Crisp, savoury sourdough discard crackers — a slow, oven-roasted recipe that uses up your discard, takes 30 minutes of active work, and produces something genuinely better than anything in a packet.
If you've been keeping a sourdough starter for a while, you've thrown away a lot of discard. The fix is a recipe that takes 30 minutes of active work and produces a result genuinely better than the £4-a-packet artisan crackers in the supermarket — crisp, savoury, deeply flavoured, perfect with cheese, soup, or anything that wants a crunch beside it. Slow-baked sourdough crackers are the most useful discard recipe in our kitchen.
| Ingredient | Weight |
|---|---|
| Sourdough discard (unfed) | 200g |
| Plain flour | 100g |
| Olive oil | 30g |
| Fine sea salt | 5g |
| Optional flavourings (see below) | — |
Makes about 50 crackers (one large baking tray).
Most discard cracker recipes online tell you to roll out the dough, score it into squares, bake for 20 minutes, and call it done. The result is usually flat, salty, and indistinguishable from any other home-made cracker. The recipe here does three things differently:
In a bowl, combine the discard, flour, olive oil, and salt. Mix until a stiff dough forms. Knead briefly in the bowl — 30 seconds is plenty.
Wrap in cling film or place in an airtight container. Rest in the fridge for 12–24 hours. The longer rest gives more flavour, but 12 hours is plenty if you're impatient.
Preheat the oven to 160°C (fan).
Take the dough out of the fridge. Cut in half. Roll each half on a sheet of baking parchment, dusted with flour, until extremely thin — 1mm if you can manage. Don't worry if the edges are ragged. Aim for thinness, not perfection.
Score the rolled dough with a pizza cutter into rectangles or squares — about 4cm × 6cm. Don't separate them; they break apart easily after baking.
Sprinkle generously with sea salt flakes (Maldon ideal) and any other toppings you like (see flavourings below).
Slide the parchment onto a baking tray. Bake for 22–28 minutes, until the crackers are deep golden brown and crisp. The thinnest crackers might be done in 18 minutes; the thicker bits in 28. If some are darker than others, just pick out the done ones and put the rest back for a few minutes.
Cool on the tray. They crisp further as they cool. Snap into pieces along the score lines.
The plain version is excellent. But the dough is a blank canvas for any flavour you'd put on bread. Add the flavourings to the dough during mixing, or sprinkle on top before baking.
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary mixed into the dough. Maldon salt on top.
1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper in the dough; 30g finely grated mature cheddar pressed into the surface before baking.
2 tablespoons of mixed seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, sesame, poppy, fennel) sprinkled on top before baking. Roll the dough to make sure the seeds embed slightly.
2 cloves of garlic, finely grated; 1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves; 1 teaspoon dried oregano. All into the dough.
1 teaspoon smoked paprika in the dough; flaky salt on top.
Replace 50g of the plain flour with wholemeal. Add 1 teaspoon of caraway seeds. Excellent with cheese.
1 teaspoon truffle oil added to the dough; 30g finely grated parmesan on top before baking. Restaurant cheese-board territory.
Of all the variables, thickness matters most. A 2mm cracker is a dense crisp. A 1mm cracker is a snap. A 0.5mm cracker is a crystalline shatter. Roll thinner than you think you should — they always seem too thin until you bake them, at which point they're perfect.
If your rolling pin is struggling, divide the dough into smaller portions and roll each one separately. Use the parchment as your rolling surface so the dough doesn't stick.
Sourdough crackers keep for 2–3 weeks in an airtight tin at room temperature. Don't refrigerate — fridge moisture softens the crackers within a day. If they do go soft, refresh them in a 150°C oven for 5 minutes to crisp them back up.
Yes, but it's a waste of an active starter — the discard recipe doesn't benefit from rising power. If you're going to use fed starter, save it for bread.
Yes — both produce darker, more flavoursome crackers with a slightly more rustic look.
Up to two weeks in the fridge. Older than that, the discard gets quite vinegary, which gives the crackers a strong sour flavour — some people love this, others find it overwhelming. Test a small batch first.
Not really — without rolling, you'd get sourdough flatbreads, which is a different recipe. Try our discard flatbreads instead.
Either they were rolled too thick, or they came out of the oven before they were fully dried out. Bake until deep golden brown — undercooked is the most common cracker mistake.
You can substitute the plain flour with a gluten-free blend, but the texture changes — they become more brittle and less snappy. Sourdough discard, however, contains gluten regardless, so this isn't suitable for coeliacs.
The whole point of these crackers is that they go with everything. Some favourites:
The labour of making one tray and two trays is identical. Roll a second batch of dough at the same time and bake the trays one after the other. A double batch fills a large tin and keeps you in crackers for weeks. We have one tin in our kitchen that's almost never empty.
Most home-made versions of supermarket products aren't actually worth making — the supermarket versions are good enough that DIY isn't a clear win. Crackers are different. The supermarket cracker market is dominated by mass-produced products with stabilisers, flavour enhancers, and palm oil. A 30-minute home-made tray of sourdough crackers genuinely surpasses anything in the £4-a-pack premium aisle.
Combined with the fact that they use up something you'd otherwise throw away, they're one of the few discard recipes worth keeping in permanent rotation. We make them weekly. So will you, after the first batch.
Drop the flour to 50g. Add 100g of mixed seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, sesame, linseed, poppy). Mix, rest, roll thin, bake. The result is closer to a Scandinavian seed crispbread than a traditional cracker — extremely thin, intensely seedy, brilliant with mature cheddar.
Roll the dough as for crackers. Sprinkle generously with grated parmesan and a pinch of cayenne. Cut into 1cm strips and twist each one before baking. They puff into golden cheese twists that are devastating with a glass of cold beer.
Roll thicker (2mm), cut into 5cm discs with a cookie cutter, brush with olive oil, sprinkle with rosemary and Maldon salt. Bake at 180°C for 18 minutes. More like little focaccia chips than crackers — incredibly more-ish.
Replace the plain flour with 80g wholemeal rye. Add 1 teaspoon caraway, ½ teaspoon fennel, ¼ teaspoon coriander seed (all coarsely crushed). Excellent with smoked salmon and cream cheese.
Up to three weeks if covered. After that the flavour gets very strong (very vinegary), but it's not unsafe — just intense. We've made crackers from month-old discard and they came out fine, if rather assertive.
If you have more discard than you can use, freeze it. Discard freezes well in 100g portions and keeps indefinitely. Defrost overnight in the fridge before using.
The maths is striking. A bag of plain flour: £1.50, makes about 12 batches of crackers. A bottle of olive oil: £4, lasts a year of cracker batches. A box of Maldon salt: £3, lasts six months. So each batch of 50 crackers — equivalent to two £4 packets of supermarket sourdough crackers — costs you about 30p in ingredients, plus discard you'd otherwise bin.
Across a year of weekly batches, you save around £200, eat better crackers, and reduce food waste meaningfully. Genuinely one of the highest-impact recipes in the discard repertoire.
Different crackers go with different cheeses. A few pairings worth specific:
For a complete cheese-board, bake two contrasting batches — say, plain sea-salt and a punchier flavoured one. Most cheese boards have multiple cheese textures and need cracker variety to match.
You can find half a dozen sourdough cracker recipes online and most of them are perfectly fine. What distinguishes this one is the slow bake — 25 minutes at 160°C instead of 12 minutes at 200°C. The slower temperature dries the cracker through without browning the surface too quickly, giving you that even golden colour and crisp-but-not-burnt texture. It's a small change with a big visual and textural payoff.
The other distinguishing feature is the 24-hour rest, which is unusual in cracker recipes. The rest gives the discard time to develop properly fermented flavour rather than just contributing texture. Eat one of these alongside a quick-bake cracker and the difference is immediately obvious — these have actual flavour, not just salt.
For convenience, the bullet-point version:
That's it. The simplest, most useful sourdough discard recipe in the repertoire — by some distance.
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