English Muffins

There may not be a ton of “fun” things about tightening up your budget, but one of the side effects of trying to use up everything that’s already in your pantry is that you end up with ideas that you may not ever have thought to make. On this particular day, I was searching for ways to use bread flour that wasn’t just a loaf of bread. I came upon this recipe from Baked By An Introvert for English Muffins. All I can say is WOW! There may be a bunch of steps to this, but it was so much fun to do! It was exciting to shape them, watch them rise, and give them their shape and color by griddling them before baking! I can’t describe how it felt to cut the first one open and see those signature nooks and crannies! It was almost as satisfying as eating them!

The ingredient list is pretty standard stuff I usually have around. I’ve come across some recipes that use all-purpose flour for this, too, so if that’s all you have, I’d say to go for it. The bread flour has more gluten, so using it gives my muffins more chewiness, but all-purpose flour won’t ruin your batch by any means. The spirit of my posts this month is definitely “use what you’ve got,” so don’t go out and buy a bag of bread flour on my account! (I still have another bag of bread flour in my pantry, so if you decide to buy a whole bag to make these, I will have another recipe that uses it soon enough!)

I slowly heated the milk and honey together on the stovetop until they reached around 105°F. I stirred in the yeast and allowed it to proof for 5-10 minutes until it “proofed” to me it was active. (Sorry! Bad baking pun, but I legitimately couldn’t come up with a different phrase once that was in my head!) It gets a thick foam on the surface of the milk mixture with a few bubbles poking through. Stir it all back in, and add the egg and butter.

My mixer and dough hook have seen a lot of action this year, and they are the definite stars of this recipe’s execution as well! The flour and salt go in the bowl, then the wet ingredients are gradually added while the mixer is already running on low. Once all the milk/honey/yeast/egg/butter mixture is incorporated, scrape down the sides (make sure there isn’t any extra flour in the bottom that didn’t get mixed in!), turn the speed up to medium, and let it run for 4-5 minutes. The dough should be smooth and very sticky!

You can see how wet that dough is, but that’s the right texture! This bowl was sprayed with a little cooking spray to get it ready for the first rise. Once it doubled in size (after about an hour) it looked like this:

I almost needed a bigger bowl!!

For the next step, you can either cut the dough in half and just keep halving it until you get 16 fairly even dough balls, or you can weigh it out like I did, using a kitchen scale. The next time I do it, I’ll probably just eyeball it. Trying to get everything to be exactly the same size was a bit laborious and since that dough was VERY sticky, it got a little messy, too. I don’t know if there was enough value in having them be exactly the same weight for me to go through that again, even if it did make for some beautifully uniform muffins. Paul and Mary would have been proud!

Once the balls were portioned and shaped (I rolled the dough between lightly floured hands, then flattened them out slightly into disks) I arranged them to rise on cookie sheets lined with parchment and dusted with cornmeal.

I was pretty stingy with the cornmeal. I think you could stand to generously dust the parchment, and that may have made what comes after the next rise a bit easier. Sprinkle some additional cornmeal on top, too!

The absolute hardest part of this bake was getting the balls of dough from the cookie sheet where they were rising to the griddle without deflating them and undoing everything the second rise was creating: the air bubbles that would become my nooks and crannies. I tried everything! We have a thin spatula we use to get under eggs in a frying pan. I tried sliding my offset spatula underneath. The dough just stuck to everything. I found that if I could get a tiny edge up, I had more control just lifting the parchment and guiding the dough onto my hands (again, very lightly floured).

Second big tip: have patience with your griddle. You know how those first couple of pancakes are usually the worst because you’re still getting the heat right? You inevitably have the heat too hot or not hot enough, leading to burnt pancakes or pancakes you have to flip too many times to get cooked. This is the same. Set the griddle (a frying pan is fine, too, but you need enough room so they won’t touch) to medium-low heat. You don’t need any cooking spray! We’re looking for a dry toast for the surface of the muffins.

My first four muffins were definitely the trial and error muffins. They were a bit flatter from the spatula experiments and came out a bit too light. They were still pretty delicious!

Once you’ve finished toasting the tops and bottoms on the muffins, you can put them back onto the same parchmented cookie sheets you used for the second rise. Bake these babies for 10-15 minutes at 325°F. It was hard to tell when they were done, because they looked pretty similar going in as they did coming out. I had to trust that they were done all the way through.

Moment of truth…I split one open using the classic fork-stab-around-the-middle-then-split-open technique all the cool kids are doing with their English Muffins these days. Sawing them open with a knife disturbs the crannies. The nooks don’t like it much either! 😀 They were perfect on the inside! A couple of minutes in the toaster, spread with some jam, and it was heaven!

I know it seems like a lot of steps. I know you have a busy life, but no matter what you’ve got on your plate right now, make some room for these English Muffins! The only downside is you may never be able to go back to store-bought English Muffins again. Good news, though, English Muffins freeze incredibly well. I had to freeze a bunch, otherwise I would have eaten all of these in one sitting. Yeah, they are that good!

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