u/Sea-Siren-5053

I haven’t been baking very long, and so far I haven’t used my discard much. I was saving it for a bit, but I wasn’t using it and it was just accumulating, so I ended up just throwing it away. This leads me to two questions I have about discard:

I was expecting that the discard would give baked goods a bit of a flavour, a bit of tang, but I just found that what I made just ended up tasting the same as it would without. Is that normal? Can I feed it a bit before using, or would that just then become starter

again ?

Can’t discard just be used back in a sourdough bread recipe? If I always use the same flour:water ratio, I’ll know exactly how much of each I’m putting in, then can replace some of the flour and water I would’ve added. In addition to active starter of course. I’ve never come across doing this, is there a reason not to do this?

Thanks for illuminating me! Interested in discussing!

Ps: I have some in the fridge now, and was planning to make some kind of banana bread muffin with it tomorrow. Would love a recipe recommendation!

I was getting a bit discouraged with the sourdough process with dough not bulk fermenting and rising enough. I think my starter is still a bit weak, plus my house had been quite cold. So I decided to try adding a bit of yeast to give it a boost. I couldn’t find a definitive answer on how much I should add, without doing a completely different recipe. I went with 1.5g/0.33%, which I found in a couple of places (not sure if they were the best sources).

Yep, it was too much yeast lol

I realized pretty quickly that it was too much, it was fermenting so fast. I hadn’t done a yeast only bread in a few years, so I just stuck to the same process as sourdough, just sped up.

On the plus side, it’s definitely not dense, crumb is alright, and it looked nicely proofed and easy to score. But unfortunately not very sour.

I’ll try it again with a very small amount yeast, or maybe look for a proper hybrid recipe. And hopefully I can figure out how to strengthen my starter in the meantime.

Recipe and method:

1.5g yeast
500g flour (50 whole wheat)
350g water (95F)
110 g starter (1:1:1)
10g salt

Mix at 8am. Wait 15, 1 stretch and folds, 2 sets of coil folds every 30 min.

Bulk until 12pm (4h at 22C).

Preshape, wait 15, then final shape. Placed in loaf pan and in the fridge.

Baked at 8pm. 25 min covered at 465, 23 uncovered at 450. Rest overnight.

Using sourdough discard

Adding yeast to sourdough