Adventures with Sourdough

This is why it's important to keep your starter
in a jar with lots of headroom. When I
unscrewed the lid, the starter exploded out.

I grew a sourdough starter in my garden a couple of years ago, and have been experimenting with it ever since.

Recently my starter has been growing faster than we can eat the bread I make with it. When making bread, I refresh the starter with more flour and water, then return some to the jar in the fridge and use the rest. The amount in the jar never shrinks. In fact, it's currently growing at an extraordinary rate.

So this week I used some of my sourdough starter in muffins. When making muffins, I use the sourdough straight — no refreshing and returning to the jar. It's a great way to use excess sourdough starter.

Orange Sourdough Muffins

I was inspired by Ellen Buchman Ewald in her classic book Recipes for a Small Planet. She has a recipe for orange muffins made with whole wheat flour. They are raised with buttermilk, baking soda and sourdough starter. They are sweetened with a little honey, and make a dense healthy muffin.

Then I used her method to adapt my favorite lemon muffin recipe to sourdough. The muffins are made with white flour and sweetened with sugar. The sourdough, baking soda and kefir made them light. Yummy if not totally healthy .

Here's what I did.

Lemon Sourdough Muffins
2 cups white flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup sugar
1/8 tsp cloves
3/4 cup sourdough starter
1 egg, beaten
1 cup kefir
1/2 cup oil
zest of 1 lemon.

Whisk together the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients. Gently combine the two mixtures.

Pour into a greased muffin tin and bake at 375°F for 20 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

For decadence, combine 1/4 cup lemon juice and 2 tbsp sugar and dip the tops of the warm muffins in it.

Makes 12 muffins

Lemon Sourdough Muffin