Sourdough has a reputation for taking days. Discard recipes don't — because you've already skipped the part that takes days. Nothing on this page proves, rises, or needs planning the night before.

Timings below are honest: hands-on time plus oven time, from a standing start.

Under 10 minutes

Pancakes. The fastest useful thing you can do with discard. Whisk discard, egg, a little milk, flour, sugar, salt and bicarbonate of soda; cook. The bicarb reacts with the discard's acidity the moment they meet, which is why the batter puffs almost immediately — and why you should cook it fairly promptly rather than letting it sit. Both a same-morning and an overnight version here.

A mug cake. Discard, a spoon of sugar, a spoon of oil, a spoon of cocoa, a pinch of bicarb, ninety seconds in the microwave. One portion, one mug, no washing up beyond the mug.

Stirred into something you're already cooking. A few tablespoons into soup, stew or a pan sauce, near the end, thickens it and adds a savoury depth. Whisk it with a ladle of the hot liquid first so it disperses rather than clumping.

10–20 minutes

Flatbread. Discard, flour, salt, a splash of oil. Knead briefly, divide, roll thin, dry-fry in a very hot pan for about ninety seconds a side until it blisters. No rest required. This is the one to learn if you want a reliable weeknight bread.

Crêpes. Thinner batter than pancakes, no leavening at all. Discard, egg, milk, a little flour, pinch of salt. The tang works particularly well with savoury fillings.

Waffles. Same batter family as pancakes, but the iron's high heat and the higher fat content give a genuinely crisp shell. Best made in a batch and frozen — they reheat in a toaster straight from frozen.

20–30 minutes

Crackers. Twenty minutes of work and they keep a fortnight, which makes them the best return on effort here. The only difficulty is rolling them thin enough — thinner than feels reasonable. Full method.

Cheese crisps. The no-roll shortcut when you can't face a rolling pin: spoon small mounds of a stiff discard-and-grated-cheese mixture onto a lined tray, flatten slightly, bake until deep gold. Covered in the same edition as the crackers.

Savoury quick bread. Discard, flour, baking powder, egg, oil, plus whatever needs eating — cheese, herbs, spring onions, olives. Into a loaf tin, into the oven. Genuinely fast, and it uses a full cup.

What "quick" costs you

Two things, and they're worth knowing so you can choose deliberately.

Depth of flavour. The tang in a same-morning batter is mild. An overnight rest in the fridge lets the bacteria carry on working and the sourness develops considerably. If you like a pronounced tang, quick recipes will taste flat to you — mix the batter tonight instead.

Texture in anything gluten-dependent. Fast pizza dough is good; slow-fermented pizza dough is better, with more chew and more blister. The same-day pizza method sits right at that boundary, at about ninety minutes — outside the remit of this page, but the fastest route to a genuinely good base.

The trick that makes everything here faster

Keep discard in the fridge in a jar you can pour from, not scoop from. A wide-mouthed jar with slightly loose discard pours; a narrow jar with stiff discard means a spatula, a scale and a mess. It sounds trivial and it's the difference between a ten-minute pancake and a fifteen-minute one with more washing up.

Cold discard works fine in every recipe on this page. If a batter looks lumpy, give it five minutes and whisk again — that's hydration catching up, not a mistake.

Where to go next