Homemade Sourdough Starter Crumpets
While on Lockdown, I got into the sourdough bread craze…and I became a little obsessed with the mother-starter. The fact that wild yeast is everywhere, was blowing my mind and helped shift my focus and interest onto something positive during lockdown. Plus, with an instant yeast shortage and bread purchasing restrictions, the fact that wild yeast is free is a massive draw. Instead of taking about 5 days for my mother starter to become fully active, it took about ten days. In that time I ended up splitting some of it up and trying different amounts of flour and water feeds and ratios and ended up with a lot of different starters!
Wild yeast is everywhere in the sense that it’s on fruit, in vegetables, flowers, the air! It’s also a pre-biotic and pro-biotic, which encourages good bacteria to be produced in the body plus other supposed heath benefits - unless you’re allergic to yeast like my bff. 😔
Though, if sourdough bread is a bit too full on to begin with, it’s still a great idea to keep a starter alive just so you can make loads of delicious breakfast treats like pancakes, waffles and crumpets! After all it is just flour and water!
Once you have a good mother starter, to build it up and keep it alive you must regularly take out half of it and feed it up again with flour and water to ferment. But instead of discarding the starter you take out, I have discovered that you can use it make a lot of amazing food with a simple starter, and one of these is CRUMPETS!
I remember eating these from a packet as a kid but I never really knew what they were - except delicious hole-y pancakes that you could just pop in the toaster and cover with lots of butter! But I can tell you that making crumpets from scratch is SO much better and more satisfying than shop-bought ones. It’s cheap, so easy and the taste and texture is amazing. Sort of crunchy on the bottom, but soft and spongy too.
To make a starter from scratch, I followed this recipe here by thekitchn.com
Crumpets:
Ingredients:
1 Cup of Starter or “discard”
1/4 tsp baking soda
just shy of 1/4 tsp salt
1 Tbsp sugar (or less to taste)
metal egg rings (optional) These are great to keep that round shape and gives them room to rise. You can buy easily these on Amazon.
If using two cups of starter, almost but not quite, double the ingredients.
Method:
Combine all ingredients into a bowl
Mix together - it will look light and billowy
Lightly oil a frying pan, flat griddle or non-stick pan
scoop a large tablespoon of the mixture into the rings or just directly on the pan. They wont rise as much and will turn out a little flatter but still taste great. You could use metal cookie cutters instead.
Wait until little holes form and the doughy mixture cooks through.
You can flip and lightly seal the top side, especially if you have made thick crumpets.
Make sure you put lots of butter on them then add your favourite spread. My favourite spreads to put on them are honey, marmite and jam…enjoy! #happylockdown ( <—- I’ve linked yummy crumpet inspo here)
