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 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).

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.