Popovers from Sourdough Starter

Delicious concoctions can be made with sourdough starter, left in the container after you have made bread. These recipes use unfed starter. A book I love for sourdough baking is Artisan Sourdough by Emilie Raffa. She has some recipes at the end of the book for using that leftover starter.

I decided to experiment with trying her easy dijon parsley popovers. I had bought a beautiful popover pan and had only used it once with my granddaughter. This one asks you to heat the pan in the oven while the oven reaches 450. My popover pan holds six large popovers, exactly the number created by this recipe.

Putting this together was quick and the results were delectable.

First you whisk together three eggs. Then you add 1/2 cup of leftover starter and whisk that together.

Meanwhile you melt 2 T of unsalted butter in 1 1/4 cups of whole milk on low heat on the stove. As soon as the butter melted, I took it off of the heat so that it wouldn't cook the eggs when I added it to the mix. 

 Next I added the mustard, garlic powder, sea salt (I used Himalayan pink salt), and some freshly ground pepper. Oh, and a T of finely chopped fresh parsley. You can see the green flecks.

 Slowly I whisked in the milk/melted butter mix. And finally I whisked in one cup of all-purpose flour.

I pulled the hot, hot, hot pan out of the oven and sprayed the cups with canola oil cooking spray. Then I poured the batter into the cups, making them as even as possible.

The popovers popped up high and light as they cooked and they were oh, so beautiful.

 I had one with a bowl of homemade potato soup topped with bacon and sour cream. What a delicious dinner that was!

This post is being written in the time of the coronavirus. Many of us are isolated at home. I gave the rest of the popovers and the remaining soup to a friend and her husband. She met my car near her home and took the food through my passenger side back window so we could stay six feet apart.

In our own homes, we all enjoyed them as well as the soup which was cooked with a rind of cheese as I often do. Turned out the cheese rind I pulled out of the bag was a hot pepper cheese, giving the potato soup a kick that I loved but will never be able to repeat!.

A Sourdough Starter Story

My mother ordered 100-year-old sourdough starter from San
Francisco when I was 15. She shared it with me when I left home
so I could continue baking sourdough bread. I have baked
bread almost every week my whole life. 

My mother died at age 93 in 2015 and when we cleaned out
her house, I found a blackened quart jar on her screened
porch in Mississippi - not refrigerated and not used for at
least four years. I brought it into the house and opened the
jar. The jar's interior (and suddenly the whole
house) smelled like the sewer. My sister was horrified
that I was going to empty this jar, but after I pulled off
spoonful after spoonful of black gunk, in the center
I found pure white starter. 

We had to leave the windows wide open in the house for hours
to get rid of the awful smell. And to bring the starter home with me,
I triple bagged it in zip-lock bags like a plastic version of the
stacked Russian dolls.

I brought Mother’s starter back to Atlanta to see if I could revive it.
I put about a tablespoon of it in each of nine small bowls and fed
each of the bowls about 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup water.
I covered all of them and went to work. 

When I got home it was like the starter that ate my kitchen. Thrilled
to have food after four years, the starters had all bubbled up and
over the rims of the bowls in which I had left them. My kitchen
counter was covered with glorious, revived, 151-year-old starter.
Sadly, there are no photos. I have been baking with it several
times weekly ever since and sharing it with everyone who
expresses an interest. 

In case you have any worries about the fact that it was in
the Mississippi heat, unfed, for four or so years, a sourdough
starter was scraped off of a pottery jar in an Egyptian
tomb and brought back to life. Microbes are amazing
survivors! (see Rob Dunn’s book: Never Home Alone).

I love knowing that this starter now includes my microbes
as well as my mother's, microbes from my Atlanta kitchens
over the years, and those from my childhood home in
Mississippi.

As you use a sourdough starter, your microbes and those
from your kitchen will be added as well!