Recipes

Two kinds of recipe: ones that need an active starter at its peak to do the lifting, and ones that use discard purely for flavour and need no rise at all.

Honest disclaimer: I have not baked all of these

The loaf, the pancakes and the crackers are tested and in regular rotation. The rest are collected - gathered from bakers whose judgement I trust, rewritten in plain language and metric, and queued up to try. I am collecting sourdough recipes roughly the way other people collect Pokémon.

So treat an untested one as a good lead rather than a guarantee. Read it through before you start, trust your own eyes over my timings, and tell me if something is off - I will fix it and credit you.

With active starter

Your starter needs to be properly awake for these - fed, risen and at its peak.

Basic sourdough loafTested · one loaf, baked in a pot. The place to start. Add-insOlives, chocolate, rosemary - the same loaf, made interesting. Mini loaves in a muffin tinCollected · twelve small loaves, five flavours, one dough. Overnight pitaCollected · they puff into pockets. Four minutes in the oven. Freezer pizza doughCollected · twelve dough balls in the freezer.

With discard

Discard straight from the fridge is fine for all of these. It does not need to be active, and it can be a week or two old.

Discard pancakesTested · breakfast in fifteen minutes, no waiting. Discard crackersTested · thin, snappy, salty. Disappear instantly. Cheese crackersCollected · sharp and cheesy. Squares or shapes. Chocolate muffinsCollected · dark and moist, and they use a lot of discard. Cinnamon rollsCollected · overnight, raised by the discard alone. TortillasCollected · soft, quick and forgiving. Active or discard.

Want one that isn't here?

There is a ready-made prompt you can paste into Copilot to get a new recipe written up in the same format as these pages.

Reading these recipes

Everything is in grams. Use a scale.
Active starter means fed, risen, and at its peak. See feeding.
Discard means unfed starter, straight from the jar.
Timings assume a kitchen at roughly 22-24 °C. Warmer is faster, cooler is slower. Watch the dough, not the clock.
The techniques behind the bread recipes - folds, bulk ferment, shaping, scoring, baking - are all explained on the method page.

Running out of discard?

Keep a dedicated discard jar in the fridge and tip each feed's discard into it. It keeps for a couple of weeks and builds up faster than you would think - the chocolate muffins alone will take 240 g.

Tips from other bakers

Nothing here yet - the flakes have only just gone out. As people send things back, their notes land here, with their name on them if they want it.

What is worth sending

Something that worked better than what is written here - a different ratio, a timing that suits a cold kitchen, a flour that behaved well.
Something that went wrong, and what fixed it. These are the most useful of the lot, and the hardest to find written down honestly.
A collected recipe you actually baked, so it can move across to tested with your name against it.
A photo of a loaf, good or bad. Day-three disasters especially.

Send it over. Say whether you would like your name on it.