Dave, question about sourdough pancakes
Hi Dave. I saw on the other forum your post about the sourdough pancakes. I have a question (of course!). haha You said, "This morning, I took a couple of cups of mixed starter discards out of the fridge, added honey, salt, melted butter, and an egg."
Did you not add any extra flour to the starter? No oil? I've always wondered why I should have to add extra flour when my starter is usually just about the same consistency as pancake batter. And what about milk....is there no advantage to adding milk and not just having water in the mix?
I made some sourdough pancakes a couple of weeks ago with discarded starter, using a recipe I found just by searching the internet, and my daughter loved them. There were pretty good. Better than a boxed mix, for sure. The one I used said to mix the soda and salt in a small amount of water or milk and quickly stir into the batter. (The batter was then supposed to begin to foam and rise in the bowl, but it didn't do much.) I'm afraid I'm too lazy to try adding the soda to each pancake's worth of batter as I make them!
If anyone else has lots of experience with sourdough pancakes, I'd be glad to hear what you have to say. I have lots of discard I need to use up!
Hi Bad Cook, when my grandgirls come to spend the night they expect pancakes for Sunday breakfast - I tried making French toast one time and they diplomatically suggested I ask their mother for a recipe! My pancake recipe starts the night before: melt 4oz. butter in 1 cup of milk, cool to room temp. Add to 9oz. discard starter, 1 tspn salt, 1 tbspn brown sugar and 6 oz all purpose flour. Mix all together, cover and leave on counter overnight. Whisk in 2 large eggs and 1/4tspn baking soda. I halve the recipe and that is plenty for the 3 of us. Hope you try them, A.
Hi, Annie.
I dunno about Bad Cook, but I'm going to try them - like tomorrow morning!
David
Good morning David, hope you enjoyed the pancakes? I am snowed in and would love to make bread but the chances of power outages are high with the heavy snow on the trees. So I will just enjoy reading about the other members' breads, finish my grandaughter's quilt, work the crossword and enjoy the beauty outside. (From inside!) Sending holiday greetings to you and all TFL members and especially to Floyd and family - thanks for everything, A
Hi, Annie.
Well, I mixed up the batter per your recipe except for one little thing: I made half a recipe but with the full recipe's amounts of sugar and salt. Serves me right for rushing to do this when I should have been in bed already.
Needless to say, the pancakes were strangly sweet and way too salty. I liked the texture and the flavor (underneath the saltiness).
On question: Usually, pancake recipes caution about over-mixing. You want the batter a bit lumpy for optimal results. How about sourdough pancake batter? Do you similarly avoid mixing too smoothness?
I want to try these again!
Happy holidays too you, too!
David
Oh dear, what a shame! Isn't it easy to goof when you are overtired or multitasking? Or maybe that is my age talking. I use a whisk to blend the egg and soda into the batter and I hadn't thought (or remembered) that the batter should be slightly lumpy. I really don't think it matters, but of course being a limey I didn't grow up eating pancakes and the purists may be horrified. They seemed fine to my uneducated palate and the girls love them and that makes Nana happy, A.
Hi, Bad.
You forget "the novice" part. It's true I have been cooking all my life, but baking was something I had absolutely no interest in until I ran into the NYT no-knead recipe, and discoverd that with almost no work, i could make bread as good as my favorite restaurants served. Until then, I didn't eat bread at home, except for my whole wheat toast in the morning. Pancakes? Waffles? Forget about it. But then, I got interested in sourdough, and here we are, with all this extra starter...
I was following Jon's recipe, over on breadtopia. His recipe adds no milk or flour. I did substitute melted butter for the oil, and honey for the sugar, and I confess that my first pancake was too thin, so I added a little flour.
The two things I really liked about Jon's recipe were that he only used sourdough starter, so you don't have to decide the night before that you are going to make pancakes, and that he only uses baking soda, no baking powder. Most recipes use both. Baking soda reacts with the acid in the sourdough to give a single, quick rise, so his trick of only adding it at the last moment, to each individual pancake, really gives maximum rise and lightness to the pancakes. It only takes a moment to spoon some batter into a small bowl and add baking soda solution, and you can do it while the previous pancake is finishing up, just after you flip it.
It would be interesting to compare the results of his minimalist approach to some of the more elaborate ones, but I'll leave that to someone with far more interest in pancakes.
Dave
Thanks, Annie, for your recipe. It's very similar to the one I got off the internet, except yours sits overnight and the one I used doesn't. It just said to let it stand while you cook the bacon or sausage. I may try yours also....have to think ahead, though, and I'm not very good at that! We eat pancakes at suppertime....I don't "cook" breakfast. I hope David reports back on how his turned out.
Dave....the recipe I used had no baking powder in it, only soda, and it was added to the whole batter, then left to sit just a little while. It made some pretty good pancakes, but I think they could have been improved upon. I don't even remember what site I got it from.
I've noticed several recipes using brown sugar....what is the reasoning behind that, instead of white sugar? Anyone know?
I think what will end up happening is that I will combine the things I like from all the recipes I've seen, and make up my own recipe. Thanks for all the input!
Brown sugar has molasses, which is acidic, to react with the baking soda. If using sourdough, the molasses is superfluous.
Ok, good to know. I do usually keep brown sugar around, but I don't know if I would like the taste of brown sugar in pancakes. It's nice to know I don't have to use it. Thanks!
I've adapted this recipe to meet my family's needs (son is allergic to eggs and milk). I like this one because I finally made good pancakes without milk. We use Energ egg replacer.
Here's what I do:
I try to mix the starter the night before, but it works pretty good if I do it when I get up at the crazy hour of 4 am (I'm a very early riser).
Mix up the egg replacer, sugar, salt & baking soda. Add this mixture to the starter with the oil and then add water until its a reasonable pancake batter consistency.
This weekend, I added an extra tablespoon of oil and made waffles in our 1950's era waffle maker with the non non stick coating :) and they popped right out with no sticking. HooRay. Our first successful waffles since the boy was diagnosed with food allergies.
I thought these were heavy on the oil at first, but I can't argue with the results.