The only sourdough pastry recipes I’ve seen just use the sourdough starter in its discard form, without any fermentation, and instead rely on baking powder or soda to provide the leavening. I’d be curious to hear why folks think that is, but even more curious to see if anyone can share with me any sourdough-only leavened pastry recipes. And if you don’t have any recipes (or even if you do!), any tips as to the timing of incorporation of some of your typical pastry ingredients into the dough would be very welcome.
To focus the conversation, I’ll mention that I’m particularly into scones, which, different from typical bread dough, can include things like butter, eggs, milk instead of water, sugar, chopped nuts, and fruit (berries for example). So when and how should I be incorporating these ingredients into my dough?
I have made lots of sweet things using only sourdough leaven. For example, various babka recipes, Mexican conchas, cinnamon snails (basically crispy cinnamon rolls), and probably a few other things that don’t immediately jump to mind.
You should be able to use it for anything in place of commercial yeast as the leavener. The general caveat being that anything with a high proportion of sugar and/or fat is going to rise a lot more slowly. Sometimes I won’t even see much expansion during the bulk rise but it still works fine. For this reason, I also would generally recommend making a preferment, and one that comprises a significant proportion of the final dough–and I often have to make this a very low hydration preferment, like a biga, if the final recipe requires adding more wet ingredients like honey, milk, oil, butter, eggs, etc. By boosting the yeast population to the max it helps them cope better with the enriched dough. (Temperature may also become more critical as it may be hard to ferment in very cold temps where leaner doughs could still crawl their way along–this isn’t usually an issue in my kitchen.)
I’m a little confused by the reference to scones–the ones I’m familiar with are leavened with soda/baking powder, not yeast.
As to “why” there aren’t more recipes for enriched dough using only starter, I’m reluctant to speculate overmuch–there is so much misinformation out there regarding what sourdough is and is not, that it’s hard to stay on top of… I expect, though, that it’s simply for the same reason that so many sourdough recipes use huge amounts of starter/preferments even with lean doughs that don’t benefit from it (you can make the same bread more nutritious with less hands-on work just by extending the rising time). Perhaps everyone is just in a hurry these days, and has a hard time understanding or quantifying the advantages of sourdough, or grasping how convenient it can actually be that longer rising time often means less work and more flexibility for the baker–but also I do think a lot of people have a stubborn and (frankly) to me rather bewildering lack of faith in their starter, and thus anything that’s going to lengthen the rising times and/or make the expansion less dramatic plays into this persistent fear of their starter “failing.”