Sourdough Crumpets with Natural Starter Recipe

I have been wanting to make my own crumpets for about eight years. I can tell you this because that’s when I remember placing, in my bulging clipping file, a mauve scrap of paper on which I’d copied a crumpet recipe from one of the ladies’ magazines my grandmother used to subscribe to.

But the recipe involved yeast, and back then I hadn’t yet conquered my fear of it, so the recipe hibernated in the “miscellaneous” section for years, until it eventually got the ax during a perhaps overzealous pruning campaign.

The project resurfaced in my mind a few months ago, when I learned from the King Arthur Flour website that you could make sourdough crumpets with natural starter.

Now I can count on fantastic crumpets every time: nicely bubbly at the top, to catch the drippings of whatever you spread them with, crisp around the edges, and lightly doughy on the inside, with a subtle tang to the palate.

A thrifty recipe for sourdough crumpets

Better yet, the recipe is the kind that every natural starter enthusiast dreams of: one that offers to use up the excess starter that the natural feeding cycle leaves you with*. All you need to do is store that extra starter in a container in the fridge — I’ve recycled an empty tub of yogurt for that purpose — until it amounts to roughly a cup (270 grams), which, in my case, takes about three feedings. You mix that with a bit of sugar, salt, and baking soda, and cook the foamy batter like pancakes in a skillet.

It took me a couple of tries to get them right — I had to figure out how hot the skillet needed to be, how much of the batter I should use for each crumpet, and that the crumpet rings needed to be well greased and well preheated to prevent sticking — but now I can count on fantastic sourdough crumpets every time: nicely bubbly at the top, to catch the drippings of whatever you spread them with, crisp around the edges, and lightly doughy on the inside, with a subtle tang to the palate.

I decided to equip myself with proper crumpet rings, which produce straight sides and a neat, stackable shape, but you can do without, or use, as I’ve seen suggested here and there, empty cans of tuna from which you’ll remove the top and bottom with a can opener (make sure you get cans that can be opened on both sides; it’s not always the case).

Crumpets are a teatime staple in the UK, served warm and spread with butter, but we also enjoy our sourdough crumpets at breakfast, with almond butter and a sliced pear. And because they are, in fact, neither sweet nor savory, I’ve eaten them with a chunk of fruity comté cheese and a bowl of soup to particularly satisfying results.

In all cases, toasting the crumpet is a must. And because they freeze so well, you can cook a big batch and stash them away for an impromptu crumpet fest.

[Note: Crumpets can also be made without a starter, as instructed in the following recipes (untested by me but seemingly reliable). This one is also from the King Arthur Flour website, with step-by-step pictures also, and this one appeared recently in The Guardian.]

* A sourdough starter needs to be fed its own weight in flour and its own weight in water at every feeding — daily or twice daily if it’s kept at room temperature, weekly if it lives in the fridge. If you were to keep all of the “old” starter, it would triple at every feeding and build up to an exponentially large quantity: you would gradually need more and more flour to keep it happy, which would be costly and impractical. The solution then is to remove a portion of the starter before each feeding, keeping just a couple of tablespoons. Some people throw out that extra starter, but many prefer to keep it in the fridge and work it into crêpe, cake, or clafoutis batters, in pizza doughs, in this crumpet recipe, etc. This extra starter can also be given away to another baker. Read more about natural starter bread.

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