Making preserves, specifically marmalade, is one hip pandemic pastime I picked up well after it was no longer hip; the other is sourdough. I started growing my starter in May or June—the months kinda run together, ya know— of last year, following the instructions on the King Arthur website. It was slow getting started, dawdling along at its own pace. It hadn’t read the instructions apparently. But within a couple weeks I had a happy little yeast colony in a jar, and it’s been a low maintenance pet ever since.

The pandemic sourdough rules include naming your starter, and I was very late with that too. Not deliberately, just not feeling especially witty or creative during the fugue state of 2020. Right before Christmas we watched Guys and Dolls, because there was a reference to it in one of Kiddo’s graphic novels, and “while it doesn’t hold up,” it’s still one of the few musicals I can stand. Don’t get me started on Andrew Lloyd Webber. Anyway … while cringing through the awful messaging and singing all the songs in my head (mostly), I found a name for my reliable wild yeast pet: Nathan. As in “good old reliable Nathan.”

Mostly, Nathan makes pizza dough. I’ve adjusted this recipe a little here and there. Nathan lives in the fridge, and I usually feed him once a week and use the discard for the dough. Then the dough hangs out in the fridge for a few days until pizza night. Taking the dough out of the fridge a few hours ahead of time to come to room temp helps a lot with shaping it. The cold dough does not stretch as easily, at least for me.

Lately I’m getting sick of pizza every. single. Saturday. night. Kiddo likes her routine, but sometimes I’m just over it. But Nathan still needed a feeding, and throwing away the discard is anathema to me. I also can’t throw away a chicken carcass without making a batch of chicken broth first, but I digress. So instead I made pretzels with the discard, and they are almost as easy as pizza dough. A few adjustments: I subbed one cup of 2% milk for the water and nonfat dry milk, I skipped the diastatic malt powder because I didn’t have any and used sugar per the recipe, I sprinkled them with Diamond Crystal kosher salt because I didn’t have pretzel salt, and I brushed them with garlic butter at the end. My shaping skills are, ahem, inconsistent, and the recipe does make a dozen, but we ate some before I remembered to take a picture.