Tag: sourdough discard

Semolina Sourdough Cavatelli

After making the Semolina Sourdough bread I had a little semolina flour left that I needed to use up before the flour’s expiration date. Conveniently, around this time I saw a blog post from The Clever Carrot about making semolina cavatelli with sourdough starter. I wanted to use all my flour, so I scaled the recipe up based on the amount I had available.

I gathered the mise en place:

I made a well in the flour and added the water and then the starter.

I mixed the dough with a fork, then kneaded it in the bowl by hand until all the flour was absorbed. At this point the dough was very dry and sandy, and it was hard to get the dough to incorporate all the flour.

The dough rested for 10 minutes, then I kneaded it on the counter for a mere 2 minutes until dough was smooth and no longer gritty. I was amazed at how quickly the dough transformed into a smooth mass!

The dough rested in the fridge for 24 hours until I was ready to use it. I cut the round into strips, rolled each strip out, then cut each roll into inch-long pillows. I shaped them into cavatelli with a fork. I placed the finished cavatelli on a floured sheet pan and covered them while I worked on each rope.

Once they were all shaped, I boiled the noodles in salted water. I cooked the cavatelli for 8 minutes, when they were very much on the chewy side of al dente, but they could have could have cooked for longer for a softer noodle.

We ate the cavatelli with freshly made tomato sauce and giant meatballs. It was a heavenly meal!

The cavatelli did not taste sour, which is absolutely fine, since fermentation was not the goal here. They tasted very fresh, and the shaping of the cavatelli was very pleasant. This project has made me much more interested in making more pasta at home. If you’re at all interested, I would definitely recommend giving it a try!

Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out.

Sourdough Discard Chocolate Chip Cookies: Worth It?

A while ago I read about a sourdough chocolate chip cookie recipe that was next level. My starter wasn’t active at the time, so I’ve been waiting to try this recipe for quite a while, and this seemed like the right time. The recipe can be found here.

I gathered the mise en place:

Before I could start mixing up cookies I had to brown the butter to get all the water content out of it. This lost water will be made up with some of the water in the sourdough starter. The goal is to start with 225g of butter and end up with 185g.

Once the butter was very foamy and the milk solids had browned I let it cool just enough that it would no longer burn me through the bowl. I weighed the browned butter and was tickled pink to see it weigh exactly 185g. I also combined the flour with the leaveners and salt at this stage.

Here’s my updated mise en place:

I mixed the butter and sugars.

Then I added the egg yolks and creamed the mixture. Normally I would cream the butter and sugar before adding anything else, but since the butter no longer has any water content it won’t cream with the sugar properly. The egg yolks have just enough water content to get the sugar to cream up nicely.

I added the starter and vanilla and mixed until homogeneous.

I added the flour and mixed until just combined.

Finally, I added the chocolate chips and pulsed in my stand mixer for just a few seconds until the chocolate was well-incorporated. At this stage the dough was very soft and malleable and quite easy to mix.

I refrigerated the dough for 4 hours (apparently that is the minimum amount of time to chill a cookie dough incorporating melted butter for the cookie to still have good structure when baked).

Once the dough was thoroughly chilled I measured the dough into 70g portions as directed and rolled each portion into a ball. I baked a few, and froze the rest.

So: the good: The cookies are soft and pillowy inside. They have good flavor, and my husband is very much enjoying being able to pull cookie dough out of the freezer and bake a fresh cookie on demand. This recipe makes A LOT of cookies.

The not so good: The cookies are are just a touch cakey, which is not my preferred cookie texture. This is likely in part because of the natural yeasts in the sourdough starter. Because the cookies go onto the baking tray cold they also don’t spread as wide or as thin as cookies that are baked straight from the mixing bowl.

The cookies don’t have enough salt to my taste, but a sprinkling of flakey salt on top solved that problem and made me feel fancy.

They also seem a bit too sweet to me. If I made these again I would use 3/4 of the sugar in the recipe. Sugar helps cookies form their structure, so this does make me worry that the texture of the cookies could be impacted by a smaller amount of sugar.

These are big cookies, but not absolutely ginormous. If I made these again I would measure out 50g portions instead of 70g.

I had such high hopes for these cookies, but after making them I feel pretty ‘Meh’ about the final product. It felt like a lot of effort to make these for a pretty average tasting cookie. I probably will not make these again (our current favourite chocolate chip cookie recipe is this one).

BUT! I learned so much from reading about the process of creating the recipe and making these cookies, and that is a huge win in my book!

Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out.

Transform Your Sourdough Discard into Waffles

For these waffles I used a new (to me) starter that I bought in Seattle. The starter is from Alaska, and I like to imagine a gold-miner carefully tending to his starter while hoping to strike it rich in the Yukon. Although, I doubt he used his starter to make waffles. As usual, the recipe is from the King Arthur Baking School book.

I gathered my mise en place. The recipe calls for all the flour in the recipe to be whole wheat, but relies on a starter fed with all purpose flour. I prefer to feed my starter with whole wheat flour, so to keep the ratio of flour types consistent I replaced 50g of the whole wheat flour in the recipe with all purpose flour.

I combined the dry ingredients, whisked together the wet ingredients (including the starter), and then mixed them all together.

I heated up my waffle iron and started cooking waffles. As an aside, are waffles baked or fried?

These waffles have a fantastic texture! They are quite crispy on the outside while still having a tender chew. There is a hint of sour flavor, but the tanginess is not overwhelming. I recommend brushing the waffles with butter, drizzling with maple syrup, and sprinkling with salt before devouring them. They are delicious.

Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out.