Homemade English Muffin Adventure

Our oven broke. Guillaume said he smelled burned electronics and saw smoke. We tried preheating. The inside stayed cold.

There’s never really a good time for something like this to happen, but during a pandemic was a big blow. In the moment, I was inconsolable. My tears weren’t just about the oven, though. They were the dam breaking on mounting losses.

Weeks have passed. The wrong replacement part arrived by mail. We’re still waiting for the correct one. In the search for silver linings, we still had a working stovetop. Plus, the non-functioning oven provided a reprieve from more attempts to make regular bread at altitude. That last boule was inedible. No exaggeration.

So, much like my Midwestern ancestors, I turned to cast iron skillets. And, very much unlike them, I hauled out the stand mixer.

Making English muffins from scratch seemed like a fairly low-risk endeavor. King Arthur Flour’s recipe gets excellent reviews, included helpful tips, and seemed fairly easy to divide in half to produce a more modest 8 muffins. But I procrastinated about starting, expressing to Guillaume that no yeasted dough I’d ever put in the stand mixer had ever turned out well. He convinced me to just go for it.

Watching the stand mixer veritably bounce along the counter while straining to paddle the supposed-to-be-soft dough, I started to lose it. What the heck was going on? Guillaume suggested starting over.

“How??? I don’t even know what went wrong! I followed all the directions! I put in all the ingredients!” While gesturing around the kitchen, I spotted the butter, still sitting on the counter. Oops.

Incorporating the butter after the fact required taking the dough hunk out of the stand mixer and kneading it by hand on a silicone mat. Finally, the thing seemed somewhat smooth, albeit not very stretchy. As helpful as the recipe was, some of the instructions were vague. How stretchy is stretchy? What does “puffy” mean? What is “low” heat exactly?

So all I can relay is what I did here at altitude, after getting the small yet crucial amount of butter into the dough. This was not a speedy project, but the muffins turned out better than expected. I’m counting this as a win.

Homemade English Muffins
Adapted from King Arthur Flour

Makes 8

200g lukewarm milk
1½ Tbsp. softened butter
¾ tsp. salt, to taste
1 Tbsp. sugar
½ a large egg, lightly beaten, approx. 22g
2¼ C. (270g) unbleached bread flour
1 tsp. instant yeast
Corn meal or semolina

Add all of the ingredients, except the corn meal or semolina, to a stand mixer bowl. Do not forget the butter. Using the flat paddle attachment, beat on medium-high until the dough becomes smooth and shiny, about five minutes. You should have fairly soft dough.

(Alternatively, mix the ingredients in a bowl by hand until completely combined. Remove the sticky dough and knead it on a nonstick surface by hand for several minutes until it gets smooth and shiny. I found that it was fairly easy to knead without sticking to my hands.)

Shape the dough into a ball, place it in the bowl, and cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Allow it to rise at room temperature until puffy. Original directions say 1 to 2 hours; I split the difference at about 1½ hours. Room temperature was around 72°F.

Lightly coat the bottoms of two cast iron pans with vegetable oil using a paper towel. Sprinkle a generous amount of corn meal or semolina into both, shaking the pan slightly to make the layers somewhat even.

Gently deflate the dough with your fingertips. Remove from the bowl and place onto a clean, nonstick work surface. Use a dull knife or bench scraper to divide it into 8 even pieces. Shape each piece into a smooth ball with your hands, then flatten each one until it’s about 3 to 3½ inches across.

Place four of the dough pieces in each cold cast iron pan. Sprinkle the tops with some corn meal or semolina.

(If you have one pan, the original recipe suggests placing the prepared dough on a cold baking sheet that has the oil and the corn meal or semolina. Then you can heat them in batches.)

Cover each pan with a piece of parchment paper. Allow them to rest for 20 minutes. They should puff up slightly. It’s okay to let them sit longer if you’re doing batches. Later batches will be slightly larger, though.

Place each pan on the same sized burner over low heat. On our programmable stovetop, I found that starting at level 2.4 for the first 7 minutes, lowering the heat to 2.2 for another 7 minutes on the same side, and then flipping them over worked best.

Cook the muffins for approximately 7 to 15 minutes per side. You want the crust to get deep golden brown on both sides. Avoid pressing them down with a spatula — I did this to speed up cooking and lost the nooks and crannies.

The sides should bounce back when gently pressed to indicate that they’re getting done. If the muffins still feel kind of heavy when you lift them out of the pan, they need more time.

King Arthur Flour says you can pop them in a 350°F oven for about 10 minutes to finish them, but that wasn’t an option. I lowered the heat to 2.0, put the lid on, and gave them 2 to 4 more minutes to cook through.

When you’re confident that they’re actually done, remove them to plates and allow them to cool completely.

Split them with a fork to serve: Take a fork and push the tines into the edge. Remove the fork and repeat this process along the rest of the edge, rotating the muffin as you go. Gently pull the two halves apart.

Refrigerate leftover muffins. They taste best toasted.