What to make with sourdough discard

Baking with sourdough provides great taste and good nutrition, but also a constant conundrum: What to do with all the sourdough discard generated by a home starter?

A bubbly, healthy sourdough starter involves regular feedings of flour and water, as author and former PCC cooking instructor Cynthia Lair shared in her book “Sourdough On The Rise” (her good advice and starter recipe is here). Nourishing a starter also involves regularly pouring off “sourdough discard” to keep the starter lively and balanced.

“Discard,” though, doesn’t have to be literal for sourdough. Rather than trashing or composting the excess liquid, treat it as a resourceful ingredient on its own. There are several options for using “discard” rather than letting it go to waste.

Storing sourdough discard

First, get enough sourdough discard on hand. Depending on the volume of your starter and the frequency of the feedings, you may want to pour off the discard in a separate container, saving enough over a few days to use it in other cooking projects. Anne-Marie Bonneau, the Zero-Waste Chef, recommends storing sourdough discard in a jar in the refrigerator, as it would over-ferment if left at room temperature too long. (Most bakers recommend using it within a week.)

In the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” school of conservation, another way to avoid wasting sourdough discard is to generate less in the first place. Once you have a mature starter, you can experiment with feeding it smaller quantities of flour (and having less discard), or keeping it in the refrigerator and feeding it less often.

Use sourdough discard for baking

Yes, the point of nurturing a sourdough starter is generally to make leavened sourdough bread and baked goods. The “discard” does not have enough leavening power to make a bread rise the way sourdough starter can. And yet, the discard can still be used for bread and other risen baked goods — so long as other leavening agents are added. That’s how the bakers at Modernist Cuisine created “Second Chance Sourdough,” a long-fermented loaf using a mixture of instant yeast and sourdough discard. Yeast and time contribute most of the rising power, but the starter adds flavor and some hydrated flour. (The original Modernist recipe, which uses frozen and then thawed starter, calls it “ a rather spectacular form of instant sourdough flavoring.”)

Sourdough discard is also popular in pizza dough, usually with a small amount of added instant yeast.

The same logic — using sourdough discard for flavoring and bulk rather than leavening — holds for other popular baked goods, like a fudgy sourdough chocolate cake, these sourdough blueberry muffins and a sourdough discard banana bread. Generally, the “discard” doesn’t make the sweets taste sour, but adds complexity and depth to the flavors.

Sourdough discard flavors a perfect breakfast

You might keep a sourdough starter alive just for a regular supply of sourdough discard pancakes and waffles. This classic recipe at The Perfect Loaf compares the benefits of discard to those of buttermilk. Serious Eats notes that the strength of the starter will affect how tangy these crisp, light discard waffles will taste.

The baking geniuses at King Arthur Baking use 1/3 cup of discard as a binder in sourdough granola, reducing the amount of sweetener granola usually requires. And while we’re being creative, if you want to go beyond breakfast, this site uses discard in batter to coat fried vegetables or fish, as a thickener for bechamel sauce, and in “sourdough meatballs,” among other inventive uses.

Using sourdough discard for crackers and other flatbreads

The benefits of discard — flavor and flour — are especially valuable for making crackers and other unleavened breads. Jackie Freeman, a cookbook author and former PCC cooking class instructor, uses sourdough discard in her rosemary sourdough crackers, which she says are amazingly delicious and amazingly easy to make.

This “no waste” discard cracker recipe from Little Spoon Farm uses only sourdough discard, no added flour, for crisp crackers that author Amy Duska says are almost cheesy in flavor. Duska also uses discard (with added flour) for sourdough naan, sourdough tortillas and other flatbreads.