Favorite Sourdough Recipes
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Yep. We were one of those families who have adopted sourdough / bread baking into our way of life this quarantine. While Iām not stoked with the state of the world currently, I am happy with some of the habits we have picked up during this time. More on that another time though, because today we are just talking about DOUGH. Sourdough ;)
I shared a post almost 3 months ago regarding tips for baking bread. I covered a couple of our favorite sourdough recipes in that post, but thought it might be more helpful for me to designate a specific post to discussing them. Iāve gotten a myriad of questions regarding what we like to bake with sourdough PLUS we have tried other recipes since that post was published. So hereās all that info! Keep scrolling for recipes we have tried and recipes weād like to make with our sourdough starter.
OUR FAVORITE SOURDOUGH RECIPES
Bread. This is the basic sourdough loaf that Nick bakes almost weekly. Note that it makes TWO loaves. You can half it if you only want one, though you freeze one or even give to a neighbor! We donāt have a dutch oven. We bake on our pizza stone and like to use a cast iron skillet with ice underneath it to help the crust. Another note is that we prefer to use regular flour in comparison to bread flour. To each their own! We are also still experimenting with herbs and add-ons. So far we have only done rosemary and we didnāt use enough. Will keep you posted!
Sprouted Grain Sourdough Bread. I have recently gone on a sprouting kick, so making a sprouted wheat just made sense! So yummy! Good luck finding wheat berries - I finally found some at Erewhon Market. I could not find any at Whole Foods or Ralphās. They didnāt sprout as visibly as beans (what Iām used to), but werenāt too hard. NOTE: Do not keep this out on the counter like you would regular sourdough. The sprouted wheat is LIVE and this loaf must be kept in the fridge. I learned this the hard way though it totally makes sense. I baked my loaf Saturday and there was mold on it Wednesday.
Baguettes. Feels like youāre in France ;) I actually featured them in the images here. We prefer rustic, no egg wash. We havenāt use the extra dry yeast and they turned out wonderfully.
Naan Bread. These are SO good, especially paired with homemade hummus. We have them as appetizers or as part of a gyro sandwich.
Dinner Rolls. We made these for Easter! They are great alone, but we used them instead of Hawaiian Rolls for poppyseed sandwiches. SO GOOD.
Pizza Dough. We have started a tradition where we make pizza every Friday! We have found we like using fed sourdough starter versus discard. We also donāt typically use additional dry yeast like the recipe calls for. We did use it twice and I couldnāt tell a big difference, though Nick said he could. (He liked it.) We usually divide this dough in half and make two 12ā thin crust pizzas versus one 14ā regular pizza crust. We like to leave the dough out for 3-4 hours and then put it in the fridge until it is ready to use. It tastes best when sitting overnight, but is still great when you bake it day of!
Biscuits. These make yummy regular biscuits, but my favorite way to use them is the wrap them around litāl smokies for pigs in a blanket!
Hot Dog Buns. This can be used for hamburger buns if you want too! Note that this recipe is an overnight one. I didnāt realize that at first so I sped up the process and still worked great! I didnāt have enough discard for the recipe so I used fed. I didnāt want to wait 8 hours for it to rise, so I also use the teaspoon of dry active yeast to speed up the process - even though I used fed starter. I placed the dough in the oven with the light on to speed up the process and only waited an hour before dividing it into 8 pieces. I also didnāt let it rest 20 minutes prior to doing that. After forming, I put the buns back in the oven with the light on to rise for an hour, then took out to pre-heat for an hour. I only cooked them for 22 minutes, but every oven varies. I also rotated the pan halfway through baking. SO GOOD. Iāll try making them correctly another time ;)
Cinnamon Rolls. These are delicious, just make sure to roll them thin enough. If you like orange sweet rolls like me, you can make the base with the sourdough cinnamon bun recipe I linked, but combine it with this orange sweet rolls recipe regarding the orange juice in the rolls and the icing recipe exactly. I like to add cream cheese to both icing recipes!
Pancakes / Waffle Mix. Iāve never had tastier pancakes or waffles than these. I'm normally a chocolate chip girl, but these make me want to eat them plain with butter.
Pretzels. I made these with homemade beer cheese for a virtual beer tasting. Iād personally rather have a hard pretzel than a soft pretzel, but these were good.
Side note - Donāt throw away old bread pending it isnāt moldy. Use it to make croutons for salads or toast them up to create crostinis for a cheese board.
White Hemstitch Plate | Fellow Mug (c/o)
SOURDOUGH RECIPES THAT ARE ON MY LIST TO MAKE
Croissants. Iāve made them before with but only with dry yeast. Nick has never made them and I want him to experience the labor of love that they are. Worth it though!!
Crackers. These are supposedly really easy and yummy. Who doesnāt like crackers? I can eat a whole sleeve of Ritz AND Saltines in one sitting.
Chocolate Chip Cookies. Adding sourdough just makes everything better!
Chocolate Cake. But Iām going to use different frosting!
Brownies. I prefer chewy to cakey brownies, so not sure if I will like these, but we shall see.
Pasta. We make pasta all the time, so not sure why we havenāt made it with sourdough starter yet!
Tortillas. All I have to say is YUM.
Focaccia. This is at the top of Nickās list! We had the best focaccia bread of our lives at Felix in Venice, CA. If we can make it half as good as that, Iāll be happy.
Popovers. I LOVE popovers. I even have the special pan and everything! Iāve never made them with sourdough starter, so Iām excited to try. Just need to whip up a batch of strawberry butter to go with them!
Donuts. Again, everything is better with sourdough!
Muffins. Blueberry muffins are already good, I imagine with sourdough they are fluffier and better!
A couple notesā¦
Our best reference has been King Arthur Flour. While they donāt have all the recipes I want, they do have a lot. They have also taught me a lot about what a recipe should look like, so Iām able to vet other recipes and decide if they are worth making or if I should keep looking. They are very descriptive and are good teachers, so I would highly recommend looking through their website as a resource.
Regarding dry yeast packets, we were able to finally get our hands on some a couple of weeks ago. We found a packet of Red Star Yeast at Whole Foods and snatched it up. We were also able to find some private label dry yeast at Erewhon Market. Nick is in the process of trying out recipes where they were optional and seeing what we think. In my opinion, I donāt notice a big difference, but I can see how it makes the pizza dough more fluffy.
I recommend buying an oven thermometer. It costs under $10 and is so useful! We found that our actual oven temperature didnāt match what we told it to heat up to, so this allows us to make the proper adjustments. Other tools we have are a banneton proofing basket, a bakerās couches (we use it to cover the basket, but you donāt really need it for a loaf it is beneficial for baguettes), pastry scrapers (we also have a bench knife which I like because it has a ruler on the edge - it works similarly), and actual razor blades to score / lame the loaf. Oh! and we also use a food thermometer to check the temperature of the bread. Itās sometimes hard to tell when sourdough is done, because the crust appears finished before the instead is.
I think that is it, but Iāll try to update this post with new findings and recipes. Speaking of that, have you tried any of these sourdough recipes? Better you do you have a favorite sourdough recipe I should try? Apparently we are going to have a lot more time on our hands. Might as well bake. Enjoy!!
P.S. I address quite a bit in this post, but let me know if you have any questions!! Happy to help, especially when delicious carbs are involved ;)
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