Making sourdough at home

Epicurious.com

For about the last 10 months, I've been cultivating a sourdough starter, mostly keeping it in my fridge and feeding it once a week.

And I've been very, very happy with the results: Though my baguettes still need work, I've wowed friends with sourdough English muffins, sourdough rolls, sourdough sandwiches, sourdough pizzas and calzones, sourdough waffles and pancakes, and on and on.

But feeding the starter once a week means that every week I have an extra cup of starter that I have to use up, freeze or discard. A cup a week doesn't sound like a lot, but by now I've frozen so much starter that I'm worried the yeast reigning over a sizable territory in my freezer may soon declare their sovereignty over the entire refrigerator.

Tossing a cup of good sourdough starter seems like a waste, but not as many people as I expected seem interested in receiving starter as a gift. Finally, my household simply cannot eat its way through two to three sourdough baguettes a week, and I am soooo sick of sourdough waffles every weekend.

So I ask you, the nicest-smelling foodie-blog readership in all the land: What new recipes and uses would you recommend that I try to make good use of a cup of sourdough starter?


Michael Y. Park is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He studied medieval history as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and journalism as a graduate student at New York University. His stories have appeared in publications including The New York Times, the New York Post, and the Toronto Globe and Mail.




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