Don’t Throw Away Your Sourdough Starter!

By Lexie Mariano

Right now, it seems like everyone is baking, evidenced by the onslaught of baking posts on social media and the shortage of baking ingredients in my local stores. And the most popular baking venture seems to be sourdough bread. To make sourdough by scratch requires first making sourdough starter, which entails combining the wild yeast present in flour with water. After about a day, air bubbles start to form in the starter, meaning that the mixture is fermenting. To keep your starter “alive”, you then continue adding fresh flour and water to your starter every day for a week until the starter is bubbly and frothy. At that point, your starter is ready to be used to make sourdough bread. This week-long (though sometimes more, depending on your flour) process requires constantly adding flour and discarding about half of each day’s starter, which ultimately produces a large amount of discarded starter. At this time with the pandemic, many stores are experiencing a shortage in many ingredients, but especially with flour. Even stores who do have flour may set a limit on the number of bags a customer may buy. This is why using re-using ingredients, such as starter, that might have otherwise been thrown away is critical. If you google, “what to do with sourbread starter”, more than eight million results pop up. Again, starter is made up of only flour and water, which are the main ingredients in many baking recipes. This means you can use starter in almost anything you bake. Personally, I have made scones, pancakes, crumpets, cinnamon rolls, banana bread, even chocolate cake! There are many ways to use otherwise discarded sourdough starter. Although it may seem easier and less wasteful to discard any unused starter than baking even more food, it is always better to use what you have to make food that someone will eat. Even if you will not eat it, you can always share your treats with a friend or donate it to a local senior home or soup kitchen. Or, you could always give your discarded starter to a friend to start making their own bread!