This recipe for sourdough discard sandwich bread is made with your favorite flour, water, sea salt, and unfed starter. That’s it! It bakes up light and delicious for sandwiches, toast, and grilled cheese. The recipe is for one loaf at a time to keep your sandwich bread fresh, but it can easily be doubled if you have more mouths to feed.
This recipe calls for organic white flour. This is because organic white flour is the only white flour not bleached and not enriched.
However, you can switch up the flour and experiment with various flour substitutions and combinations as you feel more confident.
This recipe also calls for unfed sourdough starter, but you may use active, fed starter if that’s what you have. This recipe is really for those days when you need bread but can’t wait around for your starter to rise with a current feeding.
More on that below, but here are a few more sourdough bread ideas you can try when you have time:
Yeast Free Bread: Sourdough with Spelt
Sourdough Kulich: An Easter Recipe
Sourdough Pitas: Make Naturally Leavened Pita Bread
To keep track of your sourdough recipes, as well as ferment times and baking details, please join our newsletter family and receive our super simple Sourdough Worksheets!
What is the Difference Between Sourdough Bread and Sourdough Discard Bread?
Sourdough bread usually refers to a loaf of bread made with active, bubbly sourdough starter. In some recipes, there will also be commercial yeast, but none of my sourdough recipes include it.
Discard bread usually refers to a loaf of sourdough bread made with “discard”. Sourdough discard is simply sourdough starter that hasn’t been fed yet. This is also known as unfed starter.
Active and unfed starter function the same in recipes, though many recipes suggest you use active starter (with bubbles). Because this is true, there’s no reason for you to have to discard sourdough starter.
Discard means to throw away, but you don’t need to toss unfed starter because you can use it in any sourdough recipe. If I don’t feel like baking and I happen to have extra starter, I give it to my chickens and ducks to supplement their feed. They love it!
Sourdough Discard Sandwich Bread
To make sourdough discard sandwich bread, you need to understand how sourdough starter works to raise bread dough.
How a Sourdough Starter Works
Sourdough starter is:
Flour + Water. That’s it.
When you feed the starter (typically) equal parts flour and water, the natural yeast (aka wild yeast, natural leaven) and bacteria consume the water and the flour. This consumption is achieved via a process called fermentation.
The consumption produces gas that increases the size of the starter and produces bubbles.
If you want a more scientific explanation, sourdough fermentation begins when you feed your starter. The enzymes in the flour break down the grain starches into sugars. The yeast and bacteria consume the sugar, which produces CO2, acids, and alcohol.
When you have alcohol accumulate on your sourdough starter this is called hooch. It’s gray and has a strong odor. Just dump it off; it’s not “poisonous” or necessarily harmful but it doesn’t improve the flavor of your starter. It can also cause stomach upset.
When you add sourdough starter to bread dough, the CO2 gets trapped in the dough, causing it to rise and create the airy crumb structure that is characteristic of sourdough bread.
What Happens if You Bake Sourdough Discard?
Sourdough discard, or unfed sourdough, recipes bake up the same way active sourdough recipe do. When you bake sourdough discard recipes and ferment them correctly and raise them according to instructions, you get great sourdough baked goods.
It can be hard to wrap our brains around using sourdough discard, or unfed starter, in place of active starter in sourdough recipes, but I promise it works!
- When you have unfed starter, you feed it equal parts water and flour.
- If you keep your starter in your fridge, you’ll feed far less often – maybe once or twice a week.
- When you keep your starter on the counter, you’ll feed it multiple times a week because it’s a warmer environment.
- When you place an unfed starter into 3-6 cups of flour (the amount called for in most bread recipes), you give it a huge feeding. It will bubble up and raise your bread in the same way an active starter will.
Some bakers claim an unfed starter will raise better even better than active starter!
If you’re on Facebook, try the awesome group Rebel Sourdough Baking for more practical information and instruction.
How Do you Roll Sourdough for Sandwich Bread?
You don’t need to spend a lot of time forming the dough roll for sourdough sandwich bread. In fact, from start to finish, this is basically a no-knead recipe!
When your dough has fermented for at least six hours and doubled in size and slowly returns (though not completely) a gentle finger pressure, it’s time to shape it.
- Remove the dough from the bowl to a lightly floured or water-damp clean surface. If you use water, use only a little bit – you don’t want a pool of water.
- Flour or wet your hands to pick up the dough and place it on the prepared surface.
- Press the dough flat with the heel of your hands and fold two sides underneath to the bottom of the dough. Alternatively, you can pull one side of the dough up, shake it a bit to even it out, and fold it over the top of the dough.
- Turn the dough 30° and gently pull out the sides of the dough, this is called stretching, and tuck them underneath (this is called folding). Or as I said, you can do this from the top instead of tucking into the bottom.
- Rotate and repeat that action (of stretching and folding) until you have a smooth, log-shaped dough.
It sort of looks like a dough baby at this point – I always give it a congenial pat when I’m done shaping it.
Clever carrot has a super short video to see how she stretches and folds her dough from the top. Either way works great. Just don’t overwork the dough! This isn’t kneading; this is simply shaping.
Emilie Raffa of Clever Carrot also has a sourdough book out, Artisan Sourdough Made Simple, that I’ve heard great things about but haven’t yet picked up. I think it will be going on my birthday list this year!
Sourdough Discard Sandwich Bread Recipe
Sourdough Discard Sandwich Bread
Ingredients
- 1 Cup Water
- 1/2 Cup Discard unfed Sourdough Starter
- 3 - 3 1/2 Cups Organic White Flour
- 1 tsp. Sea Salt
Instructions
- In a large bowl, combine 1 cup water with 1/2 cup of starter. Mix well.
- Add flour and salt to the bowl and mix until incorporated. The dough will start to clear the sides of the bowl as you finish mixing.
- Once the dough is thoroughly mixed, use your hands to form a ball of dough.
- Wipe the bowl with oil and return the dough ball.* Cover the bowl to keep the fermenting dough warm and damp. Allow to ferment six hours or until doubled in size. The dough will slowly return a gentle fingerprint, though not completely, when ready to form into a loaf.
- Remove the dough from the bowl and place it on a clean, lightly floured** surface. Start tucking the edges underneath to the bottom of the dough while slowly rotating it. This should take no more than four or five tucks to form a log of dough. Don't overwork the dough.
- Place the log into an seasoned/oiled or parchment paper-lined bread pan and cover with an inverted oiled bread pan. This will keep the dough moist while it rises. Allow the dough to rise until doubled in size, usually 1-2 hours.
- Remove the inverted pan and use scissors to cut 3-6 slashes on the top of dough. Return the inverted pan and place in the oven. Place the pan inside a cold oven and set to 450°F/232°C for 35 minutes. Then reduce the oven temperature to 400°F/2041°C and bake for another 25-30 minutes. Sourdough bread is done when an internal thermometer reads around 205°F/96°C.
- Gently remove from the pan to a cooling rack and allow to cool completely ( up to 12 hours) before cutting.
- Store in an airtight bag or container for up to a week in a cool place.
Notes
What is the Best Way to Use Sourdough Discard?
Remember, sourdough discard can more correctly be called unfed sourdough starter. We can use sourdough discard in any recipe where we’d use active starter.
When it comes to sourdough, I want you to learn to be wary of anyone telling you what is BEST to do. Sometimes people get carried away with their passion for sourdough baking that they get rigid with their method.
The truth is, there are limitless ways to bake sourdough, including using sourdough discard. My pioneer ancestors mixed their bread dough in the morning, fermented it on the back of a dusty wagon, and baked it over open flame at night.
No scales, no thermometers, no fancy additives. Just flour, water, starter, and some salt.
If they can do it, you and I can do it!
And we can do it without claiming our way is the best or the only way to do use sourdough. We can support each other and share methods and tips and support.
But there’s no one right way to do anything in the kitchen.
All the same, here are a few sourdough discard recipes for you:
Cookies made with Sourdough Starter
Pumpkin Drop Biscuits with Sourdough Starter
Sourdough Brownies from Common Sense Home
Einkorn Sourdough Crackers from A Modern Homestead
Is Eating Sourdough Discard Healthy?
Sourdough starter is healthy in that the bacteria and yeasts have digested the starches and phytic acid in and on the grain. The longer it ferments, the more digested it is. You can refer back to the section above for more information on the general healthiness of sourdough.
With sourdough discard, if it over-ferments, the alcohols that are produced over time as the sourdough digests the grain can build up on the surface of the starter.
This gray, watery material is called hooch and it is highly acidic.
If hooch is consumed, it can cause stomach acid and reflux in some people. This is why it’s recommended that you discard equal amounts of old starter for the amount of new flour and water.
Ways to Avoid & Deal With Hooch:
- If you’re using your starter consistently (every day or every other day), you probably won’t see any hooch build up because you’ll be feeding your starter new food with each use.
- If you’re only using your starter intermittently, you will need to watch for hooch build up. This is especially good to remember if you keep your starter in the fridge. Make a habit of checking it daily – just give it a glance and be sure it’s healthy looking.
- If the starter develops a gray top coating, has the dark liquid hooch on top, and/or starts to smell yucky*, dump off the hooch and scrape out the discolored, stinky starter. Throw this away or put it in the compost pile; never put it down your drain! Re-feed, several times if necessary, until it looks bubbly and smells delicious.
Avoid putting your sourdough starter on the counter one day, and then removing it to the fridge the next day. Doing this once in awhile won’t cause too many problems, but doing that consistently will confuse the starter.
Certain of the yeasts and bacteria are thermosensitive (in that they respond differently in cold or warm environments), and constantly changing their space makes them spazz out and misbehave.
*A ripe, healthy sourdough starter should smell tart, though slightly sweet. It should never smell like rotting gym socks.
Is Sourdough Discard Bread Healthy?
Sourdough discard recipes are as healthy as regular sourdough recipes because they’re the same thing. Sourdough always works the same way.
The sourdough (a combination of natural yeasts and bacteria) consume the flour and water via fermentation, which produces CO2 that raises the dough.
Many people who struggle with grain consumption are able to successfully eat sourdough products without stomach upset. You can read about my personal journey with grain and sourdough in this article: Healthy Bread & Naturally Leavened Sourdough.
I often check in with Weston Price to follow their reports of the research happening with sourdough and health. Here’s an example of information they share. This is in regards to a research reported by the British Journal of Nutrition and conducted by the University of Guelph. Where they…
“…examined how subjects responded after eating bread for breakfast and again after lunch. The ten male subjects, who were overweight and ranged between fifty and sixty years old, showed the most positive body responses after eating sourdough white bread.
With the sourdough, the subjects’ blood sugar levels were lower for a similar rise in blood insulin, and this positive effect remained during the second meal and lasted hours after.
Surprisingly, the worst results were seen after consumption of whole wheat and whole wheat with barley bread, which caused blood sugar levels to spike, with high levels lasting until well after lunch.
According to Professor Terry Graham, head researcher on the project, the fermentation of the sourdough “changes the nature of starches in the bread, creating a more beneficial bread.”
The research team is now looking into the effects of sourdough fermentation on whole wheat bread (The Canadian Press, July 7, 2008). What these preliminary results tell us is that consumption of improperly prepared whole grains puts the body under stress, as witnessed by the unhealthy increase in blood sugar levels. (Bold emphasis added.)
How Long Does Homemade Sourdough Sandwich Bread Last?
Homemade bread has no preservatives, unlike commercial bread which is full of them to make it shelf stable. This is a compelling reason to make homemade bread!
Sourdough sandwich bread will last around a week when stored in an airtight container. I don’t use linen bread bags because I’ve found that they dry out the loaf too quickly.
Use dried out sourdough bread to make croutons, bread pudding, or bread crumbs. Find instructions
Sourdough bread will continue to sour, or ferment, though very slowly. Though it is naturally resistant to fungal growth because of its acidic nature, sourdough bread will eventually form a blue mold.
If you’re a cheesemaker and want to make your own Roquefort cheese, this may not be entirely bad! David Asher in his book, The Art of Natural Cheesemaking, explains,
…one of the few species [of fungus] that grows well upon sourdough bread is…you guessed it, Penicillim roqueforti.
By creating the right conditions, you can grow a pure culture of Penicillium roqueforti on a piece of sourdough bread. And whether you are making Roquefort, Stilton, or a surface-ripened blue, you can use your own homegrown P. roqueforti spores for all your blue cheese needs.
He then proceeds to teach you how to do just that. You can read a more complete review of Asher’s fabulous book here: Review of The Art of Natural Cheesemaking.
Yes, You Can Make Sourdough Bread with Unfed Starter!
Let’s make a goal together to stop calling unfed sourdough starter discard. Because we can use it in the same way we use active starter, there’s no need to ever throw it away!
So, what’s your favorite way to use sourdough discard (aka unfed starter)? Leave a comment and let other readers know!
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This recipe was awesome, especially since it has a long fermentation so you can be gone during the day. It turned out great and I really enjoyed it. It was super easy too. Next time I am going to try it with honey instead of salt and cinnamon and raisins. Definitely a keeper.
So glad it worked well for you – it is delicious! I love how adaptable sourdough is for flavor and timing. I’ve made up several batches of bread dough and then just popped them in the fridge. The cold retards the rise, so I pull them out and bake them when I run out of bread that week.
That is, when I have fridge space!