English Muffins

Breakfast can be beautiful in its simplicity or astonishing in its breadth and complexity. What is not beautiful or astonishing is when your boyfriend (a grown, 26-year-old man) informs you that for breakfast he had a cookie and some yerba mate. I am not a nutritionist and I am a professed fan of ramen noodles, but that sort of thing strikes me as not the best thing you can do for your body, especially after you've made it wake up at 6:55 in the morning. And while I religiously eat cereal for breakfast most days of the week, I can appreciate those who, like Peter, are in search of something more. Enter the English muffin.

Really, they can be used in a remarkable number of ways: smeared with peeanut butter and honey, made into a sandwich with an egg and some salsa, or slathered with butter or your homemade habanero-apricot jam (pictured above; I need to hone my recipe a bit more then I'll post it here). Peter even ate a muffin with some Thai curry he made and had fairly rapturous things to say about it. These are fun to bake but are a little time consuming as they're skillet-cooked, so find an empty Sunday afternoon, crank up the NPR and make these bad boys. They're rewarding, comforting and versatile. Plus you get to offhandedly announce that you made English muffins.

Peter Reinhart, my baking guru, actually has two recipes for English muffins. I've tried both and these are the ones that I prefer. The others didn't give me nooks and crannies, but still tasted great and are less time-consuming so you can hunt that one down and give it a shot if you're not as obsessed with nooks and crannies as I am. Also, it's important to note that this dough isn't dough so much as it is batter; meaning if you have something wetter and that doesn't really come together like a traditional bread, don't panic--you've still got it right!

English Muffins (From Artisan Bread Every Day)

2 tsp honey
1 TBS vegetable/olive oil
1 1/2 cups lukewarm whole or nonfat milk
2 2/3 cups unbleached bread flour
3/4 tsp salt (or 1/ 1/4 tsp coarse kosher salt)
2 tsp instant yeast
1/4 tsp baking soda
3 TBS warm water
cornmeal (for dusting)

Add the honey and oil to the milk and stir to dissolve the honey. In a mixing bowl, whisk the flour, salt, and yeast together, then pour in the milk mixture. Whisk for 1 minute, until all of the ingredients are evenly distributed and the flour is hydrated. You should see gluten strands forming as the wet sponge develops. Scrape down the bowl with a spatula, then mix the batter for a few more seconds. Scrape down the bowl again, then cover tightly with plastic wrap and immediately refrigerate overnight or for up to 4 days. The batter will bubble and rise as it cools down.

ON BAKING DAY:

Remove the dough from the fridge about 2 hours before you plan to bake the English muffins. The dough will be much stiffer but still sticky and it will bubble as it comes to room temperature.
When you're nearly ready to bake, dissolve the baking soda in the warm water and gently fold it into the dough, just like folding egg whites into cake batter, until it is fully absorbed. Let the dough rest for 5 to 10 minutes, until it starts bubbling again. Heat a flat griddle pan or cast-iron skillet over medium heat, or to 300 F if using an electric griddle.

Mist the griddle and the inside of the crumpet rings with spray oil, then dust the inside of the rings with cornmeal. Cover the surface of the pan with as many rings as it will hold, then dust the pan inside the rings with more cornmeal. Lower the heat to medium-low, actually closer to low than to medium; you'll have to use trial-and-error on this at first until you find the setting that works with your stove or griddle.

To bake, mist a 1/3 cup measuring cup with spray oil, fill it with dough, and pour the dough into a ring, filling the ring about two thirds full; depending on the size of the ring, you may not need all of the batter in the scoop to fill each ring, but for standard crumpet rings 1/3 cup of batter is about right. Fill all of the rings, then sprinkle cornmeal over each muffin.

The dough will not spread immediately to fill the ring but will begin to slowly rise and soon will fill, and reach the top of the ring; it may or may not bubble. Cook the muffins for at least 12 minutes, or just until the bottoms are golden brown and crisp and the tops lose their wet look. Then, flip the muffins over, rings and all, and cook for 12 minutes more. If it takes less than 12 minutes per side, your griddle setting is probably too high and you'll end up with undercooked muffins.

When both sides are golden brown and the dough is springy to the touch, remove the muffins from the pan. Cool them in their rings for about 2 minutes, then pop them out. Turn the muffins on their edge to cool; this will help prevent sinking and shrinking. Cool for at least 30 minutes before serving. After they cool, you can split them with a fork to accentuate the interior nooks. Enjoy!