Sourdough (Discard) Skillet from Farmhouse on Boone

Sourdough (Discard) Skillet - made May 15, 2025, modified from Farmhouse on Boone

1 1/2 cups sourdough starter

3 eggs

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon basil

3 tablespoons butter or coconut oil

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 pound ground turkey

4 cups mixed veggies - I used spinach and Japanese sweet potatoes

1/4 cup fresh cilantro

1 1/2 cups cheddar cheese, optional

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Saute the ground turkey in a cast iron skillet on the stove. After it's completely cooked, place on a plate and set aside.
3. Peel 3 medium-sized Japanese sweet potatoes, peel and cut into chunks. Parboil in salted boiling water for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and drain. 
4. Thoroughly wash spinach.
5. In the cast iron skillet, stir together the spinach, potato chunks and cilantro until spinach has cooked down. Add the ground turkey back in.
6. In a medium bowl, mix together the sourdough starter, eggs, salt, basil, butter and baking powder. Spread the sourdough mixture evenly over the top of the ground turkey and veggies. Sprinkle with the 1 1/2 cups grated cheddar cheese.
7. Bake for 25 minutes or until bread is cooked through and golden.

As anyone who's ever nurtured and fed a sourdough starter, you have to keep it alive and active through regular feedings of water and flour. But whenever you feed it and it grows, you also have to discard some of the starter to make room for the new growth.

I hate to waste anything, even or particularly, ingredients that could be used to make new (or even familiar) dishes. It turns out I'm not alone as there are a lot of recipes using up sourdough discard. Who knew?? (Probably many other people)

I had never heard of sourdough discard skillet but I was happy to find this recipe where it seemed so flexible that I could use anything, most notably, the ingredients I either had on hand or was easy to buy. For this particular version, I used ground turkey, spinach and Japanese sweet potatoes, also know as Murasaki sweet potatoes, available at Trader Joe's.

I slightly underestimated how much discard I had and used up almost all of it, leaving just enough to have the new feeding of water and flour to work with to grow more starter.

As advertised, this couldn't be easier to make. I did parboil the sweet potatoes briefly, just to make sure they cooked through. And I could probably have added more spinach given how much spinach cooks down. But for my first effort, it turned out pretty well.

For the more creative cooks among you (of which I am not one), there's so much flexibility to this type of recipe. Throw together whatever ingredients suit you and cover it with the sourdough discard mixture and cheese and voila, easy dinner dish. Bonus that I got to use my cast iron pan which had been gathering dust for awhile. Next time I wouldn't hesitate to use more spices either to jazz up the dish. I just need to grow more starter.