My favorite ways to use sourdough discard

Like everyone else and their mother, I first made a sourdough starter deep in the pandemic. My love affair with bread was swift and all-consuming. I set my morning alarm to give me enough time for four dough turns before work started. Friday nights, when the newest episode of Great British Bakeoff dropped, I hit pause every 20 minutes to sprint into the kitchen and check on my loaf’s rise. I had eyes for nothing but bread. I even stopped baking sweet things. (I’m not proud of that. These days I aim for more balance in my baked-good relationships.)

As my skills slowly improved – my bread evolving from glutinous boulders to crackly-crusted loaves I could hand to my neighbors without humiliation – the amount of sourdough discard I was throwing away grew proportionately.

Every sourdough baker knows this problem. I swear my blue silicone spatula gave me side-eye every time I used it to scoop a head of unused, fermented, transformed, useful flour into the compost bin.

Perhaps your kitchen utensils give you side-eye, too. Or maybe your household tools are innocently inanimate, which is nice for you, but you’d still like to make the most of the ingredients you buy.

I’ve rounded up a few of my favorite recipes from around the internet for how to use sourdough discard in delicious ways. I hope these inspire you bread bakers. And if you’d like to hear more about how to bake low-waste and help the climate, give my podcast episode on the topic a listen. In it I talk to climate experts, authors, and chefs for their insights and tips.