Baking Bread in a Pandemic
Eat it, don’t waste it! Make crackers.
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It’s the pandemic; you can’t get bread or active dry yeast in the store. As a result, you have been creating a brand new sourdough starter from scratch to make your own bread, and you have all this discard that you throw away.
What a waste! But you have to feed it, and it’s not strong enough to use yet. What to do — What to do!
Wait! I know. Cook with it. It is just flour and water, afterall. If you have been using my method of beginning and feeding your starter, you should have somewhere around 1 1/2 cups of starter that smells tangy and sweet, and has many great bubbles in it.
You are aching to bake bread and can’t, but you can make the next best thing — crackers!!! Why crackers? Because they are easy and quick, you can add whatever flavoring you want, and you will never need to buy crackers again.
Let’s get started.
What You Will Need
1 c. (225 g.) unfed starter discard
1 c. (120 g.) all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp (3 g.)kosher salt
4 Tbsp. (56 g.) of unsalted butter, at room temperature*
2 Tbsp. of your favorite spice (ie: thyme, dill, oregano & basil)
2 Tbsp. (60 g.) olive oil
2 tsp. (10 g.) coarse sea salt
Parchment paper
2-11 x 13 baking sheets, or 3–4 9 x 12 baking sheets
Rolling pin
Rolling pizza cutter or sharp knife
I adapted my recipe from the King Arthur flour recipe, which you can see here. This recipe is great because if you only have 1/4 cup of discard, you can easily cut this down to only make a small amount, or divide this into 3 or 4 parts to make up to four different flavors of crackers at the same time.
*If you only have salted butter, leave out the kosher salt and go lite on the coarse sea salt.
Putting it together
These crackers are great without any spice flavoring added to them, so my instructions will be for a single batch. If you want to put one of your spices in…
