tasking.

Where our food comes from:
Bluebird Grain Farms: whole wheat flour, emmer flour
Rockridge Orchards: blackberry honey
Sidhu Farms: blackberries of enormous size
Skagit River Ranch: eggs
StoneBuhr: Shepherd’s Grain AP flour
Localish: butter (ran out of the homemade local butter)
Far away: baking soda

Tags: No Comments