Sourdough Fails of 2024

For your entertainment, here are some behind-the-scenes kitchen blunders from last year, featuring recipes and methods that did not work!

You see pretty exclusively the best of my sourdough on this website and I work hard to only post recipes that produce great results that you can replicate in your own kitchen, because I know what a bummer it is to sink time and resources into a recipe just for it to flop.

But, for every finalized post, there were likely several iterations of the recipe that came before. Sometimes, they just need a few tweaks - It's a rare recipe that works just how I want it to the first time! And some recipes just do not work. Here are the stand outs from 2024. Enjoy!

Heads up, this post includes unedited, unfiltered, totally unappetizing photos of baked goods. You've been warned!

Zucchini bread

First up, zucchini bread. I battled with this being gummy and frankly, disgusting. My first couple attempts were dense bricks and when I tried them just to see if the flavor was right, it honestly felt like I was eating a wet sponge.

Gross.

Eventually, I got it just right and you can find the (not gummy! not gross!) sourdough discard zucchini bread recipe here.

Pinterest reviews say it comes out great and is perfectly moist. A huge improvement!

Brioche

Next up, brioche.

I haven't come back to this yet because it was such a flop. What even happened? I don't know.

It was basically the opposite of everything I love about brioche. It was dense, crumbly, crisp, and way too firm.

(It did still make pretty good grilled cheese, so I'll give it that!)

Maybe 2025 will be the year of brioche success, if I work up the nerve to try it again.

English muffins

English muffins are one of my favorite things to make with sourdough, but nailing down the cooking method was a doozy.

More times than I care to tell you about, I ended up with perfect-looking English muffins that were gummy and underdone on the interior. So sad!

But there's a happy ending to my English muffin woes, and the recipe is coming to the internet soon!

Blueberry Scones

I mentioned in the post for these lemon blueberry sourdough discard scones that you cannot substitute frozen blueberries for fresh, and here's the photo evidence.

These were actually better tasting than looking, so we still ate them. But the texture was all wrong, and it took a lot to get over how unappetizing they looked.

Brownies

The sourdough discard brownie recipe of my dreams is still in the works, but here's one iteration that did not work.

Too much flour made it cakey and crumbly. Not what I want in a brownie! This one needs a lot of work.

Poor me, testing out brownies.

The monkey bread fiasco

A recipe success but a kitchen mishap.

After taking photos of this sourdough monkey bread, camera still in hand, I moved the cake stand off of the table with my free hand. It was not well balanced and the monkey bread slid off, I tried to (heroically) catch the monkey bread with the cake stand that was still in my hand, but that inexplicably caused the cake stand to fly out of my hand and break on the table.

So the monkey bread landed on the bench, and the cake stand broke on the table. Oops! It was a sticky mess. RIP to my cake stand.