Sourdough Brownies: Easy Sourdough Discard Brownies

Sourdough brownies are chocolate brownies that use a fresh or discarded sourdough starter, or levain—a culinary concoction of live yeast and bacteria. Sourdough starters are necessary to make sourdough recipes, such as sourdough bread.

To keep a sourdough starter alive, you have to feed it regularly, a process that involves discarding a portion of the starter—called the sourdough discard—each time. Sourdough brownies utilize fresh or discarded sourdough starter for its inclusion of yeast, which gives the brownies a slight lift and a faint sourdough flavor. This is in contrast to traditional brownies, which use baking powder (for cake-like brownies) or whipped eggs (for fudgy brownies) for lift and texture.

For sourdough brownies with a fudge-like consistency, use any one or all of these tips:

1. 1. Add chocolate chips. For even more chocolate flavor, additional sweetness, and complex texture, add chocolate chips to the batter. When the chocolate chips melt, they become soft and gooey, or when the brownies are at room temperature, the chocolate becomes firm and offers a crunch. Use semisweet chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or white chocolate.
2. 2. Lightly beat the eggs. Introducing a lot of air into the brownie mixture creates cakey brownies as opposed to fudgy brownies. To avoid this, beat the eggs and sugar together just until they combine but before they become light and fluffy. This helps to produce a denser, fudgier brownie.
3. 3. Use only brown sugar. For chewy brownies, use only brown sugar instead of a combination of brown sugar and white, granulated sugar. Either light brown sugar or dark brown sugar will work, although dark brown sugar possesses a more intense molasses flavor that you might find complements a fudgy texture better.
4. 4. Utilize a sourdough starter discard. Instead of using your freshly fed sourdough starter, use the sourdough discard, which chefs remove before they feed additional flour and water to their mixture (containing live yeast and bacteria). The discarded portion will have a tangier flavor due to the fermenting process, rather than a raw flour taste.