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 Saga Part V

I don't know if I'll ever actually get caught up with this story but I promise I'll try.

This week I had a new challenge: We weren't even sure that the yeast was still alive!  I'm not sure how it would have died, but for some reason even letting the sourdough rise overnight in the oven with the light on seemed not to make the starter smell sourdoughy nor was it all that bubbly.

What I realized is that only recently had I switched from bleached flour to unbleached.  It seems the starter was doing its job but the more refined flour was more reactive to the yeast.  On the other hand, according to everything I read, unbleached is better for the yeast and will produce better flavor.  I'm also not sure that there was all that much yeast in my overnight starter as, only a day before, I took a cup out and gave it to a friend and fed the starter.  I think I forgot to leave it out to get to room temperature so it seemed to not be all that "hot."

In any case, I made a very simple recipe consisting of:
2 cups starter (warmed over night)
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 egg
3 tsp oil
2 tbsp soda (baking soda)

The pancakes were light and fluffy!  They rose just like they're supposed to when adding the soda and they had a pretty good sourdough flavor but they still seemed a little weak.

I'm getting closer.

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.

The Pancake Part II

In May of this year, I decided that I needed to learn to make pancakes.  So I did and I put the recipe to memory:

1.5 cups flour
3.5 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1.25 cups milk
1 egg
3 tbsp butter (melted)

This is pretty easy, right?  I made excellent pancakes all over using this recipe and even on a spur of the moment made some while at my sister-in-law's house.  So when I got the sourdough starter I thought, well I can mix up everything but the egg, milk, and butter when I pull it out and let it grow overnight. It also happened that I left the mix on the stovetop thinking that the kitchen was warm enough.  I was wrong about that, too.  By morning the mix smelled a little of sourdough but it wasn't pungent.   And when I made the flapjacks, I found out my mistake as my pancakes tasted just like regular pancakes not sourdough pancakes.   That was 28 July of this year.

This is our starter in its jar.  You can see the little pockets, which are clear.  That's yeast poop, or some like to call it ethyl alcohol and others call it booze.  If too much of it fills the top of the jar it'll literally drown the starter in its own feces.  I know it's kind of a disgusting thought but that's what it is.

Given long late mornings with a late work call I could make pancakes for my family more often and not even bother to refrigerate the starter, but that's not my life so the next batch of pancakes was the next Friday.  This time I decided not to add the salt (as I think that's what slowed the yeast).  So I just fed the starter and let it grow overnight (this time in the oven with the light on).  In the morning, the starter had a nice clear liquid on top so I knew it had done its job but I decided to make waffles instead of pancakes.  My wife still says those were great and I need to do it for pancakes.

Saturday morning, instead of letting the sourdough starter grow overnight I just used the starter from the fridge and added some flour.  I should have known that wouldn't work, and it didn't.

To be continued...

The picture above is from deep in the Tanana Flats south of Fairbanks.  It's a beautiful area and I was there studying the mosquitoes (there were plenty).

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.