Sourdough Quick “Bread”
I haven’t gotten much use out of my sourdough starter the past few weeks and instead have just been keeping it happy and fed in the refrigerator. I was gone last weekend and am out of town five of the next six weekends, so I don’t see that changing anytime soon. It is certainly possible to do long rise sourdoughs during the week, but it makes it harder to do other things since I have to be home to tend to the dough.
So given that I haven’t been using the starter for much I have been trying to find new recipes for the discard when I feed it weekly. My go-to is to make sourdough waffles/pancakes but I wanted to find some kind of quick bread recipe I could experiment with. Well just my luck, recently on r/sourdough on Reddit there was a great thread with people posting their favorite sourdough discard recipes.
I came across a recipe for a sourdough quick bread that I thought I’d give a try. The user noted that for their family they could make this after dinner and it would be gone by morning. After making one loaf I can certainly see why; this quick bread is really just a cake.
While the loaf was baking I thought to myself, ‘wow, the apartment sure smells like I’m baking a cake’. I was rather distracted while I was putting together the batter so as it finished baking took a closer look over the ingredient list. The ingredients and proportions were all similar to a regular yellow cake, just that there was a no liquid added to compensate for the water in the starter.
Well, what’s not to like about cake? This was delicious! We sliced it up and stuck it in the freezer to prevent ourselves from devouring it too quickly. About a week later, most of it was gone. During that week I put together the wooden puzzle pictured above of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing (my wife’s parents just returned from a trip to China). I loved those puzzles when I was younger and had several dinosaur ones, but never one as involved as this one. While we’re getting ready to move it is currently on our floor, but hopefully soon we’ll have somewhere to display it.
- ⅓ C butter, room temperature
- ½ C sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 C unfed sourdough starter
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 2 C AP flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp baking soda
- ¾ tsp salt
- Preheat oven to 350 F.
- In a small bowl use a fork to cream together the butter and sugar. Once combined add in the egg, starter, and vanilla. Mix until combined.
- In a separate bowl mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt.
- Add the flour mixture to the starter mixture, stirring just until blended. If the batter is too thick add water 1 tsp at a time until it can be easily stirred.
- Pour batter into greased loaf pan; let rest for 15 to 20 minutes.
- Bake at 350F until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 40 minutes.
