Glenn's Sourdough Funny Biscuits

Sourdough Funny Biscuits

Lesley called them “Glenn’s Funny Biscuits”, and the name sort of stuck. They came about as something of a challenge, and they’re a bit of a challenge to make. If you’re into using sourdough, I hope you’ll give them a try.

When I was on one of my extended motorcycle camping rode trips I needed to come up with a breakfast that was quick, easy to clean up and made good use of sourdough. I like to get in a hundred miles or so of travel before I stop and make breakfast. That means pulling into a rest stop, breaking out the cooking gear, making a hot breakfast, cleaning up and getting back on the road without taking an inordinate amount of time. Funny biscuits were the answer I came up with.

To mix the dough, pour some starter into a depression in the middle of your flour, right in the container. Carefully sprinkle a pinch of baking soda (I use this for any sourdough quickbread) and a pinch of salt over the starter, and stir the mixture with a fork so that it picks up flour and forms into a dough ball. This may take a little practice. Mix in too much flour and the dough won’t stick together. Too little, and you simply have a sticky mess.

When the dough is formed into a rough ball, reach into the container with you hand and knead the ball of dough a few times, turning it over so as to maintain a floured outer surface. When kneaded into the right consistency, pull the blob of dough into smaller balls as needed to make whatever size biscuits you want. I shape them by rotating the dough inside a circle made up of my thumb and middle finger, then pat them down to about a three-quarter inch thickness. Put them in a frying pan with a lid on it and cook them over low heat for fifteen to twenty minutes. Turn them over half way through the baking time so both sides get browned nicely.

It was a real treat to have fresh, hot biscuits for breakfast at a scenic rest area. They’re great with butter and jam, honey, peanut butter, or a slice of cheese if you have some handy. I served them with soft boiled eggs and a couple of cups of hot tea. Delicious.

What’s your favorite quick sourdough treat?

Sourdough Pancakes

Making Pancakes on the Road

I guess there are a lot of choices about camping gear, including cookware, but to me it has always seemed the gear I came up with was lacking. I’ve tried aluminum and stainless steel, thin gage ironware, and even porcelain cookware that reminded me of the blue enamelware plates my parents used on camping trips we took together when I was a kid.  The thing is, none of them seem suited to not burning food or ruining it because it all stuck to the bottom of the pan. Everything I’ve run across seems designed for lightness, which is necessary, especially for backpacking. The best pans I’ve used are cast iron. I’d hate to try carrying one of those backpacking. I’ve tried over and over to use those little Boy Scout type cook sets with a frying pan, deep dish, lidded pot, and coffee cup. Of course, the aluminum cup burns your mouth when you take a sip of any hot liquid, but the lidded pot works well. The handle on the frying pan needs to be long if you’re cooking over a campfire, but is way too heavy if you are cooking on a tiny backpacking stove, which I always carry on motorcycle trips, and the pan falls off the stove.

So, enough complaining. The reason for the above discussion is because I wanted to set myself up for a little sympathy, or shared misery, when I say I’ve burned more pancakes on camping trips than I’d like to admit. And, that’s the topic for this week’s blog post—sourdough pancakes. I learned to make pancakes early in life, cooking them on a wood stove. I learned to flip them as a kid too, whenever I wasn’t using a griddle big enough to cook half a dozen at a time (I had a big appetite). I took pride in being able to make good pancakes, so I found the burning, sticking, deforming frying pan experiences of camping cookware frustrating to say the least. But I am stubborn, and insisted on using sourdough on backpacking trips as well as motorcycle runs. Even the imperfect results I often produced were well worth the effort once on the tongue. I also figured out that I needed to hold the pan, not set it on the burner and turn to something else while my pancake cooked. That way, I could control the heat better and actually do a decent job of cooking the pancakes, not scorching them. Fortunately, I also dropped my eating quota down from eight or twelve pancakes to two or three.

Making sourdough pancakes still seems to me more technique than recipe. I like to keep my starter quite thick, and that effects the necessary technique. I plop about a half cup into a bowl holding an egg I’ve already beaten, and mix the two together. I then toss a couple of rounded tablespoons of flour and a heaping tablespoon of powdered milk on top of the mixture and sprinkle a pinch of baking soda (1/4 teaspoon) and a pinch of salt over that. I stir the ingredients together, adding as much water as needed to produce a nice pancake batter consistency. I love to add blueberries, if I have them, or banana if I happen to have one of those handy, although that’s not likely on a back packing or road trip. I fry the batter in clarified butter, which keeps pretty well when refrigeration is lacking. I often use honey as a sweetener instead of syrup because it can be used in other cooking as well. In spite of the difficulties and challenges, my mouth is watering at the memories. What are your tales of making pancakes over campfires or camp stoves? If sourdough is your thing, but camping is not, I hope you share your recipes and techniques as well. There are a lot of ways to “get-er-done”, and I hope to learn some new ones from you. P/S Thanks for visiting my blog.

Getting Started with Sourdough

Cooking with Sourdough

Cooking on the road can be murder. At the end of the day, it’s always later than you planned. You’re tired. It’s dark, cold, and threatening to rain. So that puts camping and cooking on the road in the same category as golf—I have no explanation at all for why I enjoy it, but I do.

I usually take homemade beef jerky with me on a road trip, and a couple of packages of something like Cajun red beans and rice, but I also take flour and the most important staple of all—sourdough starter. It’s a good thing I prefer a motorcycle to an airplane; I’d never get through security with my pack smelling like a winery. Sourdough gets pretty fragrant, especially in the heat. Keeping it from getting too hot can be a real challenge. I’ve used those little insulated lunch containers with a cup of ice picked up at a truck stop and thrown into a plastic baggie. You need the baggie, because the ice always melts to water…well, almost all of it melts. If I’m lucky at the end of the day there will be just enough ice left to cool down a cup of bourbon, (no room for highball glasses).

There seem to be two major approaches to maintaining, (feeding), sourdough starter: (1) sugar; and, (2) flour and water. I use the flour and water approach exclusively. I got my first inspiration for sourdough from my third grade teacher, who brought a slab of sourdough bread to class. She said it was a hundred years old. I never thought to ask at the time if she meant the starter or the slab of bread. I just sat in awe and said “Wow” like most of the other kids. Her grandfather had been a gold miner in Alaska, and cooked with sourdough. She explained the process, and the idea of doing something like that stuck with me. I knew even then than it was something I wanted to do—pan for gold and make sourdough. Actually, I have done both, although not in Alaska.

You can make an initial starter utilizing yeast present in the air pretty much everywhere. Or, you can use a packet of commercial yeast for the initial batch and focus your purity on maintaining and using your starter without any further commercial yeast infusions. Since your starter will be joined by the yeasts in the air wherever you happen to be, it’s all going to become uniquely yours anyway.

If you choose to begin the process with commercial yeast, a cup of all purpose flour, a packet of dry yeast, two cups of hot (but not boiling) water, and you’re in business. Let it sit in a lightly covered, glass or plastic container for a week, stirring it down if it threatens to leave the container, and pouring off any liquid that forms at the top. The liquid is alcohol, one of the two by-products of yeast fermentation. The other by-product is carbon dioxide, the gas bubbles that make your breads or muffins, etc. rise. After the culture has become well-established, a week to ten days, you can start using the starter for all sorts of goodies. Use it down to the last cup and then replenish your starter by adding flour and water in the same one-to-two ratio.

I’ve met a lot of other people who keep sourdough “pets”, although none yet who were crazy enough to carry it across country on a motorcycle. If you’re someone who is a sourdough devotee, I’d love to hear your sourdough story. I plan to talk more about using sourdough, and camp cooking, in future blogs. Love to have you join the discussion.