Why you should add sourdough discard to your pasta

We're excited to welcome back award-winning bread baker and cookbook author Bryan Ford to share his expertise on making pasta from scratch. Below, he offers a go-to sourdough pasta recipe.

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If you've never made your own pasta from scratch, you're missing out on a very fun and delicious time. Lucky for me, it's become an even more tasty time since I started using King Arthur Semolina Flour in my go-to pasta recipe.

If you're not familiar, semolina flour is a coarse grind of high-protein durum wheat. Often used to make bread, pizza, and pasta, it lends a lovely pale yellow color and sweet, nutty flavor. In pasta, particularly, the flour's coarse texture and high protein content enable you to make different shapes with the dough and for those shapes to hold their form when cooked.

Additionally, semolina flour helps maintain a hearty consistency in your noodle that allows it to soak up the sauces you might be using when preparing your pasta dish. 

Although I typically make pasta dough exclusively with semolina, I decided to take this recipe a step further and mix in some of the new '00' Pizza Flour that King Arthur offers. Using the fine '00' flour in small quantities for pasta gives the dough a balanced and smooth feel, while still allowing the semolina to be the star of the show.

Photography by Rick Holbrook; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne

Why add sourdough discard to your pasta?

You may be wondering, however, why you'd add sourdough discard to pasta dough? One of the most obvious reasons is that any kind of dough will taste better when you add some sort of pre-fermented flour to it. That’s right, adding sourdough to batters and doughs will add an enhanced, complex flavor — if you don’t believe me, try it!

There can be other benefits to adding pre-fermented flour as well. I've found the digestibility of wheat is much easier when the gluten has been fermented for long periods of time; for me, this pasta recipe creates a smooth dough that doesn’t make me feel too full. Since the starter adds additional moisture to the dough, I also find it to be slightly more extensible than typical pasta doughs.

Photography by Patrick Marinello; food styling by Yekaterina Boytsova

One dough, three pastas 

I’m a big fan of being able to use one dough to derive different flavors. I do it all the time when I bake bread, but it’s really fun to be able to infuse new flavors into pasta, try different shapes, and create a rainbow of colors. 

The method for changing up the pasta color is pretty simple: you just need a good blender or food processor, and you can start experimenting with so many different things! To make green tortelli, I simply add 1/3 of the dough to my food processor with some spinach leaves and a splash of olive oil. (See tips on the bottom of the recipe page.) For a sun-dried tomato dough, I add some sun-dried tomatoes as well as a bit of the oil from the jar, which provides a lovely burnt-orange hue. 

Ready to dive into homemade pasta? Break out your sourdough starter and rolling pin, and get started with this recipe for Sourdough Pasta.

Cover photo by Patrick Marinello; food styling by Yekaterina Boytsova.