Delightfully crispy and packed with flavor: cheese-like tang, garlic, onion, with a hit of salt. You’ll never discard your discard starter again.

One day, I noticed a friend had posted on a community webpage that she had extra sourdough starter if anyone wanted it. It made me wonder about extra starter – a problem I don’t seem to encounter. Due to a combination of where we live and our predisposition to avoid waste, we generally don’t have “extra.” Of course, shortly after coming to the conclusion that we’d never have extra starter, I had a week where I skipped making sourdough loaves and wound up with “extra starter.” One of my recipe books recommended discarding the extra. What?! I decided to taste it, to see if the flavor would inspire a recipe. Tasting raw starter was a bad idea. Yuck! 

After a bit of research, I decided to tinker with a cracker recipe I found on the King Arthur Flour website. My first batch came out wonderfully flavored, but too soft. The problem was the thickness. My rolling pin and I could not get the dough thin enough. The solution came to me after rolling lasagna noodles – the pasta machine! If you’ve only ever thought of your pasta machine as a noodle machine, think again. Besides wonderfully flavored and textured linguini and spaghetti, I’ve also cranked out perfect bowties, ravioli and even wonton wrappers. This seemingly single-purposed machine helps perfectly roll sourdough to make satisfyingly crunchy crackers.

If you don’t have a pasta machine, I highly recommend the Atlas model we have. It is a heavy beast, but it is a kitchen tool that’s made the cut every time we’ve had to pack up and move. If you don’t want to add another item to your cupboards, a rolling pin will still work with this recipe. Be patient and aim to roll a thickness of about 1/16”.

The finished crackers have a tangy cheese-like flavor from the sourdough starter. This in combination with a mixture of onion and garlic and a hit of grey sea salt make these crackers very addicting. Serve with the complementary topping of your choice. Or enjoy their flavor unadorned, as I usually do.

Don’t Discard the Discard Sourdough Crackers

Ingredients

• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp granulated shallots (onion powder would work, too)
• 1 tsp granulated garlic
• 1 cup sourdough starter, unfed
• 4 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
• olive oil for brushing
• coarse salt for sprinkling on top (I like grey sea salt)

Directions

1. Mix first 6 ingredients to form a smooth dough.
2. Tightly cover in plastic and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. I often refrigerate for several days.
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
4. Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper or reusable liner.
5. Cut off 1/4th of refrigerated dough and roll until it’s about 1/16” thick. I roll it like it is pasta on the pasta machine down to the 5th setting.
6. Placed rolled dough on prepared baking sheet.
7. Using a knife, or pastry roller, cut dough into cracker shapes. There is no need to move the crackers apart.
8. Brush dough with olive oil.
9. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt.
10. Bake for 9 minutes.
11. Crackers will be lightly browned when done.
12. Let cool on wire rack. Store cooled crackers in an airtight container at room temperature.
13. Repeat with remaining dough.