Recipes: Crumpets, sourdough

Recently I made sourdough crumpets for breakfast. I had had the crumpets one buys in the supermarket on occassion, but didn't really like them. I tried to home made version with white flour every now and then, but still I wasn't satisfied, there had to be a more nutritious way to make them with sourdough. So I read a lot online and experimented a bit. The result of my experimentations you will find below. It is certainly very tasty and my children loved them, hopefully yours will as well.

As for the toppings, you can use a variety of things, savoury and sweet.
Sweet toppings can be: sliced or mashed fruit, whipped cream, clotted cream, butter and cinnamon, home made fruit butter or such. The possibilities are endless.
Savoury toppings can be: home made nut butter, tomato or any other vegetable, either cooked or raw, with some salt and pepper, melted cheese with a vegetable, such as tomato or mushroom, cheese, fried or poached egg, ham, salami, fried bacon, pulled pork, or whatever takes your fancy. You can add some herbs or spices, or chilli to make the flavour you want. Again the possibilities are endless. 

Recently we made pizza crumpets, just add a bit of tomato sauce, salami, ham, mushrooms and cheese and put them under the broiler. The kids loved them :-)

Origin: United Kingdom

Difficulty: easy
Time: about 1 hour start to finish
Serves: 4
Yield: 8 pieces 
Traditional, Vegetarian

Equipment:
* egg, crumpet or american pancake rings, I used silicon ones that I bought on Ebay
* frying pan
* bowl for the batter

Ingredients:
* 2 cups / 500 ml sourdough starter
* 2 TBSP sweetner, such as sucanat or any other whole sweetner (you can omit if you prefer, for instance for savoury crumpets)
* 1 tsp celtic sea salt
* 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
* 1 TBSP water to dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in
* butter, coconut oil, ghee, lard or beef drippings for greasing your pan and rings
* optional - herbs and spices to your liking

Directions:
* Warm up your pan, grease it, grease your rings.
* Put the sourdough starter, sweetner and salt in a bowl, mix well. 
* Mix the bicarbonate of soda and water together.
* Once your pan is hot mix the bicarbonate of soda/water mix with the sourdough mix. Now it will start bubbling and poofing up. 
* You can now put your batter in your rings, make sure you do not fill them up too high as they crumpets will rise while baking. I used a gravy spoon to fill my rings, which was halfway up the ring, but by the time the crumpets were cooked they were to or slightly over the top of the rings, which wasn't a problem as the batter had cooked and was firm.
* Once you see the characteristic holes in the top of the crumpets and they are dry at the top you can flip them over and cook the other side a bit, or, if you prefer tip them out onto a plate right away. When you choose to cook the other side, take them out when they have the colour you want.
* Grease your pan and rings again (clean the rings in between in case they have dough on them) and make your next batch.

Possible substitutions:
butter - ghee, coconut, tallow, lard, beef drippings etc.
sucanat - honey, maple syrup, coconut/palm sugar, maple sugar
celtic sea salt - himalaya salt, persian salt