How To Use Sourdough Discard To Make Flavorful Pasta

There's nothing quite like making pasta from scratch, creating the foundation of homemade noodle dishes with your own two hands. It's a fun process with a delicious result, the perfect way to spend date night or an evening with the family. You can gather in the kitchen, swapping stories and pushing your dough through a pasta roller while discussing the best sauce to serve with pumpkin ravioli. Whatever the plan, the only thing more satisfying than executing the perfect volcano method for perfect pasta dough is adding some sourdough discard to make your pasta even more unique. And you get that sourdough discard by getting your hands on some sourdough starter.

Sourdough starter is like a gluten-based pet you have to feed regularly and that grows with every passing day. It won't play with you like a dog, but thanks to the yeast growing inside it, it's very much alive. Every time you feed it — which involves adding new flour and water to your sourdough — you have to remove some of it or it'll outgrow its container. 

The portion you remove is called the sourdough discard, and it can be somewhat heartbreaking to throw away after all the hard work invested in growing it. Thus, there's a wealth of recipes online for using that sourdough discard, and one of the more unique ideas is to add it to your pasta dough for a slightly fermented twist on recipes like ultra-creamy chicken fettuccine Alfredo or smoky kielbasa pasta.

You can infuse any kind of pasta with the sharp, fruity, vinegary tones of sourdough through a very easy process. Just measure out about 100 grams of unfed sourdough discard — roughly a heaping third-cup by volume. Add the discard to the pasta when you're adding the other wet ingredients and continue making pasta as usual. Or add a few extra ingredients to create an even more exciting homemade pasta. Add some spinach and olive oil to give your pasta a green hue or sun-dried tomatoes for a creamy orange color. 

You might find the dough to be a bit wetter thanks to the discard, but that just makes the dough more elastic. If necessary, add a bit of extra flour a tablespoon at a time until you reach a suitable consistency. The dough is still easy to work with, and you can mold or cut it into pasta for any kind of dish imaginable. The tangy sourdough flavor works especially well to cut rich, buttery sauces or alongside a nutty flavor like browned butter or Parmesan cheese.