The regional table / Alaska
Sourdough Hotcakes
Published November 1, 2026 · Alaska
In Alaska the leaven eventually became the man: by 1899 a newspaper could print "sour dough" meaning the old hands on the trail, and set it against the greenhorns in the same verse.
The word travels in a documentable direction and the public-domain newspaper record shows it. In the 1880s "sour dough" is simply a leaven, used without comment: the Conyers Weekly of 12 October 1887, writing about the breads of Asia Minor, describes rings of bread "rendered light and aristocratic by the addition of sour dough or other leavening". The same year it is already camp food in a mining story — the Weekly Banner-Watchman of 22 February 1887 runs a dialect tale in which the narrator and his partners are "sittin' at the shaft eating bacon on sour dough bread", with the aside that "nobody made better sour dough bread 'n Lem". A decade later, in the north, the leaven has become a name for a kind of man. The Walker County Messenger of 1 June 1899, reprinting the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, carries an improvised wedding on the Koyukuk performed in rhyme, in which the groom swears to love and protect his bride "From the sour dough toughs on the Koyukuk trail", and the officiant takes his fee "in checbaco money" — cheechako, the newcomer, the opposite of a sourdough. Both halves of the Alaskan vocabulary are on that one page in 1899. By January and February 1912 small Georgia papers are serialising Jack London's Burning Daylight, in which "the old sour doughs" laugh at a bet, a man will wager "any chechaquo", the saloon at Forty Mile is the Sour dough Saloon, and the hero is billed as "King of the Klondike, and Father of the Sour doughs". That is how the northern sense of the word reached the rest of the country.
Why a prospector carried a starter at all is a matter of what else was available: a jar of flour and water that renews itself needs no yeast cake, no refrigeration and no resupply, and in a country where flour arrived by boat and sold by the hundredweight it was the only leaven that could not run out. Klondike-era outfitting guides are frank about the flour economics — the 1897 guide Alaska and the Klondike Gold Fields reports flour at twelve dollars a hundredweight in Dawson City and, at the worst of it, "flour was selling at the rate of $50 a sack". What the starter could not do is leaven a griddle cake, which is where the second ingredient comes in. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, which 21 CFR 184.1736 describes as being made by treating a sodium carbonate solution with carbon dioxide until "a suspension of sodium bicarbonate forms" — carbon dioxide going into the compound, to come back out of it when it meets an acid. An overnight sourdough sponge is that acid. Stir soda into it and the gas appears in seconds, which lifts a thin batter on a hot surface in a way that hours of yeast activity cannot. The plan for this page pointed at Chronicling America's Klondike papers, which refuse scripts and have no route in without a page identifier; the dating above came instead from Georgia's collection, which reprinted the northern material. Nobody cooks for this site and the quantities below were worked out for this page.
Why this version works
The batter is poured while it is working, not after it has settled. Once the soda is in, the clock is running. The foam builds over the first two or three minutes and then collapses, and a batter poured after the collapse gives dense cakes however good the sponge was. So the griddle must already be hot when the soda goes in, the first cake should be on it within a minute, and the bowl should not be stirred again — folding knocks out the gas you just made. If you have more batter than griddle, mix the soda into half of it, cook that, and soda the rest when the pan comes free.
The sponge makes the flavour and the soda makes the lift, and they are different jobs. Left overnight with flour and milk, a starter does what it does in bread: the yeasts and lactic bacteria multiply, the batter goes slack and smells distinctly sour, and acid accumulates. What that acid will not do is raise a hotcake, because the gas a yeast produces over eight hours escapes from a thin batter as fast as it forms. The lift has to be instant, and it comes from a teaspoon of baking soda stirred in at the last moment — the carbonate meeting the accumulated acid and giving up carbon dioxide in seconds. So the overnight stage is for taste and texture and the final sixty seconds are for height, and confusing the two is why a sourdough hotcake made without soda comes out flat and leathery.
A thin batter and a moderate griddle, because there is no gluten structure holding this up. An overnight sponge has slack, broken-down gluten — that is part of what the long ferment does — so the batter cannot support itself the way a stiff pancake batter can. Keep it to the consistency of double cream, pour it in rounds and let it spread by itself, and cook on a moderately hot surface, around 375 degrees Fahrenheit, where the cake sets from the bottom up fast enough to trap the gas but not so fast that the middle stays raw. Turn once, when the surface is covered in burst bubbles and the edges look dry, and only once.
The soda also controls how sour the finished cake tastes, which is a dial rather than a constant. Every bit of soda you add neutralises some of the acid it reacts with, so the quantity sets both the rise and the flavour. A level teaspoon in this batter gives a well-risen cake that still tastes clearly of sourdough; a heaped teaspoon gives a higher cake that tastes of almost nothing but wheat, and past that point you get the soapy, faintly metallic flavour of unreacted soda. Taste the sponge before you add any: an overnight sponge in a warm kitchen is far more acid than one that sat in a cold one and will take more soda. Add it, stir once, and judge the batter by how fast it foams.
Ingredient notes
The soda: one level teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, dissolved in a tablespoon of warm water just before it goes in. Dissolving it matters: dry soda stirred into a thick batter leaves pockets that taste bitter and show as yellow-brown spots on the cooked cake. Use plain bicarbonate and not baking powder, which already contains its own acid and will waste itself on nothing. Measure it level rather than eyeballing it, because this is the one ingredient in the recipe you can noticeably overdo.
The starter: a cup of active starter at about equal weights of flour and water, fed and risen within the last twelve hours so it is lively rather than exhausted. Any starter will work; an older one tends to be more acid and will take more soda. If yours lives in the fridge, feed it the morning before you want hotcakes and leave it out all day. The Alaskan romance about hundred-year-old starters is real enough as a practice but makes no difference to the pan: what matters is whether it was fed yesterday.
The enrichment: two eggs, two tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon of fine salt and a quarter-cup of melted butter, all added in the morning after the sponge has worked. The sugar is there for browning as much as sweetness — an overnight sponge has eaten most of its own sugars and a cake made without any comes out pale. Butter melted and stirred in gives a more tender cake than oil. Hold back a little butter for the griddle, and keep the syrup, which in Alaska is as likely to be birch as maple, for the table.
The flour and the liquid: two cups of plain flour and two cups of milk for the overnight sponge. Plain white flour is what 21 CFR 137.105 calls simply flour, ground and bolted from cleaned wheat other than durum, fine enough that 98 percent of it passes a 212-micrometre sieve, and it is the right choice here — wholemeal makes a heavier, faster-souring sponge and wants a little more liquid. Milk gives a softer cake and browns better than water; buttermilk works and brings extra acid, so expect to use more soda. Use water if you are being faithful to a cabin on the Yukon.
Step by step
- Make the sponge the night before. In a large bowl, whisk the cup of active starter with two cups of plain flour and two cups of milk until smooth — it will be the consistency of a thick batter. Cover it loosely with a cloth and leave it at room temperature for 8 to 12 hours. In the morning it should be visibly risen or at least domed and bubbled, slack, and smelling clearly sour.
- Enrich it in the morning and leave the soda out. Beat the eggs with the sugar and salt and stir them into the sponge, then stir in the melted butter. The batter should now pour off a spoon in a thick ribbon, about the consistency of double cream; loosen it with a splash of milk if it is stiffer than that. Do not add the soda yet. Taste a little — it should be definitely sour.
- Get the griddle to temperature first. Heat a heavy griddle or wide frying pan over medium to medium-high until a drop of water skitters rather than sits, about 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter it lightly. The pan must be ready before the soda goes into the bowl, because from that moment the batter has about three minutes of useful life.
- Dissolve the soda, stir it in once, and start pouring. Dissolve the level teaspoon of bicarbonate in a tablespoon of warm water, pour it over the batter and fold it through with about five strokes — just enough to distribute it. The batter will foam and climb. Pour the first cake immediately, in a round of about a third of a cup, and let it spread on its own rather than pushing it out with the spoon.
- Turn once, when the bubbles have burst. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until the surface is covered in open burst bubbles, the edges look dry and matt, and the underside is an even gold. Turn once with a wide spatula and give the second side 1 to 2 minutes. Do not press the cake down and do not turn it back; both collapse the gas you went to such trouble to make.
- Keep them in a single layer and serve as you go. Move the cooked hotcakes to a warm plate in one layer rather than a stack — stacking steams them soft — and keep pouring until the batter stops foaming, which will be sooner than you expect. Serve with butter and syrup, and if there is batter left that has gone flat, cook it anyway and eat those first.
Flat, heavy, leathery cakes mean the soda never did its work: either it was left out, it was baking powder rather than bicarbonate, or the batter sat around after the soda went in. Mix the soda into whatever is left and cook immediately. A soapy or metallic taste with brown-yellow freckles is the opposite fault, too much soda or soda added dry and undissolved — dissolve it next time and measure it level. Cakes that are raw in the middle and dark outside were cooked too hot on too thick a pour; thin the batter and drop the heat. If the sponge smells of acetone or nail varnish in the morning it has over-fermented in too warm a kitchen, and while it is safe, it will taste harsh; use it with a little extra soda and start the next one later in the evening. And if the first cake is perfect and the fourth is dense, you are simply at the end of the gas, which is normal and is why this batter is cooked in one run.
Storage and make-ahead
The batter does not keep once the soda is in — that is the whole point of adding it last — but the sponge does: made and left overnight, it will hold a further day in the fridge and simply get more sour, which more soda will balance. Cooked hotcakes keep 2 days refrigerated and freeze for 2 months interleaved with greaseproof paper; reheat them in a dry pan or a toaster rather than a microwave, which turns them to flannel.
The starter is the thing that genuinely keeps, and that was always the argument for it. Fed weekly it lives indefinitely at room temperature and for months in a fridge between feeds; the Alaskan habit of carrying it against the cold, sleeping with the jar to keep it from freezing, is the practical end of the same logic. If you bake rarely, keep it in the fridge and feed it the day before you want it. A starter that has been neglected and smells of solvent usually comes back after two or three daily feedings.
What to serve with it
Butter and syrup, and in Alaska that syrup is as likely to be birch as maple — thinner, darker and faintly bitter, and very good on a cake that is already sour. Beyond that, bacon or reindeer sausage, eggs, and fried potatoes; berries in any form, since the state has them in quantity, and especially a spoonful of stewed lowbush cranberries, whose acid suits the cake better than anything sweet.
To drink, strong coffee, and plenty of it. If these are supper rather than breakfast, which they frequently were, a glass of cold milk. Nothing is gained by putting fruit juice next to a sour cake, and nothing at all is gained by whipped cream.
From the recipe box / Alaska
Sourdough Hotcakes
A starter let down with flour and milk overnight, then slackened with egg and butter and lifted at the last moment with baking soda — the hotcake Alaska built on the one pot a prospector could not afford to let freeze, and the reason the old hands were called sourdoughs.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 20 min
- Total
- 8 hr 35 min
- Serves
- 4
- Calories
- 575 per serving
Instructions
- The night before, whisk the starter with the flour and milk, cover loosely and leave at room temperature 8 to 12 hours until risen, slack and clearly sour.
- In the morning stir in the eggs beaten with the sugar and salt, then the melted butter, loosening with a little milk to the consistency of double cream.
- Heat a heavy griddle to about 375 °F and butter it lightly before touching the soda.
- Dissolve the level teaspoon of bicarbonate in a tablespoon of warm water, fold it through the batter in about five strokes, and pour the first cake at once.
- Cook 2 to 3 minutes until the surface is covered in burst bubbles and the edges are matt, turn once, and give the second side 1 to 2 minutes.
- Keep the cooked hotcakes in a single layer on a warm plate and pour the rest while the batter is still foaming; serve with butter and syrup.
Nutrition
| Fat | 19 g (11 g saturated) |
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| Sodium | 900 mg |
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| Protein | 18 g |
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| Serving | about three hotcakes, without syrup |
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| Calories | 575 |
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| Cholesterol | 135 mg |
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| Carbohydrates | 85 g (12 g sugar, 2 g fiber) |
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Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as
a courtesy, not as dietary advice.
Questions readers ask
Do I have to add baking soda?
For hotcakes, yes, if you want them to rise. The overnight sponge builds flavour and acid but a thin batter cannot hold the slow gas a yeast makes — it escapes as fast as it appears. What lifts the cake is the instant reaction between that accumulated acid and sodium bicarbonate, which 21 CFR 184.1736 describes as manufactured by driving carbon dioxide into a sodium carbonate solution. The gas goes in during manufacture and comes back out in your bowl. A sourdough hotcake made without soda is a thin sour flatbread; good in its own way, but not this.
Does the age of the starter matter?
Less than the stories suggest. What the pan cares about is whether the starter was fed recently and is active, not whether it came over the Chilkoot. An older, more acid starter will take more soda and give a tangier cake, which is a difference of degree rather than of kind. The practical reason prospectors kept one going was supply rather than sentiment: flour came in by boat and sold at twelve dollars a hundredweight in Dawson, and as much as fifty dollars a sack at the worst of it according to a guide published in 1897, while a jar of flour and water renews itself for nothing and needs no yeast cake and no cold storage.
How much soda, and does it change the taste?
A level teaspoon for this quantity, and yes, substantially. Soda neutralises the acid it reacts with, so the amount sets both the height of the cake and how sour it tastes. Less soda gives a flatter, tangier cake; more gives a taller, blander one; too much gives a soapy, slightly metallic flavour and yellow-brown freckles where undissolved grains sat. Because an overnight sponge in a warm kitchen is far more acid than one in a cold kitchen, taste the sponge first and treat the teaspoon as a starting point rather than a rule.
Why are Alaskan old-timers called sourdoughs?
Because of the pot they carried, and the newspaper record shows the word changing meaning. In the 1880s "sour dough" was just a leaven — the Conyers Weekly of 12 October 1887 uses it that way about the breads of Asia Minor — and it was already camp food in a mining story in the Weekly Banner-Watchman of 22 February 1887, where men at a shaft eat "bacon on sour dough bread". By 1 June 1899 a Georgia paper reprinting the Seattle Post-Intelligencer prints a Koyukuk wedding rhyme in which the groom promises to protect his bride "From the sour dough toughs on the Koyukuk trail", and the fee is taken "in checbaco money", cheechako being the newcomer. Within about twelve years the leaven had become the man, and the pairing with cheechako shows the sense was fully formed.