In the course of my sourdough education I’ve been told that you can use the sourdough starter straight up, without adding more flour and doing exciting things like waiting all night. But I had not actually read such a recipe till this week. I was looking for sourdough pumpkin pancake recipes and found a recipe that uses two cups of sourdough discard, a cup of pumpkin, one egg, some sugar, 1 tsp baking soda, 1/4 tsp salt, and spices. Here. https://actsofsourdough.com/sourdough-discard-pumpkin-pancakes/ It has no dairy in the batter, and uses butter to grease the pan.

Since I’m trying to cook for a child with milk allergies while I need sourdough this looked perfect. During my search I had read that coconut oil fries pancakes without turning brown and scorching, so I used it. Voila! Perfect, light, tasty pancakes with no dairy and lots of sourdough. I highly recommend them.

Naturally being me I had to try again with differences. I wanted to use some of my whole grain flour. I wanted to try applesauce as well. The pumpkin batch tasted great but it didn’t taste spicy so I figured I’d like to try upping the spices. All this experimental desire gave me a complex moment.

One reason this recipe is so perfect for me is that I don’t really understand how other people use their sourdough starter. I see recipes that call for 60 grams of starter or a quarter cup or something like that. But if I just remove X amount of starter from my starter bowl then when do I feed it? And if I feed it but don’t cook with it then I get really confused. This usually results in dead starter. Since bread is what I really want to make, I have developed a routine that gets the bread made and the starter fed.

I have about 400 grams of starter in my refrigerator. When I get ready for bread I take it out, split it using a kitchen scale, feed both portions using the scale, let them bubble a bit, and then one goes back in the refrigerator and the other goes into bread. Ideally. Of course, I frequently forget to get the original back in the cooler at the right moment, and I am also capable of managing to lose track of enough time that the second bowl for bread has to wait overnight, either in the fridge or out. But in general, the system works, and since I lowered the temperature of my baking to 350º my sandwich bread has been very nice.

Two hundred grams of sourdough starter is close enough to two cups. This means that my system can generate two cups of sourdough starter easily and though the recipe says to use discard, it hasn’t made any difference for me. But this also means that if I want to have specialty flour in the pancakes, it has to go in the starter. So here’s the next recipe.

First, take 200 grams of starter and add 100 grams of Sonora flour and 100 grams of water. Stir and leave over night. (You might point out that I didn’t want to do that. But this is different. I do this part all the time. When I do a full recipe that has to wait over night I still have to be in the mood in the morning. Here, after I’ve doubled my starter I can just wait to use one part for a day or two. … )

In the morning (or whenever), get a bigger bowl. Add the following ingredients.

1 egg — it looked small. I added a second one and beat them
1 cup of (super runny) applesauce (I froze last year) (It had no impact on the taste…)
2 Tablespoons of maple sugar (could be white or honey or brown which I think is what she used)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp cardamom or more? The jar was almost empty and quite old. I just dumped it.
Mix together.
At this point I panicked at how wet it was and added 1 (one) extra tablespoon of flour. Then I stopped. Those heritage, whole grain flours soak up a lot of liquid.
Add the sourdough starter fed with Sonora flour.
Stir very carefully. The sourdough mixes slowly. It’s a bit of a snob and likes to stay with itself, but keep mixing.

Leave the whole thing alone for fifteen minutes. YES. Do it.

This allows the baking soda to get going and it results in amazingly light pancakes which you can cook as normal. Only I did use coconut oil and it did not turn brown the way butter does so I had to pay close attention. Burning butter keeps me from burning pancakes, functioning as an alert system. ALSO sourdough pancakes cook more slowly than regular pancakes. If you don’t want the middle to be slightly undercooked, pay attention and cook a bit longer.

Enjoy! Even without a picture.