The first time I made English muffins they didn’t turn out that great, however I have tried several recipes and tweaked them to my liking. This recipe is far more traditional than most English muffin recipes you will find online. This is because when I first looked into making English muffins I noticed most of the recipes involved using a powdered milk, which I am not a fan of using especially since I have no other use for it. As well many of the recipes I found online didn’t have the nooks and crannies which makes English muffins what they are! I read many comments on English muffin recipes stating that although the muffins tasted good, they didn’t taste like traditional English muffins. This is because they used ingredients like baking soda and vinegar to create the nooks and crannies, which changes the flavour.

To create a more authentic English muffin you need to let the dough overproof (meaning the yeast has eaten all the sugar and started to deflate). This is something that seems so wrong when making bread, because normally you are only supposed to let bread rise until it’s double and nothing more. But to give English muffins the proper taste while creating the nooks and crannies you need to do the wrong thing and let them overproof.

Having to overproof the dough makes English muffins a great starter bread for beginners as it’s much harder to make it incorrectly than other yeast breads. Because this is a bread it does take a while to make, but it’s fairly minimum in actual effort.

Ingredients:

1 cup milk

1 tbsp butter (I used margarine – I don’t think it makes a difference)

1 tbsp honey

2 1/4 tsp dry yeast

140g (1 cup) white all-purpose flour

140g (1 cup) whole wheat flour

1/2 tsp salt

Yellow cornmeal (not shown)

Directions:

Heat milk up until it reaches between 110-112°F. This is so that the milk is at the perfect temperature for the yeast to reproduce (activate). When the milk has come to temperature add the butter and honey and mix well. Then add the yeast and let the mixture sit for 10 minutes. If the yeast worked it’s magic it will look bubbly and the kitchen will smell yeasty.

Next combine the salt into the flour and add this mixture into the yeast/milk mixture. (It’s important not to add the salt to the yeast/milk mixture while the yeast is being activated as it can cause the yeast the not activate as well).

For this part I start mixing with a spoon, but eventually switch to my hands. Any way you combine the dough it’s going to be a messy job because it’s a very sticky dough at this point. Likely you will need to add more flour until the dough is smooth and only a little sticky. Then knead the dough until it is well combined and elastic (when you pull the dough it will quickly come back to it’s regular size). It will look like this:

Place it in a bowl (preferably glass, but definitely not aluminum) and wrap it in plastic wrap (If using a small bowl grease the plastic wrap so the dough doesn’t stick to the top). Now you can go about your evening and go to bed. In the morning when you wake up the dough will look much bigger in size, but deflated.

This dough will be more sticky than it was night before. Remove the dough from the bowl and knead it together a bit until it’s all one smooth texture. Next separate into 6 equal sizes (I am not good at making them equal. If anyone has some decent techniques let me know). The dough will still be sticky, so in order to shape them dredge the muffin into the cornmeal and shape.

Next, place them onto a griddle or frying pan (I used two frying pans) and let them sit, covered in the pan for a half hour (with the element/griddle turned-off). They will puff up a bit more during this time. Next turn the heat on the medium and let it cook for 10-15 minutes on each side.

You will know that the muffins are done by tapping them and hearing a follow sound (A rule used for all breads). You can then separate the muffin (when they have cooled) with your fingers and it will have nooks and crannies. I couldn’t get a picture that showed the nooks and crannies very well.

Serve with eggs or peanut butter & jam.

Time to make: 9.5 hours (8 of which you are sleeping)

Nutrition: 197 calories, 36g carbs, 3g fat

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

Like this: Like Loading... Related

Tagged: bread, breakfast, Food, health, homemade