Anyone with a sourdough starter needs a good backup plan for using it up without baking. The easy answers are to compost it or make pancakes.
This pancake recipe is a modified from what I found online, with sugar and baking soda way reduced, and simplified due to laziness.
±240g (1 cup) starter
1 egg
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon baking soda or baking powder, whatever you got.
The process is quite simple also. Preheat your skillet with butter, medium heat. Mix up all the ingredients real good. Drop in a couple spoonfuls of batter into the skillet. Flip after a minute or two. Flip again after a minute. Do it again. Makes three or four pancakes. Add butter and syrup. Eat.
If you look at the Michael Ruhlman’s ratio for pancakes, you’ll see that we’ve essentially backed into his formula. 2 flour : 2 water : 1 egg : 1/2 fat. The recipe above its 120g flour : 120g water : 50g egg : 28g olive oil.
However, don’t let the false exactness of the ratios confuse you, my recipe is very loose. If I have a bigger egg or less starter, it will just be little flatter. If you want it fluffier, add more baking soda. If you want to make a crepe, add a second egg and skip the baking powder. If you’re short on starter, just add equal parts flour and water and definitely throw in more baking powder.
Ultimately this recipe is all about burning up your leftover starter. This will be especially important if you get into the Chad Robertson’s Tartine method, where you refresh your starter a couple times before making the dough. I hate waste, so I usually skip the refresh (which is a polite way to say throw away most of the starter and feed the remainder) and just live with a slower rise and miss out on any smidgen of extra flavour profile I’d otherwise obtain.
But even then, I still occasionally need to burn up starter. Feeding the little fellow for another week’s hibernation is a doubling exercise, requiring at least an equal amount of fresh material. So if I have 100g of starter, I need to add 50g of flour and 50g of water. You can see where this will lead if left unchecked, and pancakes is our buffer.
And it’s also where my girl started cooking. So it’s sentimental too.