One day soon, I might post a recipe that doesn’t start with sourdough. Or, alternatively, maybe I’ll turn every single thing I like to bake into a sourdough version. Who’s to say? Stick around for the ride! It’ll be a surprise! Much like life itself, right? One week it’s cold and chilly and feels like winter, and the next week I pass a guy wearing khaki shorts and Birkenstocks on my evening walk in the park. One month you can’t fall asleep without playing the NYT crossword, and the next month you want nothing more than get under the covers to read another page of your novel (I’ve just finished this one, am now starting this one, and this one is next). One day you love omelettes with a roughly 50/50 ratio of Gruyere cheese to egg, and the next day you take one bite and decide that you are over Gruyere and would really appreciate some cheddar. Preferably extra sharp aged Vermont cheddar. Being alive is wild, man.
But back to the sourdough. I have dabbled in sourdough starter ownership (parenthood?) myself, and it wasn’t a riotous success, to put it mildly. By which I mean, I forgot to feed it and it died.
So now I have a new sourdough starter which is bubbling away vigorously on my countertop, smelling yeasty and fermented and making me happy and generally weirding out and generating fascinating conversations with everyone who comes into our apartment.
(Side note: I got my sourdough starter from an excellent Brooklyn bakery, She Wolf, which makes the best sourdough loaves I’ve tasted. They sell their bread at the farmers’ market and if you ask nicely, they’ll give you a tiny bit—just 20 grams which is all you need—of their starter. Bakers are the best!)
Of course, in all my excitement, I’ve managed to make everything but classic sourdough bread. Some might say I am putting off the inevitable? Distracting myself to avoid the actual task at hand of learning to make perfect golden boules, crusty on the outside and sticky-chewy on the inside?
Regardless, my methods of procrastination have yielded seriously delicious results. If you leave your sourdough starter out at room temperature, you need to feed it once a day (or even twice). And every time you feed it, you have to discard a large portion of it first.
Discard is not the proper name for it though! It’s a blend of flour and water and wild yeast that has incredible flavor. Tossing it means tossing perfectly good ingredients! It’s not active enough (meaning the yeast activity has died down and it’s not growing or expanding) to leaven your yeasted bread recipes, but it’s a fantastic way to add flavor (tang) and texture (moistness) to recipes.
I made sourdough biscuits, which hands down were some of the best biscuits I’ve ever baked or eaten. And I have baked an absurdly large number of biscuits in my life, and eaten even more. They were buttery and flaky, and while the flavor was amazing, the scent was almost even better. The entire apartment smelled exceptional, like a deeply toasted buttery bread scent with some indefinable quality and savory depth to it (that’s the sourdough).
I made a sourdough pumpkin loaf packed with dark chocolate chips. I made sourdough cinnamon raisin swirl bread and brought it to my sister, where it got the seal of approval from two small hungry toddlers.
And on Sunday, I made cake. Chocolate cake, to be specific. The best plain chocolate cake I’ve ever made, to be even more specific.
This cake…well. Here’s why it’s good. It’s so chocolatey that you don’t need—and frankly, shouldn’t use—frosting. The original recipe is from King Arthur Flour and I dialed down the sugar slightly and skipped the frosting and glaze. It’s so deeply good on its own that you shouldn’t muck about disguising it with extra frills.
The interior is gorgeously plush and soft, with that kind of moisture that makes the crumbs cling together if you press them with the tines of a fork. The surface turns shiny as it bakes, and if you touch the top of a slice, it’ll stick to your fingers—just like grocery store sheet cakes do.
You know the kind I mean? The sheet cakes you’d eat at roller skating birthday parties when you were little, swathed in grittily sugared white frosting with frosting roses? Those cakes tasted artificially chocolatey, whereas this one tastes of pure chocolate, but the grocery store cakes did always have a crumb and texture that I found almost impossible to replicate at home…until now.
If you want to make this cake and don’t have a sourdough starter, I suppose you could substitute 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup flour for the 1 cup of starter. But you shouldn’t. You should get a starter just for the purpose of this recipe. Or, ask around! If you have a friend or know a bakery nearby, ask for some of their discard—just a cup—and make it that way.
**Note: As there is no baking powder in this cake, you’ll want to use natural (meaning non-Dutch processed) cocoa powder. I like using a bit of black cocoa for the color and the flavor, but if you don’t have any and don’t feel like buying it, you can just do 3/4 cup of the natural cocoa instead as the original recipe directs.
Oh, and if you feel like it’s a lot of cake to make and you’re only one person, I’ll tell you that it keeps beautifully for days. In fact, it might even be better on the third day?
Sourdough Chocolate Cake
Adapted lightly from King Arthur Flour, makes one 9” x 13” cake
1 cup (241g) discard sourdough starter
1 cup (227g) milk (I used 1%)
2 cups (241g) all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cups (247g) sugar
1 cup (198g) vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 cup (21g) black cocoa powder
1/2 cup (42g) non-Dutch process cocoa powder (or a full 3/4 cup if you don’t have any black cocoa)
2 eggs
In a large bowl (it should be big enough to allow this mixture to expand quite a bit), stir together the discard sourdough starter, milk, and flour. Don’t worry if it’s perfectly smooth! It’ll be a bit lump and that’s fine; you’ll mix it more thoroughly when you mix the batter. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit out at room temperature for about 2 hours.
After this rest, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a 9” x 13” pan with parchment and lightly grease the parchment.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the sugar, oil, vanilla, salt, baking soda, and cocoa powders and mix well.
Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well between each and scraping down the bowl as needed.
Scrape the sourdough starter mixture into the stand mixer and beat on low speed until it all comes together in a smooth batter. It helps to stop and scrape down the sides of a bowl with a spatula a few times.
Pour the batter into your pan and bake for 30 to 40 minutes. The cake is ready when the top is shiny and just barely springs back when you touch the top of it lightly—it will also begin to pull away a bit from the sides of the pan.
Remove from the oven and run a knife around the edges. Let cool before you slice and serve from the pan.