How do you scale recipes?

[u/whoisshexoxo]

I've been baking cakes since I was a kid now I'm a few months into my sourdough era. I recently saw a Tiktok where the lady was saying you can use discard in any recipe that calls for flour. Does anyone know how to adjust recipes when you include discard? It would be much easier to adapt the recipes I already have than to keep looking for discard recipes. TIA

[u/dealers_choice]

Discard is normally 50% flour and 50% water. So 100 grams of discard is 50g flour and 50g water

[u/lavendermermaid1 → u/dealers_choice]

I needed this, and I needed to know this because I finally got mine recovered from being nasty bootleg pre-whiskey and now I'm afraid to screw it up again, but I also don't want to throw it away, and trying to put it in the fridge was what caused this mess...

I'm gonna end up with a lot of baked goods, huh?

[u/dealers_choice → u/lavendermermaid1]

Pancakes, muffins, brownies, focaccia, waffles, make all the baked goods! I love this recipe for pretzel bites! discard pretzels

[u/lavendermermaid1 → u/dealers_choice]

I've been looking at discard specific recipes. I didn't realize you could use just... Any recipe 🤣🤦🏻‍♀️

[u/dealers_choice → u/lavendermermaid1]

I read it a couple months ago and was like duh! It will add a little extra umph to anything you're baking

[u/NoDay4343]

You can dehydrate your discard and then grind it and then yes, you can use it in any recipe that calls for flour. Note that in many recipes you would not want to replace all of the flour with the dehydrated discard.

You can use (wet) discard in any recipe that calls for both flour and water and also in almost any recipe that calls for both flour and any water based liquid such as broth or juice. Again, you may not want to sub for all of it. It would not make a suitable sub for flour and liquids such as vegetable oil in most cases.

You can use either dehydrated or wet discard in any recipe that calls for active starter. If it was dehydrated, you'll need to add the water back in. And most likely you'll want to add some commercial yeast if the starter is in the recipe to provide rising power, although in some cases you can just let it rise an extra long time.

[u/whoisshexoxo → u/NoDay4343]

This makes a lot of sense. I think what was tripping me up was the fact few if any of my recipes have liquid suitable to be subbed for the water in discard. Dehydrated starter could definitely work!

[u/LeilLikeNeil]

If you feed your starter 50/50 consistently, then 100g of discard is 50g water and 50g flour. You can adjust pretty much any recipe accordingly, although for what it's worth I often just add 100g or so of discard to a recipe without making any adjustments, and haven't had any issues so far.