Sourdough Sweet Potato Biscuits from Sourdough Brandon

Sourdough Sweet Potato Biscuits - made May 20, 2025 from Sourdough Brandon

280 grams all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

113 grams (1 stick) unsalted butter, cold and cut into small cubes

232 grams mashed sweet potatoes

1 tablespoon brown sugar

100 grams sourdough discard

61 grams (1/4 cup) buttermilk plus more for brushing tops

1. Line baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. In a mixing bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and salt; set aside.
3. In another mixing bowl, mix sweet potatoes, brown sugar, sourdough discard and buttermilk until combined.
4. Toss the cold, cubed butter into the dry ingredients and cut into the flour until the butter is in pea-sized pieces.
5. Add the wet ingredients to bowl and use a fork to mix until clumps form and the mixture is distributed throughout. Drizzle more buttermilk if needed into the mixture. The mixture may still be quite dry but will come together in the next step. 
6. Sprinkle work surface with a generous dusting of flour. Dump the dough onto the work surface and pat into a rectangle about 3/4 inch thick. Use a bench scraper to divide into four equal pieces. Stack them on top of each other and use your hands to press down and pat back into a rectangle. Repeat two more times to further laminate the dough and create flaky layers.
7. After the last stacking, pat the dough into a 1-inch thick square. Use the bench scraper to cut 9 equal-sized squares. Freeze the biscuits for at least 15 minutes.
8. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Evenly space the frozen biscuits on the prepared baking sheet and brush the tops with buttermilk.
9. Bake for 20-23 minutes or until the tops are golden brown. Serve warm with butter.

how the "dough" looked when it was first turned out of the bowl

First off, I'm going to say this was a laughable failure on my part. I say my part as I'm sure others have made this recipe just fine, as evidenced by the original blog post from Sourdough Brandon. I'm not a dab hand at making biscuits as I rarely make them so my ineptitude at biscuit making probably contributed to the failure.

I also say laughable because I really did have to laugh at how terribly the process went for me. The dough as mixed according to the directions was too dry. I ended up doubling the amount of buttermilk and it was still too dry. I tried the directions of cutting the dough into 4 pieces to stack for the lamination and the floury mass I can't really call dough fell apart and was not amenable to being stacked.

I squished the dough together and had a half-assed attempt at cutting it out into biscuits. 

You can see below how much flour dust was still left after cutting out the biscuits. And even then, the ones above barely held together.

I think I went wrong in a couple of places. I used Japanese or murasaki sweet potatoes and they just weren't as moist as regular yellow sweet potatoes. My sourdough starter also seemed a bit more dry and doughy rather than a wet starter. Plus, I probably should've just kept adding buttermilk until the dough at least held together and was shaggy rather than dry flour.

Given all my issues with the dough, this definitely was not flaky or laminated. It was, not surprisingly, rather doughy and dense, even after baking it more than 15 minutes than the prescribed time. 

The flavor of the murasaki sweet potatoes also wasn't very pronounced. The biscuits weren't horrible and the taste test biscuit went down just fine, warm and slathered with butter. But next time, I would definitely use regular sweet potatoes and add enough buttermilk to make that shaggy dough.

Browned Butter Sourdough Chocolate Chip Cookies from Baking It Beautiful

Browned Butter Sourdough Chocolate Chip Cookies - made dough May 17, 2025 from Baking It Beautiful 

1 cup butter, melted, browned and cooled slightly

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup granulated sugar

3 egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup sourdough starter

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 3/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 1/2 cups chocolate chips

1. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the cooled brown butter, brown sugar and granulated sugar until well combined.
2. Add the egg yolks, vanilla extract and sourdough starter, mixing until combined.
3. Add remaining dry ingredients until just combined and no floury streaks remain. Fold in chocolate chips.
4. Cover dough and chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. Portion into dough balls, cover and chill again for at least 8 hours or overnight.
5. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper and evenly space dough balls. Bake 7-9 minutes or until edges are set and middles no longer look raw. Remove from oven and let rest on baking sheet for several minutes before transferring to wire rack to cool completely.

My next few posts are going to be recipes that make use of sourdough discard. Once I fell down that rabbit hole on pinterest, I discovered a plethora of recipes that use up sourdough discard. 

So of course I felt compelled to try them, especially since I found 2 dozen eggs at Costco for $4.89. In these times of high prices, that was little short of a miracle. Long live Costco.

In any case, I also had a book club meeting coming up so it was the perfect time to try out this recipe so I had cookies to bring to the meeting.

To cut to the chase, these were excellent cookies. A bit crisp at the edges and not as soft as I normally like in my chocolate chip cookies but still had a nice crunch. I don't know if that was due to the browned butter or the sourdough discard. Or both. And in all honesty, I couldn't taste the discard at all. Not sure if I was supposed to or if it's just there to impact the texture rather than the flavor.

Still, this is both a good recipe for chocolate chip cookies and a good way to use up discard. Now that I've found there seems to be a cottage industry of sourdough discard recipes, I may or may not be feeding my starter just to have enough discard to try out more recipes.

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.

Sourdough Bread

Sourdough Bread - made February 12 - 14 and April 19 - 21, 2025

My quilting instructor shared sourdough starter with us as well as the instructions on how to make sourdough bread. She also demo'd how to make the bread. I never got on the sourdough bread baking bandwagon that so many others did during Covid but I jumped on the bandwagon now. 

Breadmaking is not one of my stronger skills, especially if I can't use a bread machine. But I thought I'd give it a go. My first attempt didn't have the same airiness of crumb that my quilt leader's had, my second attempt was better in that the top half did but the bottom half was more dense. The third time finally got close to what she did with irregular air pockets more evenly distributed for a soft but still chewy crumb. I've laid out the multiple steps below. I already had the starter she gifted to us so I'm not including directions on how to make a starter but I'm sure there are plenty of directions out there for starting one.

Although the directions are long, they're not hard or complicated. Just be aware you need to plan ahead and allow yourself 2 days before bread baking (and eating) can happen. Sourdough bead is not something to be rushed but definitely something to be enjoyed.

2 days before you want to bake the bread - Starter Prep Day

1. The night of Day -2 add 100 grams of all-purpose flour and 100 grams warm (~105 degrees F) water to 20-100 grams of starter. Loosely cover and let sit at room temperature overnight.

My sourdough starter after feeding

right after feeding and mixing

left to grow overnight at room temp

Day -1: Bread Mix Day

1. Pour 525 grams warm (105 degrees F) water into large bowl. Add 200 grams starter and mix thoroughly with dough whisk until well combined.
2. Add 700 grams bread flour and 20 grams salt; mix with dough whisk then plastic bowl scraper. You can use wet hands to form a shaggy dough ball.
3. Cover bowl with towel and let rise (autolyse stage) for at least an hour and up to 4 hours.
4. After the autolyse stage, using wet hands, pull the dough from under the dough ball up and stretch it gently as you pull it over the doughball top. Release. Give the bowl a quarter turn and repeat the process until the dough is stretched and pulled from each quarter of the bowl.
5. Over the next 2 1/2 hours, repeat the stretch and fold every 30 minutes for a total of four times. The dough will change from a slimy, ropy mass to a billowy dough with many air pockets and definite body as you stretch and fold it. Do not punch down the bowl at any time. The dough should become elastic and resilient and pass the window pane test. If your dough is still breaking before it goes transparent when pulled, do another stretch and fold.
6. Bulk rise: after the stretch and folds, allow the dough to bulk rise in the bowl at room temperature for 1-3 hours until it rises by 30% or so. Cover the dough bowl with plastic wrap and set it refrigerator for 12-15 hours (overnight).

after mixing and folding

Baking Day: 

1. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and let sit on the counter in the bowl for 2 hours or until the dough reaches room temperature.
2. On a clean, unfloured counter, pour out the dough into a large mass. Flour the top of the dough lightly and evenly.
3. Cut dough in half with bench scraper and form each half into a dough ball: scrape each half in a circle around the dough, leaving it unturned, flour side up. The unfloured counter will hold the dough center and create tension as you circle the dough with the scraper, forming a ball. Repeat for both dough balls. The dough edge should be round and the dough balls should have some form and resilience.
4. Let the dough balls rest for 20-30 minutes. They will spread out but should not fall off at the edge of the pancake. If they do, reform the (round) loaves and bench rest them again to build the structure of the dough better.
5. Final shape and rise: gently slide the dough scraper under one of the dough balls and flip it over so it rests on the floured side.
6. Gently stretch and pull the dough over from the bottom to 1/3 up the loaf. Stretch and pull the dough from the sides to the dough middle. For the final stretch, take the dough from the top of the ball and pull it all the way down to the bottom. Form a seam, pinching the seam as necessary.
7. Place the dough seam side up in a rice-floured banneton or bowl. Cover and place in the refrigerator to rise for 2-4 hours.
8. Set a baking stone, Dutch oven or baking sheet in the oven. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F for at least 30 minutes.
9. Keep the formed loaf in your banneton in the refrigerator until oven has fully heated for 30 minutes. Remove one banneton from the fridge. Gently flip loaf onto a piece of parchment paper, seam side down. Score with lame or razor blade or sharp scissors. Pick up edges of parchment paper and gently place in very hot Dutch oven. Cover with lid and return covered Dutch oven to oven. Bake 30 minutes at 450 degrees F. 
10. Remove the lid after 30 minutes. Bake an additional 10 minutes, uncovered to 205 degrees F (use a meat thermometer to check). Remove from oven and let cool for at least 1 hour to set the crumb. Repeat with remaining dough loaf.
11. If you don't have a Dutch oven, preheat oven to 400 degrees with baking pan inside for 15 minutes. On the shelf below the baking sheet, fill a pan with water for steam. Reduce heat to 375 and spritz loaves liberally with water before placing scored loaves atop parchment paper inside. Bake 30-40 minutes. Let cool for at least 1 hour before slicing.

when dough is first poured out from fridge

tighten into round ball

in the banneton for final chill and rise

don't forget to score the dough loaf before baking

my first attempt

my first attempt

As you can see from the pictures, my first attempt only had the air pockets in the top half of the loaf and the bottom was more dense. I thought I had taken pictures of the inside of my third loaf but apparently not. Just imagine the third loaf had the top half and the bottom loaf both with more evenly disbursed air holes, lol.

Crumbl Cookies review #94 - Classic Yellow Layer Cake and Flourless Chocolate Cake

Crumbl Cookies review #94: Classic Yellow Layer Cake and Flourless Chocolate Cake - visited April 12, 2025

I almost didn't get anything from the Crumbl lineup last week. They made a big deal of this collaboration with the Kardashian/Jenner names and to be honest, that had the opposite effect on me than Crumbl intended. I'm not into either family name and am not incented to buy anything attached to them.

So I dawdled until the last day these were available, trying to make up my mind if I wanted them or not. I did end up getting two of them to try but in hindsight, should've just tried one of them.

Because the yellow cake wasn't anything special and I already had a suspicion it wouldn't be. It's just a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. It was okay but I've had better and it wasn't really worth the upcharge or the calories. Truthfully, it was so generic I thought I'd tried it already and had just forgotten but that wasn't the case.

Now I've tried it and would skip it next time it comes around, regardless of whose name it's marketed with.

The flourless chocolate cake was more interesting to me. I almost didn't get it because I don't like raspberries but I was visiting with my mom and my niece the next day so I got it to share with them. I "suggested" to my niece that she eat the raspberries and she did. Problem solved.

I have much more positive things to say about the flourless chocolate cake. It was marketed as having "zero refined sugar" and it definitely wasn't sweet. It was like eating a dark chocolate truffle.

And while I don't usually like dark chocolate, it worked well in the flourless chocolate cake. This had a great, creamy texture and rich chocolate flavor. It was like baked fudge but not as sweet. I'm glad I shared it as I don't think I can eat a whole one, even over several days. Too rich for more than a few bites at a time. As it was, the three of us ate 3/4 of it in one sitting and I had the remaining 1/4 the next day. My niece liked it too and asked me to let her know the next time it was on the menu as they just opened a Crumbl near her. Ah, another Crumbl convert.