Sourdough Strawberries & Cream Scones

Made with juicy, fresh strawberries and cream, these Sourdough Strawberry Scones are a perfect spring and early summer breakfast or brunch treat!

Sourdough discard helps tenderize the scones and they’re complemented with a simple yet flavorful strawberry glaze. Adding a touch of cornmeal introduces a subtle crunch, enhancing the overall experience and harmonizing perfectly with the strawberries.

If you have access to fresh strawberries, they’re an excellent way to highlight their juiciness and bright flavor. However, the recipe adapts well to the fruit’s varying stages, whether they’re over or underripe (or sitting in the back of your fridge for a day or two too long).

I adapted this strawberry scone recipe for sourdough from Susan Spungen’s excellent Substack!

Recognizing the common perception of scones as dry or lackluster, I’ve compiled a wealth of tips in the comprehensive guide below to ensure they come out delicious, tender, and moist.

---

How to Add Sourdough Discard to Scones

It’s easy to incorporate sourdough discard into scones and other pastries like sourdough biscuits and quick breads like Sourdough Irish Soda Bread or Sourdough Banana Bread.

Because sourdough discard is an acidic ingredient, it helps to tenderize baked goods (even Sourdough Pie Crust) and reacts to mechanical leaveners like baking soda.

To add sourdough discard to scones, I typically use about ½ cup of discard (or 100-120 grams) and subtract a portion of liquid and flour from the recipe. This is because sourdough starter is typically made with an equal portion of flour and water (or 1:1 ratio).

This scone recipe relies on heavy cream for both richness of flavor and moisture, so lowering the cream amount too much results in drier scones. Hence, I use an egg yolk instead of a whole egg to subtract a small amount of liquid from the recipe.

You can use room temperature or cold sourdough discard straight from the refrigerator. Additionally, you can active sourdough starter in the recipe!

---

🔍 Tips for Making Sourdough Strawberry Scones

• Don’t overmix the batter
  • Too much mixing leads to gluten development. It’s something you want in a sourdough bread recipe, but it will result in tougher scones, biscuits, or pancakes, if you mix the dough too much.
• Chill scones before baking
  • Freezing the scones for at least 30 minutes before baking will make them flakier as the butter releases steam in the hot oven.
• Stack the dough to create flaky layers
  • To make flaky biscuits or scones, I stack (or laminate) the dough a couple of times to make more layers. This is a similar technique to making Sourdough Croissants or extra flaky Pie Crust.
• Use fresh strawberries
  • Frozen fruit releases more juices as they bake and tends to bleed into the dough, so it’s best to use fresh strawberries in this recipe.

---

🛠 Tools Needed:

You only need a few basic tools to make these sourdough strawberry scones. No mixer required!

• Baking scale: Since the density of flour and sourdough starter may vary among individuals, it’s recommended to weigh your ingredients for accuracy. Weighing your ingredients by weight will make your baking more consistent and accurate.
• Whisk: For mixing the dry and wet ingredients separately.
• Bench Scraper: Helps shape and cut out the scones.
• Baking sheet: I bake the scones on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

---

🛒 Ingredients Needed:

See below for my ingredient recommendations and possible substitutions.

• All-purpose flour: For tender scones, use a softer wheat flour, such as all-purpose flour or cake flour. I use King Arthur all-purpose flour.
• Cornmeal: I use a finely ground cornmeal for some more summer flavor and slight crunch to the scones.
• Baking Powder & Baking Soda: Mechanical leaveners to help the scones rise taller.
• Salt: I almost always use Diamond Crystal Kosher salt or sea salt in baking.
• Granulated sugar: There’s ½ cup of sugar in the recipe, but the scones aren’t too sweet. You can substitute with coconut sugar if you’d like or lower the amount slightly.
• Lemon zest: Citrus zest adds some brightness to the recipe that will help bring out even more strawberry flavor. Orange or lime zest would be good here too.
• Unsalted butter: Use cold butter for this recipe. Cold butter prevents gluten development, resulting in flakier scones and helps them rise taller.
• Egg Yolk: The egg yolk helps bind the ingredients and adds a bit more structure.
• Heavy Cream: Heavy cream (or whipping cream) gives the best flavor to these scones. If you use milk, use whole milk so you have more fat in the recipe.
• Sourdough Discard: If you don’t have an active sourdough starter, learn how to make one in a week following my how-to guide. See my top sourdough starter tips here.
• Vanilla Extract: Can substitute with another flavoring like almond extract (I’d top the scones with sliced almonds in that case!), orange blossom water, or even a touch of rose water.
• Fresh Strawberries: Slice the strawberries into quarters so you get some big and smaller chunks distributed throughout the scones.
• Coarse or raw sugar for topping (optional): Adds some sparkle, a little more sweetness, and crunchiness to the top of the scones.

Strawberry Glaze (optional)

The strawberry glaze is optional, but adds even more strawberry flavor to the scones! However, you can easily omit or substitute the glaze with just one made of powdered sugar and cream.

• Freeze-dried Strawberries: Freeze-dried berries add more intensity of flavor and color. I quickly pulverize them in a spice grinder or small food processor. You could easily use freeze-dried raspebrries as well (as I do for my Chocolate Raspberry Sourdough Biscotti).
• Powdered Sugar: The very fine confectioner’s sugar dissolves quickly and easily for glazes like the glaze for my Sourdough Lemon Poppy Seed Bundt Cake.
• Heavy Cream: Can use whole milk or a thick plant-based milk. I typically use 2-3 TBS for this recipe, but eye it as needed.

Strawberry Scone Variations

• Strawberry chocolate: Add ½ cup of chocolate chips or chopped chocolate to the batter.
• Strawberry rose: Add ½ tsp of rose water in place of vanilla extract, a touch to the glaze, and top the scones with dried rose petals.
• Strawberry mint or other herbs: Add a tablespoon of freshly chopped herbs like mint, rosemary, or thyme to the recipe.

---

🍓 How to Make Sourdough Strawberry Scones

Follow this visual and detailed recipe guide as you make these sourdough discard strawberries and cream scones.

1. Mix the Dry Ingredients

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

For maximum lemon zest flavor, massage the lemon zest in a large bowl with sugar until the sugar is fragrant, lemony, and sandy.

Rubbing the zest into the sugar infuses it and is an easy way to evenly distribute the zest and release the lemon oils.

Add the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, and salt to the bowl of lemon sugar and whisk together.

2. Cut in the Butter and Add the Strawberries

Cut the cold butter into small cubes and toss it into the flour with your hands.

Then, use your hands or a pastry cutter to cut the butter into the flour until it’s pea-sized or smaller pieces.

Add the sliced, fresh strawberries to the bowl and toss it all together. Set aside the bowl as you mix the wet ingredients or set in the refrigerator if it’s warm.

3. Mix the Wet Ingredients

In a large liquid measuring cup or other mixing bowl, whisk the heavy cream, egg yolk, sourdough discard, and vanilla extract until you have a thin, wet mixture.

4. Mix the Scone Dough

Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl of dry ingredients and use a fork to gently toss the dough.

The scone dough will be quite scraggly and dry at first, but as you continue to mix and shape the scones, it will become more wet.

Toss the dough in the bowl until large clumps form, but there’s still some floury spots remaining.

5. Shape and Freeze the Scones

Dump the scone dough out onto a clean countertop (Image 1). It’ll still be scraggly and a little floury like making pie dough.

Using a bench scraper, bring the dough together into a mass as much as you can (2).

Cut the dough into quarters and stack them on top of each other (3). This will help create many flaky layers!

Use floured hands or your bench scraper to press down on the layers of dough back into a round mass. Repeat the cutting, stacking, and pressing down one more time and pat it down into an 8-inch round, about 1 ½ inches high.

Then, use your bench scraper to cut the scones into 8 wedges. To cut, I press straight down and first cut into four quadrants (90º angles at a cross section), followed by 45º slices to slice the quadrants in half.

Place your scones on the prepared baking sheet and place in the freezer for at least 15 minutes while you preheat the oven.

Freezing the scones will help them retain their triangle shapes, be flakier, and rise taller.

6. Bake

As the scones freeze, preheat the oven to 425ºF (218ºC).

When ready to bake, brush the tops of the scones with a couple tablespoons of heavy cream and sprinkle raw, turbinado, or demerara sugar on top of the scones.

Place the scones into the oven and immediately turn the oven down to 400ºF. The initial blast of heat will help them rise taller.

Bake at 400ºF (204ºC) for 21-23 minutes, or until the scones are dark golden brown.

Cool on a wire baking sheet as you make the strawberry glaze.

7. Make the Strawberry Glaze

This strawberry glaze is so easy to make! The key is using freeze-dried strawberries for maximum, concentrated strawberry flavor.

To make, pulverize the freeze-dried strawberries in a spice grinder or small food processor into a powder.

Transfer to a bowl with powdered sugar and mix. Then, slowly drizzle in heavy cream until you have a thick but pourable consistency. If the glaze is too thick, add a little more cream. If runny, add more powdered sugar.

Use a spoon to drizzle the glaze on top of the cooled scones. Finally, enjoy these delicious sourdough strawberry scones!

---

How to Store

Sourdough scones are best served the day they’re baked. If you can wait to drizzle them with the glaze, they’ll last a little longer if you know you won’t consume them all in one sitting.

Keep the scones in an airtight container at room temperature for a couple of days.

You can store them in the refrigerator too, if you’d prefer to get an another couple of days out of them. Reheat before serving.

I don’t recommend freezing already baked scones, but you can easily freeze them before baking as I note in the instructions above.

---

❓ FAQs:

---

Other Sourdough Breakfast Recipes You May Enjoy:

---