Sour Dough Pancakes

    I have this problem with my wonderful sour dough starter. I can't seem to get into a weekly rythym of  baking bread. Consequently, my sour dough starter is often neglected. It should be fed every week, but I am too cheap to throw part of it out to make room for the new and there is a definite limit to the amount of fridge space we can devote to a sour dough starter.  I finally decided that sour dough pancakes might be a good regular use for my starter.

My newly fed sour dough starter

   I spent some time this morning doing some research on the internet.  All of the sour dough pancake recipes were pretty similar.  They all seemed to consist of an egg, about a tablespoon of oil, a bit of salt, a teaspoon of baking soda, some milk, about a cup of all-purpose flour, and about a cup of sour dough starter.  I chose to use buttermilk because I had some on hand but the recipe didn't call for it. I didn't measure the buttermilk, but just added enough milk until I thought the batter was the right consistency for pancakes.  They actually turned out pretty well. Linda said they were the best pancakes I had ever made.

Sour dough pancakes

   I'm curious to try making them sometime without the baking soda. I would like to know if I could still make decent pancakes if we were in some emergency situation living out of our food storage and we had no baking soda.  I guess a more obvious solution would be to add more baking soda to our food storage.  Also I'm curious if the sour dough is sufficiently acidic by itself to make the baking soda work without using buttermilk since the recipe didn't call for buttermilk. l guess I can experiment with these two variables over the next few weeks. I just hate to monkey with a recipe that turned out so well the first time. What is that old expression? " If it aint broke, don't fix it!"

   I've always liked my pancakes on the fluffy side.  Not that crepes can't be wonderful too. I just like my pancakes to be sufficiently fluffy to absorb honey or syrup. My mother's pancakes were always thin, never fluffy. I always enjoyed getting pancakes in a restaurant because they were fluffy. For many years I had just assumed Mom didn't know how to make good pancakes. Later, I discovered that she made those thin pancakes on purpose because Dad liked thin pancakes.  We have this very small portion of French ancestry, but the surname Tunnell is an anglicized French name. It is just possible that a love of thin pancakes (i.e. crepes) was the only bit of French culture that survived in our family ten generations later.