The Sourdough Pancake Part X

I have good news!!  There are two answers to the question I asked previously about chemistry.  Answer one.  You can artificially increase the acidity and thus the sour flavor of the pancake.  Answer two, you can get a really sour pancake without doing this.

Over the last couple of weeks I've worked my starter on the counter to get it really hot and bothered.  I feed it regularly but only when it needs it.  I've been watching it's stages as it starts by rising, then it becomes sponge like and then it builds up the "water" which is the sourdough alcohol and byproducts.  I can tell you that until you have a good amount of "water" you won't have really sour pancakes.

You might also hear that you should pour off the water before making the pancakes or even bread.  This is dead wrong.  That water is where the flavor is at.  It's your sign of having a hot active sourdough.  If it takes too long to get to that stage then you likely don't have a very strong starter yet.  Don't worry about that, just give it a few feedings and some sugar (for hyperdrive) and let it rock and roll.

I have now mastered the sour part of the pancake but haven't really gotten to the fluffy.  No matter what they aren't going to be as fluffy as buttermilk pancakes but you can get them a lot more fluffy than mine.  Today's iteration seemed to be a result of my batter being too thin.  I also tried making waffles which was a fail as I used an old iron which wasn't seasoned well and it stuck.

The "secret" ingredient to making cheater sourdough is:  Lemon juice

I haven't tried ascorbic acid (pure vitamin C) yet but I'm guessing that would work as well.

This week I may titrate some lemon juice with baking soda to see what will yield a neutral pH.  Then I can mix those parts in with an already sour sourdough and that should yield fluffy but still sour pancakes.  Hope this works.

The Pancake Saga Part IX

This has been a busy pancake week.  My sister came to visit and we had pancakes at least three times while she's been here.  The first time was the most sourdoughy I've made and my wife was a fan.  What I tried that made the difference.  This time instead of using 1 teaspoon of soda I used 1/4 and I made enough for another adult so the batch size was bigger.

The problem.  Less soda=less fluffy.  So I'm getting more sour but the fluff is going down.  I've also started getting up, adding all of the ingredients, egg and sugar and then placing in a warm spot while I take a shower.  This is similar to the concept when making sourdough bread when you add the flour and let it sit for an hour before making the dough and letting it leaven.  My thought is that the 30-45 min from adding sugar (high energy) until I cook the cakes should energize the yeast.  I'm not sure if it's worked as I haven't repeated the process.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to take my sister to Sam's Sourdough Cafe and I tried to eek their secret out of the waitress with the resulting comment of "it's complicated".  Perhaps if I eat enough pancakes there, they will have sympathy.  Then again I think I may have stumbled on the solution but I won't mention it until I've tried it.

Until next time.

The Pancake Part IV

I am almost caught up with the sourdough pancake saga.  This is the story of iteration five, week 4 of the pancake saga, which was last Saturday.  That day I scrapped the recipe which came with our starter and took up Steve Floyd's method.  This time I started the starter at about noon on Friday but never put it in a very warm place.  I will now digress.

We tend to keep the room temperature at 60-65 degrees inside.  This is due to the annual number of heating degree days (HDD) which Fairbanks is subject to.  The annual HDD for Fairbanks is around 14,000.  Now compare that to a place which still gets winter but is more mild like Central Illinois, which is around 6,400.  Basically, we never get to shut off the furnace as even in the summertime it only rarely gets up to a temperature where it stays at or above "room temperature" during the day much less overnight.  With heating oil being around $3.80 a gallon, that comes out to an average of $400-600 a month to keep the house hospitable.  Some of our neighbors changed over to natural gas or use electric and their bills can be as high as $1-2K per month in the winter.

Now back to the pancake.  The starter stayed out at our room temperature for almost 18 hours.  But yeast is most active from 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit.  Thus, my pancake batter grew but it would probably have taken 48 hours to get really going to where the flapjacks would taste sourdoughy.

I can't go back or postpone breakfast so no matter what happens, I make the pancakes.  This time they stuck together correctly, were somewhat glutinous and I cooked them in a cast iron skillet so they got brown (until my daughter started bugging me to start her plate as she was sooo hungry and then I lost track of the skillet and a couple got slightly crispy).  I think I'm on the right track but I haven't gotten it yet.

Journey to the Center of...30,000-Year-Old Ice

Permafrost--perennially frozen ground--is a fact of life up here.  It affects everyone in some way from building foundations to roads heaving to having ice cold water straight out of the tap (that last one I really like!).  Engineers in this part of the world have been battling the effects of permafrost (especially when it melts due to, say, a road bed laid over top of it) and trying to understand permafrost for as long as people have been building here.

This sign is located on the Steese Highway just south of the small town of Fox, AK, almost 10 miles north of Fairbanks.  For a month earlier this year we hauled drinking water from a natural spring in Fox, so we saw this sign quite a few times.  Every time we passed it, I thought to myself and often said aloud to my husband that I would love to see that. This Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility is a joint facility between the US Army Corps of Engineers and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

This past Saturday and Sunday, they held their first open house ever in their almost 50 years of existence.  Of course, we jumped at the chance to tour this tunnel.  They apparently were not sure how many people would show up for it.  They were overwhelmed by the outpouring of interest from the community and tourists.  I don't know the stats for Sunday, but they had to turn away at least 250 people on Saturday because they could only take about 475 people through the tunnel on their scheduled tours.  Apparently, if we had arrived much later than we did (about half an hour after they opened), we would have been turned away as well.  Fortunately, however, we both got to tour the tunnel and it was well worth the wait we had.

They actually cool the tunnel down to 24 degrees to prevent any of it from thawing.  Normally permafrost is just a few degrees below freezing.

Ice wedge

Junction of that ice wedge with other wedges

An ice wedge is a narrow piece of ice extending from ground level down into the ground several yards, usually growing every winter.  The wedges usually form in a polygonal pattern, causing the junction pictured above.  If you want to learn more about this (I'm a geology nerd, so it totally fascinates me), the tunnel's page about ice wedges has a lot of information, diagrams, and more (better than ours) photos from inside the tunnel.

Striation in the ice wedge.  These wedges are predicted to be 30,000 years old, but have stopped growing. 

Close-up of the ice surface. 

In addition to the tunnel itself, they had displays and scientists on hand to teach more about permafrost, what they've found there (mammoth bones, bison bones, etc.), and techniques for dealing with building on and in permafrost.  One of the most interesting displays was actual chunks of ice from ice wedges in the tunnel.  You could even touch it and pick it up.  Seeing it up close and backlit (see the light there?) was really something else because you could see all the sediment from all the years of growth.

We really feel so blessed to have had the opportunity to see something so rarely seen by the public and, as part of their purpose in this open house was to gauge public interest, I really hope they do it again sometime and even work toward having regular public tours.

Chokecherries, Chokecherries, and More Chokecherries

Chokecherry trees are everywhere in Fairbanks. You can't walk a block without seeing at least one tree.  Many of them are volunteers, but most of them are intentional plantings as ornamental trees, which is actually how they were introduced to this area as they are not native.  We have four chokecherry trees in our yard.  Once we discovered what these trees were, we decided to learn how to tell when they're ripe and what to do with them once they are.  That wasn't too difficult as we've seen chokecherry products throughout our travels in the lower 48.  We'd even bought some chokecherry wine at one point.

The two resources most helpful to us was this article on Wildfoods.info and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks Cooperative Extension.  I have found the UAF Cooperative Extension's publications on native foods to be invaluable resources when learning how to pick, clean, store, and utilize the abundant foods found throughout Alaska.

What's left on some of the upper branches of our big chokecherry tree.

Chokecherries are ready to pick at least 2 weeks after they turn jet black.  The longer you wait to pick them, the sweeter they will be (though I've learned they also start being eaten by birds and falling off the trees the longer you wait).  They will always have a tartness and make you pucker.  I, personally, am not a fan of them straight off the tree.  However, I have liked all chokecherry products I've tried.

Armed with this information and a ready supply in our own yard, I started picking these small black cherries. Between my husband and me we picked all the chokecherries we could reach in our yard, which was about 13 pounds, or two and a half gallons.  Most of them went into gallon bags in our freezer for later use.  I took a small portion of them, though, and extracted the juice.  We tried adding the juice to some homemade pancake syrup my husband had made when we ran out of store bought syrup.  It was nowhere near the same result as true chokecherry syrup.

The rest of the juice has sat in the refrigerator until today because we have been without storage space to make any jam, jelly, or syrup with it.  I finally broke down and bought a flat of jelly jars the other day.  This afternoon, my husband decided to make chokecherry jam.

Chokecherry jam

We currently have four pints cooling in the kitchen, and I have been picking more chokecherries, so I have a couple more gallons to go clean and freeze!

Eternal? Saga of the Perpetual Sourdough or The Pancake

Sourdough starter is like a pet.  You have to love it, nurture it, and take care of it.  If you don't it gets mad at you and spews nasty colors and stinks and might even die.  Thus, given the requirement of feeding it at least weekly when not in constant use, the question must be asked as your jar overfloweth:  What do I do with the extra starter since I have extra every week?

The simple answer is: use it!  But you may not want to spend the time to make a big batch of bread so, instead, the next best thing which takes a lot less work is:





Sourdough Pancakes! 




Stop!  Wait!  If you're like my wife and me, we had never even heard of sourdough pancakes until moving to Alaska.  I'm not sure why that is as they were likely the most common way to use sourdough starter in pioneer days, but the truth is that sourdough was made internationally famous in San Francisco, CA, in the form of bread not pancakes.  So the world hasn't been introduced in entirety to the amazing sourdough pancake.

Now, the first thing you must know is that if you plan to imitate something it is best to know what it is supposed to taste like.  Thus, my family had a job.  We had to eat lots and lots of pancakes at different breakfast and mom and pop type of places so that we would know what the best sourdough pancakes taste like.  The answer, so far, is Sam's Sourdough Cafe in Fairbanks.  It was rough and my belly ached a few times but we survived this very difficult task.

Now that we knew what they were supposed to taste like, it became imperative to learn how to imitate perfection.

The task seems easy, but that would be a lie.  I'm on week 4 of trying and have yet to get close.  I could do it faster by making pancakes every day but I have this terrible problem called work which interferes with the expeditious nature of my "Becoming Sourdough."

Thus begins the sourdough pancake saga which will not end until I can repeat the process multiple weeks in a row.

For Starters

About a month ago, the "Golden Heart" city Fairbanks, AK, celebrated the 60th anniversary of "Golden Days." It was a great taste of sourdough life and gave us many opportunities to be out in the community and learn more about why this town truly has a golden heart. However, that's just the intro to the saga which I am about to start. On Saturday of the Golden Days festival, the family went to a Kiwanis sourdough pancake breakfast in the parking lot of Sadlers Home Furnishings. We were joined at our table by a lovely local family whose father had been involved in cooking the pancakes for a number of years but this year was just running the cash register. During the conversation, the topic of sourdough was brought up. In this case it was the yeast not the eventual title. My wife mentioned that she was interested in learning more about sourdough by having and maintaining a starter. The family then told us the history of the starter that the Kiwanis use which includes one person maintaining it for the past 30 years, but he is not the first in the lineage of this sourdough. The yeast has been perpetuated for over 100 years! Wow. Of course when we had the lovely pancakes and the company we told them we would like some sourdough starter (they had it for sale). As we were finishing up eating and getting ready to go, the father (and grandfather) brought over a Styrofoam coffee cup with a lid and a set of directions. It was the yeast and we asked how much they wanted for it but they refused payment. I think they decided that we were sourdoughs in the making.

When we got home and read the instructions they were sorely lacking in my opinion. The whole thing was a mixture of parts and actual measures and statements like "then fill the bowl up to the line with starter." My 6 quart bowl doesn't seem to have a line and actually I'm not sure it's even 6 quarts or that I need to make 6 quarts of pancakes for my family of four.

That night we spent about two hours researching sourdough starter and feeding your sourdough only to discover about a hundred different methods and lots of conflicting information.  After much confusion, deliberation and research I just did it.

We found a mason jar (which originally held a very nice spaghetti sauce) and I tried the feeding directions that came with the hundred year old starter. We mixed it up and put it in the refrigerator.  Thus begins the saga of our sourdough starter.

Jumping Right In

Over the past few weeks in particular, since arriving in Fairbanks and getting settled--a term I use loosely as we have been here for a month and a half and are still living off everything out of our travel trailer since we have not yet received our household goods shipment--we have been diving right in to life in Interior Alaska: sourdough starter, berry picking, fresh rhubarb from the garden, and many fun new experiences and events.  These new experiences for us, especially the failures and triumphs in the kitchen, have inspired me to start this journal of our journey to become sourdough.

Many of you may be asking yourselves, "what in the world does it mean to be 'sourdough'?"  During our first month here, we lived in the Alaska Heritage House Bed & Breakfast, the former home of Mary Lee Davis, who authored several books about life in Alaska.  It was there, talking with the proprietor one day, that we ourselves were first introduced to the term as she explained the difference between a Sourdough and a Cheechako.  A few days later, thumbing through Davis' book, "Sourdough Gold," my husband found her definition of what it means to be a Sourdough.

54°40'  North is the southernmost border between Alaska and British Columbia, a fact I, admittedly, had to look up as I wrote this.  Fairbanks sits at 64°50', Anchorage is at 61°13', Juneau is at 58°26', and Ketchikan, the southernmost city in Alaska, is at 55°21'.  As newcomers to this last frontier, we are, in the words of the locals, Cheechakos.  Merriam-Webster online actually has an entry for the word and defines "cheechako" as "tenderfoot--used chiefly in Alaska."  

I hope you enjoy watching our journey from Cheechakos to Sourdoughs as much as we have been enjoying being on it.  We've only just begun.