This morning we had the most incredible brunch at the farm for a crowd of 17. Jeff made two massive piles of pancakes, someone brought fancy sausage, and Julia, Jessica, and I made eggs florentine with crazy fresh eggs, garlicy sautéed Swiss chard, velvety hollandaise, and made-from-scratch English muffins.
I’d never made English muffins before, and I was pretty sure they were going to come out more like hockey pucks than anything, but they were absolutely amazing!
I used the Artisan Bread Baking directions, but modified them so I could, you know, go to sleep. I set up the poolish after lunch, did the initial knead after dinner, and left the dough in the fridge overnight to ferment. I skipped the next couple rises and went straight to dividing the dough into 3½ ounce balls in the morning, shaped them, pressed them into the cornmeal, and cooked them on a baking sheet set over two burners.
If you have any sort of experience making bread, this recipe is absolutely worth the effort. The only tricky thing about it, really, is that you need to cook the muffins on very low heat, and flip them almost constantly — that way the inside will cook evenly before the outsides burn.
English Muffins
Ingredients for Poolish
- 5 oz AP flour
- 5 oz whole wheat flour
- ½ t dry active yeast, dissolved in 10 oz warm water
Ingredients to add to Poolish
- 19 oz AP flour
- 3½ oz milk
- 1½ t dry active yeast, dissolved in ⅓ C warm water
- 1 egg
- 1 T vinegar
- 2 T sugar
- 2½ T oil
- 2 t salt
- Combine the ingredients for the poolish in a large mixing bowl. Let it sit on the counter or a draft-free, warm place, for 6+ hours.
- The poolish should be nice and bubbly. Add all the remaining ingredients except the salt. Mix it with your hands — it’ll look like all there’s too much flour and not enough liquid, but just keep folding it in until everything is incorporated.
- Knead, in the bowl, for a few minutes. Don’t worry too much about kneading it thoroughly — you’ll do that later.
- Let the dough rest for 20 minutes.
- Sprinkle the salt onto the bowl, and knead until you can stretch a bit of dough thin enough to almost see through without tearing.
- Cover with a towel and place in the fridge to ferment overnight.
- When you remove the dough, it should have increased in bulk tremendously. Fold each side of the dough into the center and press down, so that you end up with a ball about the same size as before it rose. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes in a warm place — a gas oven with the pilot light on is good.
- Divide into 3 1/2 ounce / 110 gram pieces. The trick to making English muffins is to avoid overworking the dough. The less you work the dough, the flatter the finished English muffins will be. If you take the dough as it’s cut from the main dough and just pull it into shape, you’ll have a flatter English muffin. However, if you like higher English muffins, with loft between a regular English muffin and a round loaf, then round the dough and flatten it with your hand.
- Round the doughs into balls and let them rest for 5 minutes.
- Take each dough ball and gently pull it around the edge and in the center as if you were pulling the dough to start a pizza. They should wind up about 4 inches / 10 cm in diameter for this weight. Place cornmeal in a bowl and press the doughs flatter in the corn meal, turning once or twice to assure that you have cornmeal on both sides. The flatter you can get the doughs the better, within reason. They will puff up when you cook them, but if you start too round, they will be thick and may not cook on the inside.
- Place as many muffins as will fit (you’ll cook them in several batches) on your griddle, if you’ve got one, or sheet pan, and turn on the heat to something between low and medium. Cook, shifting the muffins and turning them over every minute or so, until the muffins are done to your liking. The longer you can cook them without burning, the better they will be.
- Allow the muffins to cool before splitting and heating. These freeze very well; put two or three in each plastic bag and freeze.