Baking sourdough bread often comes with a degree of guilt about the waste. Every time you feed your culture, you have perfectly good flour and water ‘leftover’. This is often called the discard, and once you’re up and running with the sourdough habit of ‘feeding the beast’ (the wild yeast) you’ll also discover this.
But it doesn’t have to be that way!
There are tons of good ‘sourdough discard’ recipes. I’ve tried crumpets, pizza bases, waffles, banana bread and many variations of crackers. I like cheese, what can I say?! I’ve tried many of them, including the excellent Richard Bertinet’s crunchy and holy crackers, and the pretty decent King Arthur’s chunky square crackers, but my favourite is based on the Dusty Knuckle Bakery’s version that I’ve laid out below. They’re thin, incredibly crispy and have a wonderfully satisfying crunch and flavour. Because they involve a little kneading and resting, they’re also a bit more robust and can therefore be thinner than some of the variations that just involve pouring or spreading.
I also happen to think these are a little easier to make than other recipes. Not least because once you’ve done the initial mix, you can leave them for half an hour or a whole day. Ideal if you’re fitting in around making or baking other goodies for a party. They’re also brilliantly flexible as you can add a host of flavours to them depending on your mood and tastes. My toddlers love them, but add a little more salt and some different flavours like fennel or caraway seeds and they’re a swish dinner party snack for adults.
Given AI is creating more and more content, I also want to explicitly say this isn’t created by or written by AI. This is a fully, repeatedly tested, real world recipe with many happy humans that can attest to its tastiness!
Easy Sourdough Discard Crackers
Ingredients
- 150 g sourdough discard
- 200 g flour (white, wholemeal/wholewheat or rye – or any flour you may have knocking around, spelt is delicious here), plus extra for dusting
- 25 g salted butter
- 25 g honey I've used honeycomb here and it was lovely!
- 60 ml water 4 tbsp water (you'll need more for older discards)
To finish (optional):
- seeds nigella, caraway, fennel, sesame, your choice
- leaves rosemary is my go to, but try whatever flavours you think will work!
- flaky sea salt
Instructions
- Mix all your ingredients, except the water, in a big bowl, and knead well until it comes together and there are no lumps of butter or dry floury bits.
- Slowly add the water. The goal is to have turn it into a ‘shaggy’ dough that holds together and is easily rolled out. You may not need all the water, but I tend to use it all.
- After about 3 minutes it should be a fairly smooth dough. Scrape your bowl down, cover it with a dish towel and leave for at least half an hour, but it can be as long as all day. You don’t need it to ferment, you’re just letting it rest so the dough relaxes and is easier to roll.
- Heat your fan oven to 160°C (180°C if you don’t have a fan).
- Roughly quarter your dough into equal pieces. Put plenty of flour on a worktop or large chopping board, and with a rolling pin, roll it out one piece at a time until it’s thicker than paper, perhaps as thick as craft card (thinner than the corrugated packing stuff). While rolling, have your baking tray ready next to you so you avoid making it so big it won’t fit on the tray.
- Carefully transfer your sheet to your baking tray, and gently brush with water* and gently pat onto the surface your choice of seeds and sea salt.
- Place into your preheated oven for about 18 minutes. These crisp as they cool, so don't be tempted to overbake them. Their colour is a good indicator of whether they're done, so look for a lovely golden brown.
- Repeat with the remaining dough if you are baking them all in one session.
- They look quite impressive whole, so I prefer to serve them like. People can then snap off pieces of the size they want.
*Should I brush them with water or olive oil?
Different recipes favour different approaches, so I thought it was worth mentioning the difference. In my experience the primary difference is in the texture they create on the surface of the cracker.
Water effectively acts as light glue for the seeds and your other additions. It will evaporate quickly in the oven, and leaves a fairly traditional matte flat cracker surface. It can make them slightly harder and crispier, making them snap like a traditional water biscuit.
Many recipes suggest using olive oil. This can heighten the golden brown colouring of the crackers, and can give them a slight sheen, particularly with a good extra virgin olive oil. And of course adds another flavour to the mix. Because the oil is slightly absorbed by the cracker surface, it can create a kind of fry-baking effect, leading to the cracker being flakier and a bit more tender than one brushed with water.
Is it safe to keep sourdough discard in the fridge?
Yes, very! The reason you want to keep it in the fridge is it slows the activity of the yeast. If you have space, it’s really useful to have an airtight jar of sourdough discard that you draw from and top up each time you’re feeding your culture. This also has the significant advantage that you don’t have to make bread and crackers and pancakes and whatever else you want to make from the discard, on the same day.
Every time you do a maintenance feed, simply scoop out some of what’s already in the jar (unless you’ve got the level quite low already) and add your leftover discards to top up the jar. Sourdough discard will easily keep in the fridge for about a week, so if you’re on a weekly baking schedule, it’s ideal. If you leave it for a while, it will develop a liquid on top (called “hooch”) and will smell increasingly acidic. That extra tang is exactly what gives these crackers their rich depth of flavour.
Can I keep cracker dough once made to bake later?
Absolutely, another reason this is such a flexible recipe. Once you’ve mixed all your ingredients above (including the water), you can keep it for a minimum of half an hour before baking, or for up to a day at a normal room temperature. If you want to keep it for longer, just pop it in the fridge and it will keep for up to 4 days. If that’s not long enough, put it in the freezer.
How to Make These Sourdough Discard Crackers Vegan
Easy! To make these sourdough discard crackers vegan, simply swap the butter for olive oil, and depending on your flavour of veganism, you can swap out the honey for molasses.
Can you use sourdough discard when first making a starter?
No. Sorry, that’s where the flexibility ends! In that first week when you’re just starting to make your new sourdough starter, the culture isn’t stable yet. It’s a melting pot of wild yeasts and bacteria, including some you definitely wouldn’t want to consume, which is also why that first week’s starter will probably smell worse than at any other time during the process. But also, it doesn’t have the complex acidity and yeastiness that makes mature sourdough discard so great for flavouring recipes like this.
If you’re looking for a super reliable recipe to make your own sourdough starter, I also have you covered there…
But I do get it. In that first week when you’re told to discard this much, and then the next day, discard a bit more, etc, feels very wasteful. I searched high and low for recipes when I have remade my starter hoping that somehow there might be a clever use for it. Short of setting up an incredibly complex pyramid scheme with friends where you all begin starters in a staggered manner, passing your discards to each other to be used in new processes… Yeah, no. You just can’t unfortunately.
What’s the difference between starter, leaven & culture?
A lot of people, myself included, casually bandy around the terms starter, leaven, culture, sourdough mother, discard, etc, and it can all sound a bit confusing. Here’s a quick explanation:
Starter / Culture / Mother: These are effectively interchangeable. Once you’ve gone through that first week of developing or growing your wild yeast, you then have a starter. So called in home baking because it’s what you use every time you want to start making sourdough. Culture is more commonly used by professionals as it sounds a wee bit more scientific, but I’m pretty confident there’s no fundamental difference. And mother is derive from the Italian madre, which generally applies to older starters that have been around for a long time.
Leaven: This is the bit of your starter that you’ve taken from the above starter in order to make a particular loaf. So for instance you wouldn’t get ‘leaven discard’ because you’d have taken the amount (250g or whatever) you needed for the recipe.
Sourdough Discard: Specifically refers to the amount you remove from your starter before feeding what’s left of it with fresh flour and water. If you didn’t ‘discard’, you would very quickly fill multiple fridges! However, what you can do with your discard should hopefully now be clearer!
