Why I’m sweet on sourdough

Glenn McConnell was a sceptic, but that changed after a few pancakes.

Iknow I’m late to the trend here. I hear you say, ‘‘sourdough is soooo lockdown 2020’’. Yes, it is. Nevertheless, I’m here to urge you, despite the trends, to keep your sourdough starter alive.

Everyone cool will have moved on to the lockdown 2021 trends, which seem to be apathy and hating the rich. But please, I urge of you, make your angry social media posts, watch White Lotus, and keep feeding your sourdough starter.

I’m not a trendsetter, I’m a trendwatcher. I jump on the bandwagon a few stops down the track, once it’s proven this horse has stamina.

About a year late to this time-killing and floureating lockdown baking trend, I have come to a verdict on sourdough.

It’s actually good.

Bear with me here. Let’s go back to the start of pandemic bread.

The story of lockdown loaves starts with a familiar picture of crazed supermarket shopping. I’m talking about the scenes we’ve come to expect when a new lockdown is announced. Think panicked shoppers packing their cars with toilet paper, frozen peas and, bizarrely, loaves of bread.

The same pattern repeated at the start of this lockdown, with supermarket shelves stripped of everything but gluten-free bread. No-one wants gluten-free bread, if they can avoid it.

With the good bread gone, the race for yeast starts in earnest. It doesn’t take long to clear out those little bottles.

In the midst of an (albeit short-lived) supermarket bread and yeast shortage, sourdough shines. The sourdough process coaxes yeast from the air.

You need to offer a mix of water and flour (20g of each), in an empty jar each day – cover it, but don’t put the lid on, to let air in. If it smells like nail polish, you’ve obviously done something wrong. It turns out that chemical aroma indicates a lack of air. Until it no longer stinks and has started doubling each day, you keep adding 20g each of water and flour to the ‘‘starter’’.

From there, it becomes a very needy plant. The yeast is alive!

It demands you perform a daily sacrifice of 40g of water and 40g of flour, but keep just 20g of starter. In return, you get this essential ingredient for bread-making.

Sometimes it takes less than a week, sometimes it takes more time. It all depends on the sourdough gods, and also how warm it is and how much air is reaching the sacrificial water and flour mixture sitting in the jar.

Eventually, yeast settles in the jar – but you must continue to feed its insatiable demand for flour and water. Once it’s settled, it still demands at least two servings of flour and water a week. Each time you feed the sourdough starter, you discard all but 20 grams of it.

That leaves you with a lot of starter discard, which is what you use to make bread. But you don’t really need that much bread, which is where this whole charade risks falling apart.

After a few loaves, I was ready to wash this sourdough starter gloop down the drain. It’s a messy endeavour. The white pile of glue-coloured sludge sticks to everything. The photos you see online of sourdough make it look aesthetically pleasing, but you rarely see the gloop behind it all.

Behind the veil of this trend, it’s not all that pretty.

And sourdough bread itself is not very versatile. It’s the Bramley of breads; good only if cooked. It’s excellent for toasted sandwiches, but when you’re living in a household of two there’s only so many toasties you can make.

At this point, I would have been happy to set the yeast free down the drain.

My partner, who’s a hundred times more invested in this sourdough than me, describes it as ‘‘a pet that brings no joy’’.

But letting it die, after weeks of work, would make us ‘‘bad sourdough parents’’, she says. It would be such a waste.

And so, this year’s lockdown activity has been finding things to make with the sourdough waste. It’s turned out to be, actually, pretty cool. Sourdough pizza bases, for one, are simply the best.

It’s no surprise you can make pizza base with sourdough. Learning it can be used to bake sweet treats, such as pancakes and muffins, is what converted me from a sceptic to a fan.

We made orange sourdough muffins – such a strange idea, but it actually worked. Which led me to cook pancakes. They were fantastic, even though I had no clue what I was doing. It’s a good use for the starter which would otherwise go down the sink.

GLENN’S SOURDOUGH PANCAKES

100g of flour 1 tsp of baking powder 100g of sourdough excess 1 egg 100ml of milk 40g of melted butter

Simply mix it all together, and pour it on a hot pan.

The sourdough made these the fluffiest pancakes I’ve ever made, but not actually sour... Although, my healthy helping of Nutella may have hidden any savoury taste.