Sour dough crumpets

We recently attended a sour dough course and we were given a sour a dough starter which I have been trying to keep alive.  I have wanted to make sour dough bread for a long time due to the health benefits and the fact that it will mean that I do not  have to buy yeast.  Sour dough has always scared me and so I have avoided it for a couple of years, despite wanting to try it.

Last night we fed the starter and there was quite a lot of discard.  I hate waste and so Mr S made some crumpets with the discard.  It is actually easier to make sourdough crumpets than normal crumpets as we made them once and it is a lot of messing around.  The recipe that we used was from  @Lorraine Elliott not quite Nigella.  This made 6 crumpets.

Ingredients

250g of sour dough starter or discard.

65ml of water

1 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Pinch of salt

Oil for frying

Method

1.  Put the discard into a bowl.
2.  Add the flour and all the other ingredients except for the oil. The batter should be able to be poured
3.  Mix it well.
4.  Put metal rings into the frying pan to get warm on a medium heat. (a none stick frying pan works the best).  You can use metal cookie cutters if you do not have egg rings.
5.  Use some oil to brush the inside of the rings so that they do not stick.
6.  Pour in some batter with a ladle to make them equal.  We made them about an inch thick but they could be made deeper.
7.  The bottom is cooked when bubbles pop and holes appear on the top of the crumpet. It took about 8 minutes before the holes fully appeared for us but it will depend on the heat that you are cooking them at.
8.  Turn the crumpet over and cook slightly on the other side.  Mr S ran a pallet knife round each ring to make sure that the crumpet came out with out breaking as he flipped them over (he took the rings off at this point).

Mr S ate them with butter and I had lemon curd.  If we were not going to eat them straight away we would not have cooked the second side and would have stored them in a silicone bag or sealed container to toast later when we ate them.  Lorraine advises that if no holes appear you should add a little more water to the batter as it needs to be pourable but like thick cream.  If they are not cooked through she advise that you put a lid on the top of the pan to keep the heat in.  The batter only works for about 30 minutes, unlike other batters for pancakes or Yorkshire puddings which are good to be left standing for a long time.  This is due to the raising agent.

Our sourdough starter has rye and spelt flour in it.  It gave the crumpets a lovely nutty flavour. A lot of bread flours are bleached which does not give as good results with sourdough and so we buy organic flour that is not bleached.  It is a bit more expensive but we seem to be getting a lot of bread from it and we are not using the yeast or butter that we would in ordinary bread.

Our first try at the crumpets may not be the prettiest, but they tasted so good that we had eaten 3 and a half before we remembered to photograph them.  Has any one else tried making them?  I like the fact that the discard is not being wasted and it feels like a free breakfast.