To reduce the amount fo water even further we can remove the egg whites. 40g of water loss means we can use 80g of starter reducing the flour weight called for in the recipe by 40g to match the water. This recipe is based on the one in my first book and it uses 225g of butter, so if we have cooked off all the water the finished butter will weigh 185g, meaning we have lost 40g of water. You can tell you’ve removed the water by weighing the finished brown butter. Removing that water is actually easy, all we need to do is brown it. Butter in the Europe is generally around 82% fat and the remaining 18% is water. Thankfully cookies include two ingredients that contain significant water, butter and eggs. We need to find the water in the recipe to remove. Chocolate chip cookies include flour but they don’t normally include any liquid so to use the discard we need to creative. If we follow the above rules for baking with sourdough discard we run into a issue straight away just looking at the ingredients. Whilst this works easily in lots of recipes a chocolate chip cookie might not be the first thing that springs to mind but let me tell you, it may be my favourite way to use the sourdough discard. The general rule is take the weight of the starter discard you have and divide this number by two, substituting it for an equal amount of flour and liquid in your recipe. Dont leave it in there for longer than a few days, if you want to store it for longer some people even freeze the discard so they can bake with it later. When you feed the starter and scrape the starter into a separate container and pop it in the fridge until you have enough for your recipe. You can turn the discard into a whole manner of recipes, including crackers, crumpets and a whole host of simple recipes like pancakes, waffles and even banana bread muffins. If you think about it the starter is 50% flour and 50% water so it should be easy to use in recipes that call for flour and some sort of liquid. The other thing you can do to prevent waste is of course use that discard in a recipe. Both of these methods slow down the starter meaning it will likely only need one feed a day instead of the two a healthy starter normally needs. The other ways you can reduce feeding is reducing the temperature of water used for the feeds to slow down the fermentation, you can also keep back less than 25g of starter when you feed. When you want to bake with it I take out the starter and give it a couple rounds of feeds to bring it back to full strength. Before you put the starter back in the fridge leave it at room temperature for a couple hours to let the fermentation get a head start and then refrigerate until you either want to bake with it or you think it needs another feed. The process to do these feeds is simple, take the starter out of the fridge and discard and feed as normal. My guideline is when you remember give the starter a feed, trying not to leave it too long between each feeds. Some people advise taking the starter out for a feed once a week, some every other week and some monthly. Placing it in the fridge slows the process down enough that it doesn’t need anywhere near as many feeds. As you will have learnt fermentation needs a warm environment to happen, or at least happen at the speed we like to happen, and simply reducing its ambient temperature slows it down. The easiest of these, and what I would suggest you do, is simply refrigerate the starter when its not in use. Thankfully there is a few ways we can reduce the amount of feedings the starter needs to survive. If you’re not going to be baking with the starter more than once a week, which is normal for most people, feeding the starter daily is going to produce the most possible amount of waste. Throwing out that discarded starter really feels like a waste right now and surely there is something we can do to reduce that. Sourdough starters are hungry little beasts and they eat flour like they don’t realise its like gold dust right now. As more and more of you join the sourdough bandwagon there is one question that raises it head regularly, and that is how to prevent waste. We’ve been in lockdown almost six weeks now and whilst its looking like restrictions might be loosened a little in the coming weeks the internets new obsession with sourdough shows no signs of abating.
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