Those Sourdough Brownies

As I mentioned in summing up our April food expenses, I now house sourdough starter. Starter needs fed on a regular basis to keep it alive and healthy. My routine is to pull it out of the refrigerator on the weekend, feed it, let it rest (usually overnight), then put a small portion of it back in the fridge. What does not go back in is called discard.

Discard is just extra starter. When you feed the starter, it grows. Only a small amount goes back in the fridge for next time, so now there is all this extra sourdough goop, the discard.

Some people actually toss the discard. They don't want to use it at the time, they have already given starter portions to their friends so the friends can get into sourdough baking (that's what happened to me: a neighbor gave me some)(yes, she asked first), and, guess what, there'll be more discard next week!

I don't like throwing the discard away, even though there truly is more where that came from. So with the advent of sourdough baking in this household, I started looking up discard recipes. (Another phrase for "discard recipes" is "sourdough recipes," because they really are one and the same thing.

As you can imagine, many sourdough recipes feature breads and crackers, and yes, I have made some of those. I have seen recipes for pancakes, coffee cakes, and such. On a whim, I searched "sourdough brownie recipe."

Holy moly!

Apparently, sourdough enthusiasts have been baking sourdough brownies for years! Who knew? Many recipes commented on the "tang" that sourdough brought to the brownie. I was intrigued and went searching for a recipe I could get into easily. Some of them were labor intensive. Others required huge amounts of this or that (one called for four eggs, which I have never seen in any homemade brownie recipe). And then I stumbled across this one from Bob's Red Mill and never looked back: https://www.bobsredmill.com/recipes/how-to-make/sourdough-brownies/

What's not to like about a recipe that starts with 9 ounces of bittersweet chocolate (I used dark chocolate) and 1 cup of butter?

The brownies were delicious. We shared them with neighbors on either sides, as well as the friend who got me started down this sourdough road. Everyone gave them rave reviews.

Here are some of my photos of that first batch. When I make them again, I may add a little (very little) more flour to provide a bit more body. The recipe requires the baker to "sprinkle" the flour, so perhaps I will add one more sprinkle.

The starter after being fed and resting overnight

The bubbles show the starter is healthy 

9 ounces of dark chocolate and 1 cup of butter, melted over slow heat

Adding the discard to the chocolate and other ingredients

Stirring the starter in

About to fold in the sprinkles of flour

The recipe calls for a 9x9 baking pan, a size I do not own. This oval pan holds the same volume.

Out of the pan. 

"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." 

Observations About April Money

When I wrote about our March food and household expenditures, I noted that we spent larger than normal amounts of money that month and the month before, most of it being related to stocking up on basics and staples. I also breathed the hope that our April spending would be much less.

Well, here it is May Day, although given our weather in Ohio, you'd swear we were in March still, and I have the numbers at hand because guess what? Our spending on food has decreased greatly so I only have a few numbers to add instead of a sheet full of them. And, looking at the decrease in spending, clearly we are looking at what we have around the house rather than jumping in the car to go to the grocery store to get something else (more about that later).

Our April food purchases? $144.56. Household items added up to $6.10, the bulk of that being trash liners for our household, a box which will last into 2021. Total? $150.66. That starts to yank the average YTD down from $238+ to $216+. I might get it down to $180.00/month average yet. We did not eat out (takeout) at all.

The food costs include two large shoppings at Aldi, one in person early in the month by Warren and one online for home delivery later in the month, one key food item when Warren had to get something for his shop at Walmart (What key food item? Kosher salt, a must have and something Aldi does not carry), and, finally, $5.00 to the Symphony for the Hershey's chocolate bars (from February's downtown Chocolate Walk) that I knew were there. The early Aldi shopping included two hams from Aldi at the pre-Easter price of 89¢ a pound. Those are now residing in the freezer and will come into play later on this year.

The most interesting revelation about April spending has been the changes I see in me. Even without the spending spurts in February and March, I now realize exactly what I mentioned above: I have a huge tendency to jump to the grocery store rather than ask myself "so what do we have here?"  Now that I am unable to go to the store and we are both very reluctant to have Warren in a store (because I am in such a high risk group), I find myself being far more thoughtful about food preparation. To borrow from blogger friend Laurie at The Clean Green Homestead, I am using what's on hand.

One item on hand now is sourdough starter, which I use weekly. (Well, I feed it weekly and then use the discard, but that's what sourdough starters are all about: feeding and discarding.) There are a variety of things you can bake with the discard, but my favorite to date has been sourdough brownies.

Sourdough starter (the bubbles show it is active)

But going back to realizing how much I just went to the grocery without thinking: this revelation about my twitchy impulse (to borrow from Anthony Ongaro, the one minimalist I enjoy, really like) caught me off guard. I famously do not shop. Ever. Malls? Nope. Online? Nope. Amazon Prime? Ha. I don't even buy books (very much) anymore. But apparently I was totally open to the call of the grocery store. And while it is likely another month or more before my oncologist lets me even stand near a grocery store, let alone set foot in one, this is a truth about me (that twitch to shop) that I need to be aware of when I finally do enter a grocery.

Despite my optimism in early April about gardening soon, the weather here has stayed colder than I expected for this time of year. We are still having occasional frosts. So there are no beds planted, other than the sprouted onions I planted for the first time ever, most of which seem to have settled in and are growing. I hope the gardening front is entirely different by May's end.

And until then, we'll enjoy the brownies.