When baking sourdough bread, you get used to throwing away copious amounts of sourdough starter, or sourdough discard. The actual term, sourdough discard, attests to the fact that ingrained in baking is the fact that you need to throw it away or do something else with it. I have tried to minimize this by baking more often — which is not always possible with our modern and busy lifestyles. When I do not bake that often, I still need to feed the sourdough and with this, there is always discard that you can use for something else.
With this extra discard, and no plans to bake, we decided to make some flapjacks! (Or at least, we call them flapjacks in South Africa.) We had some beautiful lemons extra from another recipe, so we also added some lemon juice and lemon peel, and this small addition was something of a miracle. It tasted so nice and elevated the flapjacks to the next level.
So please join me as I show you how I make this very simple dish by using my sourdough discard! This recipe will be a must for any sourdough baker!
Recipe/Ingredients
This recipe only requires one special ingredient, that being the sourdough discard. I will provide this recipe as a sourdough discard recipe and not a normal flapjack recipe. You can obviously rewrite this recipe by excluding the sourdough discard.
Every sourdough baker knows that you will have some extra sourdough starter if you do not bake. Depending on your feeding schedule, you will need to either use some of the extra started in your baking endeavours, or you will need to either throw it away or use it in something like pizza or like I am doing here, flapjacks!
For this recipe, I used the following ingredients, which made about 12 to 15 small to medium-sized flapjacks.
- 1 egg (50g),
- 25g sugar,
- 100ml milk,
- 20ml oil,
- 180g flour,
- 5g salt,
- 140g sourdough discard,
- 1 lemon's juice and peel, and
- 1 tsp baking powder.
Method/Process
This recipe is as easy as mixing everything together. It is not an exact science; you need to shoot for a specific consistency. Thicker than a pancake batter but not too thick. I adjusted my recipe a little bit to make it just right.
In this image, you can see the batter was still a bit too thick. It looks more like a cookie dough batter. I added a bit of milk.
After adding a couple of tablespoons of milk, the batter was perfect; as noted above, it is thicker than pancake (or crepe) batter.
When your batter is ready, heat a flat-top pan with some oil or butter on it. Scoop little dollops of dough onto the hot surface. You can make the flapjacks any size you like. We decided upon medium to small size.
After a while, use your nose to tell you, flip them around. If your pan is too hot, they will burn before they are cooked inside. If the pan is too cold, the dough will not cook. If everything goes according to plan, bubbles will form on the surface.
The result is a perfectly cooked fluffy flapjack! Trial and error is the best method, but you will get it very soon. It is really not that hard. And the result is so good!
We decided to eat them straight from the griddle. We did not even wait for them to cool down. This according to me is the best way to eat them (the same goes for pancakes/crepes). But you can use these flapjacks in many different sweet and savoury ways! I did not add a lot of sugar to the batter, you can obviously add a bit more. But because I opted for less sugar, it was perfect for a savoury dish.
In my savoury endeavour, I opted to add a fried egg and some charred cherry tomatoes.
I did not have time to bake, and I needed to feed my sourdough, so I used the flapjack as the perfect vehicle to transport the egg and tomato. It was the perfect breakfast!
I really hope that you try this dish for yourself. It is the perfect breakfast, using sourdough discard or to make something with fermented flour! It is really healthy and is better than normal flour.
So please do make some for yourself! Have you used sourdough discard in any special way? Please let me know!
For now, happy cooking and enjoy!
All of the photographs used in this post are my own, taken with my Nikon D3200. The recipe is also my own, adapted from many trials and errors, especially with the addition of sourdough discard. The writings and musings are also my own.