Thanks for the kind words.

I don’t have any direct experience with this matter of crepes, but I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to turn your seasoned batter into a starter. Sugar (honey) actually tends to make yeasts more active, and many a professional starter is juiced with all sorts of extra sugar, usually from fruit or fruit juice (the trade-off is that a more active starter burns through its fuel faster, but that is not necessarily a concern in a high-volume setting). My starter recipe is minimalist, but you’ll see plenty out there that call for added sugar in some form.

Salt technically retards yeast, but not to the point where the relatively small amount of salt in any standard galette recipe will make much of a difference. A small amount of butter shouldn’t hurt anything either. Really, it’s hard for any flour-and-water product not to eventually turn into a starter with the proper encouragement, since making levain, like curing, cheesemaking or aging a steak, is basically allowing something to rot within acceptable parameters. And everything rots. Mmm.

Now, if it were me running a crepe trailer, I would be tempted to just let any leftover batter sit all night in a warm place and then mix it back into the fresh stuff the next day, for that touch of sour flava, but I guess that’s technically against health regulations? Or is it? I don’t know – in my professional baking experience, the closest we ever got to levain was “forgetting” to clean the dough residue out of the floor mixer at night.

I wonder if you could make a whiteboy equivalent of injera fit-fit with leftover buckwheat galette-type products. I bet buckwheat fit-fit with cardamom-, nutmeg- and ginger-infused clarified butter and honey and some fruit would be a pretty mean breakfast, if I were the breakfast or sweets type (I am not, but I am trying). Maybe get some molasses action in there. Basically just a deconstructed galette, of course, but hey, I am only a crazy person on the Internet, what do you expect?

Here’s my situation: My husband and I just opened a little mobile creperie. Our menu is built around two recipes, one sweet, flour-based, the other made exclusively of a really nice, locally-milled buckwheat flour, water, a little butter, a touch of honey and salt.

I’d like to know if I could take some of that batter and start a levain. I know, I can just try it, but thought that if it’s certain to fail because of the little bit of butter, salt or honey, I wouldn’t waste my time on the daily feedings, etc.

Also, being decidedly against wasting anything, I’m looking for other ways to use up the reasonable amounts of leftover batter. If you have any suggestions, they’d be appreciated. Our galettes are delicious, and we love to eat them, but variety is the vice of life.

Cheers,
Paula

Anyway, first of all, I don’t know anything about whether King Arthur’s sourdough kits will produce a real starter, but what I do know is that you don’t need them. It’s easy enough to do it without a kit.

Second, yes, I am saying we use something found everywhere in nature. Natural yeasts are in the air, on flour, on your skin, and everywhere else. They made those ancient starters somehow, after all. As far as how you do it, I wrote complete instructions in the post about how to get an active starter from nothing more than plain old flour and water. It shouldn’t take much more than a week.

Third, if you want a buckwheat starter, you can either use buckwheat flour from the beginning (i.e. replace regular flour with buckwheat flour in my starter recipe) OR, if you don’t want to use so much buckwheat flour initially, once you have a healthy starter made with regular flour going, you can start feeding the starter with buckwheat flour exclusively. After a couple of feedings, buckwheat will be the dominant element of the starter.

It bears remembering that yeast will happily eat any kind of flour, so a starter can be easily converted to whole wheat, buckwheat, rye, teff or anything else you think of.

So good luck.

Speed is an issue with production, although most of the better bagels I knew in NYC could not be confused with “Mass Produced”. Still – speed is better.