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Showing posts with label Discarded Sourdough. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Discarded Sourdough. Show all posts

Cheese turnovers with discarded sourdough


I have done these turnovers in many ways and my children are crazy about them. In French they are called "chaussons". Usually I do not use a special turnover mould and I do them manually, by packing the cheese inside like in an envelope. Then, I bake them using a sandwich machine.
But these ones, I wanted to be more good-looking and I used a butterfly mould forgotten on a top shelf of my pantry. 
This is a great way to get rid of a big quantity of discarded sourdough. They taste so well in combination with the feta cheese and, although I have not tried other types of cheese, I think it would taste great too if you replace the feta with some melting cheese inside.
They are super easy to make and I warn you, they fly super fast from the plate.
Enjoy!

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Shortcrust pastry with discarded sourdough

Yesterday was the π day (03.14). I found out about this just late in the evening, but during the day, guess what I baked? Of course, a pie. Is this a sign for me from up there? Who knows...

I see myself baking much more bread than pies but I do enjoy making pies also, sometimes simple, sometimes more complex. What bread has to do with pies? Well, probably not a lot, except that I made a pie crust using discarded sourdough. I simply love to reuse discarded sourdough and now I use it in a pie crust.

What is more difficult with pie crusts is that they do not have to expand in the oven and they need to keep their shape. Sourdough has exactly the opposite property, to grow the dough. But if you use discarded sourdough, chances are little as the sourdough bacteria already consumed a lot of sugars from the flour.

In fact, I used my good old recipe of shortcrust pastry and transformed it, reusing the discarded sourdough. The 80g of milk I replaced with water (from the sourdough). Water is 50% in sourdough. I then had to deduct the same quantity from the flour. Butter quantity was kept the same but for the sourdough, I felt I could add a bit more. This is how I ended up with this recipe.

I had big help from my son mixing the ingredients by hand. While he was fascinated by the flour that stuck to his hands, I took advantage of his distraction to put together the ingredients in a ball.

I tested it in the oven and I was surprised that the shape was kept perfectly. The rise of the tart crust was minimal and I actually found it perfect. 

This crust looks solid but when you try to cut it with a spoon, it is breaking easily. It holds very well the filling and I will definitely use this recipe many times in the future.

How the tart has ended? It will come soon... but for now, let's look at the crust recipe.

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Cheese crisps with discarded rye sourdough

If you are like me, baking with sourdough and keeping it at room temperature, you understand that it is very easy to end up with a lot of discarded sourdough in the fridge. I feed my sourdough twice a day, and with every feed, I get ~50g discard. This makes about 100g a day and 700g a week. That is a lot, but there is no way that I will throw away such an incredible ingredient. I simply store it in my fridge, and every week or every other week, I do something with it. It can be crackers, pancakes, anything. Sometimes I use it as such for making pizza dough. It is an incredibly useful and healthy ingredient, so I am happy to use it.
This time, I made crisp crackers with it, and its secret ingredient is cheese. There is no trace of sourness inside remaining from the sourdough. My kids are crazy about them, and it is a great healthy snack that I can sneak into their schoolbag.

This recipe uses a lot of discarded sourdough, and this is what I was, in fact, looking for. If you do not have sourdough or you do not have enough, I think you can easily replace the sourdough with half the quantity of rye flour and half the quantity of water. But for me, the main purpose was to use the discarded sourdough for this recipe. Eggs will help them stay together, while butter will help with cooking and make them melt in your mouth.
I simply invented this recipe myself, by trying and adjusting it to fit my taste. This version is the best I have achieved so far, and I am very happy with it. The composition is straightforward to make; what is taking a bit more time is cooking them. But with an alarm set every 2 and a half minutes, you can enjoy doing other things in between without worrying that they'll get burned.
What I love the most about them is the taste of the crisp cheese that it is browned just enough to give a lovely texture and taste.

Let's see how to do them.

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Black sesame rye sourdough crackers

My kids love food that crunches between their teeth. I always have at hand for them some "cracotte", sticks or even dried bread.
As this pandemic time put me to stay at home, I launched myself into a more advanced bread journey and that means that I keep my starter at room temperature. Well, actually my starter stays on top of my wifi router because there I have constantly between 25-30ºC. I hope that the internet provider will not change soon the wifi router type otherwise I'll need to improvise another "home place" for my precious Maya sourdough :) . When keeping the sourdough out of the fridge you need to feed it. And mine is such a gourmand ! At the wifi router temperature it eats 3 times a day in proportions like 1:4:4. You can imagine then that every week I gather a lot of discarded sourdough starter that pushes me to bake something with it. I search for different recipes on the web, I adapt them and go to the kitchen to make them. This time, the source of inspiration was a recipe that I found on a brand that I love, although I never had the chance to have in my hand one of their famous flours.
As always, I bring to any recipe my personal touch, and my contribution for it was the rye sourdough starter and the black sesame seeds. These 2 come with a specific flavor.
I baked these crackers during the day when my kids were at school. When home, their eyes jumped straight on them. You can imagine that I lost the battle of convincing them to eat before crunching. But in the end, this is healthy homemade food, so why not.
When I saw the recipe I was thinking that it will take me some time to do it, but actually it was much quicker than expected. 
This is how, I am pretty sure that now I have a new recipe on my regular baking wish list of my kids.

Ready for a crunch session? Have a look on the recipe bellow.

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Sourdough waffles

This is the most efficient way to get rid of your discarded sourdough. It is quick and easy to make and it is only based on your discarded sourdough (meaning no extra flour is added). 

I keep my sourdough at room temperature and after 2 feeds daily at the end of the week I fill my jars with discarded sourdough in the fridge. I basically collect 120-150g of discarded sourdough every single day. By the end of the week I have a considerable amount and is out of question that I would through away such an amazing ingredient. 

Lately, I used this discarded sourdough for baking these waffles. I did this recipe multiplied by 2 or even 3 times, depending on the amount of discarded sourdough I have available in the fridge. But this is just the basic recipe and can be adapted to the quantity of the available sourdough.

The raise of the waffles is due to the baking powder and not due to the sourdough. The discarded sourdough has barely few activity in it when kept in the fridge. And more, this is discarded sourdough, meaning that the sourdough raised already at peak and the bacteria consumed the sugars from the starch already. You may try to bake waffles with fresh sourdough and without baking powder but my point here was to use the discarded sourdough, not to create sourdough especially for baking these waffles.

Every time I did this recipe, I saw the bottom of the plates very very quickly. They melt in your mouth and my children love them. The sugar in the composition is kept to minimum for healthy reasons, but if you like it more sweet, you are free to add more sugar.

Just give them a try if you have some discarded sourdough. If you do not have, just bare in mind that the sourdough (at 100% hydration) is 50% water and 50% flour and you can, at any time, replace sourdough with water and flour for this recipe.

The taste of these waffles is not sour as you might think when reading this recipe. The sourness disappears through the baking leaving you with a great taste and texture. 

Well, go to the kitchen, make this recipe, call the kids to eat them and let me know about their reactions :)

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Sourdough pancakes

Since I am keeping my sourdough at room temperature I need to feed it twice a day. I remain with some quantities of discarded sourdough that I keep in the fridge in a closed pot. I do not like to through away flour so the discarded sourdough I use it in many recipes. I feed my sourdough in 1:2:2 proportions (sourdough:water:flour), more exactly 15g of sourdough + 30g of water + 30g of flour. This means that I remain with 60g of discarded sourdough at every feed. I use both white flour and whole wheat flour and the type of flour doesn't really matter if this discarded part arrives in a pancake composition.

This recipe uses exclusively the flour in the sourdough and no extra one is added. My sourdough is kept at 100% hydration, meaning that half is flour and half is water. It took me a while to perfect this recipe and I am happy that I finally found a good formula. The pancakes should not be cooked too much otherwise become crispy. If this is your style feel free to brown them well, but I prefer them soft, so I can roll them with a spoon of chocolate or jam. This means that immediately they turn brownish I turn them on the other side or remove them from the pan.

These are flat pancakes in the French style not on the American style. The difference is that the American ones are more thick and small, while the French ones are flat, thin and larger.

I give here the basic ingredients for 100g of sourdough. From this basic recipe you get about 3 pancakes of 22 cm. If you have more sourdough, just multiply the ingredients. What I like is that as soon as I have some left over sourdough I bake few pancakes to have them fresh in the morning. For this particular photo, I baked a huge quantity of pancakes from 1500g of sourdough that I gathered for 2 weeks in the fridge.

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French bread

I balanced a bit our bread needs per week and I realized that with latest visits, we need more than what I was usually baking every weekend. It was the time then to make 2 breads in the same time and this one, with yeast, was one of them.
I also realized that in the last weeks I have produced more sourdough to be discarded than normal so I needed a recipe to through it in. That would not be the raising agent as yeast works much faster than sourdough but would add a bit of sour country flavor to the bread.
The next days I saw that the bread was getting dry much faster than I was used when I was baking only with sourdough. The taste of this bread is excellent, however it losts its moisture quite quickly comparing to the sourdough ones.

On the other side, again a dough that was a pleasure to work with and a pleasure to see it raising so fast.

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Hybrid semi whole wheat bread

Some days ago I was starting to raise my own sourdough starter and I'll see in a couple of days if this will be successful or not. Until then, from 2 feedings every day it remains a lot of sourdough starter to discard (even if it is not mature enough) and I have decided to use it. I have searched for a recipe and I adapted it to avoid throwing away the discarded sourdough.

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