Sourdough Pancakes

Yesterday morning I made some pancakes using the crabapple starter-- I liked them, and Kate ate them so she must have liked them all right.

I've used up my bag of Gleason's whole-wheat bread flour. Right now the flour I'm using is milled at Butterworks Farm and grown somewhere in Quebec. So, not strictly localvore, but I'm giving myself a lazy pass (it works like this: "I'm a basically happily lazy person and should give myself credit for finding and using flour that's at least local to the Northeast"). Since our localvore challege week starts today, I have to exert myself slightly more and give myself a "wild card" exemption for it-- but I don't mind.

So, the pancakes: I just halved a recipe from Sandor Katz's cookbook, except I didn't halve the butter or the egg (not much sense trying to use one-half a chicken's egg, and somehow I'm all out of quail eggs, and more butter is a good thing for pancakes). They were all-whole-wheat pancakes, but came out pretty light and tender, I thought. Used a bit of baking soda, which according to the recipe is there to cut the sour taste of the starter, but I think it must also play a big part in leavening the cakes. (Baking soda combines with the acid in the sourdough to produce carbon dioxide bubbles in the batter.) I don't think I'd mind sour pancakes-- maple syrup, after all-- and I'm curious to see if the recipe would work as well without the soda, depending more on the yeast for leavening. Maybe I'd have to help it out with the egg separation thing (mix the yolk into the batter, beat the white separately and fold it in just before cooking)-- I actually kind of like doing that, and for a small batch of pancakes it's not really any more work than beating the egg whole, mixing it in, getting out the soda, measuring it, mixing it with water, and folding that in. The other thing I'm going to do next time is put in some blueberries. I'll have to ask Kate if blueberries we picked in Pennsylvania are okay for the localvore challenge.