This month is Sourdough Surprises third anniversary, and it’s a special ‘choose your own adventure’ challenge. As I only joined in about a year ago this is a great chance for me to catch up on some of the recipes I missed.

Checking the recipe archive is rather overwhelming – so many things to chose from! After eliminating anything I’ve already tried, and anything that unseasonal, the following things caught my eye:

• Cinnamon Rolls
• Scones
• Cakes
• Cookies
• Brownies & Blondies
• Pasta

Cinnamon rolls as a breakfast treat has been lying around on my cooking spreadsheet for a while, so that’s certainly an option.

We’ve got some of Soph’s ragu in the freezer, so making some sourdough pasta to go with that would make an easy evening meal. Also I’ve been fancying the idea of rolling fresh herbs form the garden into pasta, as James Martin does.

The scones, cakes, and brownies & blondies all looked delicious, but I didn’t think they were benefitting from the sourdough very much. Most recipes had strong flavours that would overpower any sourdough flavour, and if any leavening was needed it seemed to come from baking powder rather than the sourdough.

To be honest I felt the same way about the cookies, but I need to re-up our supply of emergency cookies in the freezer, so adding some sourdough to them as an experiment is another option.

I’d love to do all three… but the Sourdough Surprises posting day falling on a Friday, combined with other plans we have, makes this hard… so I’m just going to go with the pasta for dinner, and hopefully do the cinnamon rolls later.

Herb Rolled Pasta

My normal pasta recipe is two eggs (100g) and 200g flour, so what I’m going to do is replace one of the eggs with 66g of rye sourdough starter, but that didn’t come together, so I kept adding more until it came together, probably about 100g, maybe a bit more, in the end:

• 200g pasta flour
• 1 egg
• 100g+ rye starter (200% hydration)
• Selection of whole leaves from the herb garden

So pasta stuff in the machine.

And after the extra starter brought it together:

Then into the fridge:

Then it gets rolled out in the pasta machine as usual.

But before shredding into tagliatelle I’ll put the leaves on the pasta.

Then fold over.

And re-roll to seal the leaves in.

Cut into tagliatelle.

Fry up mushrooms in butter.

Add Soph’s ragu.

Cook pasta.

Pasta into sauce, as is the correct way of things.

Serve with grated parmesan.

And mmm! OK that’s mostly Soph’s ragu, little to do with the sourdough pasta – but the herbs did add to the flavour, and it was fun to do!

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Check out the other anniversary Sourdough Surprises!