English muffins, from scratch

I'm still up to my eyeballs in offline projects, but since my sanity breaks these days are often bread-baking breaks, and since my last project was making English muffins from scratch, and since the recipe turned out to be both easy and really, really good... well, I'm checking in long enough to share the recipe.

The recipe is from Bread Winners, by Mel London, 1979, Rodale Press, a remarkably good cooking book (which I wish someone would put back into print, please), page 164. The recipe is called English Raisin Muffins. It was provided to the author by a woman named Yvonne Rodahl. She won a prize at a fair with it, and I can see why (even though, being me, of course I altered it just slightly even right out of the gate... :)

All I did differently was to substitute a half cup whole wheat flour plus a half cup bread flour for one cup of the unbleached all-purpose flour, I cut in 3 inch circles instead of 3 and a half, and I rolled a bit thinner than average for English muffins. I wound up with 17 muffins instead of 10, which suits me fine because I like smaller, thinner English muffins.

I did have a bit of a time working out how much to let them rise, and what temperature setting to use, and how long exactly to cook them given the temp I was using. By the time I got the last batch to the griddle, they had overrisen, and they collapsed a bit when I moved them onto the pan. But they all turned out good (at least the ones we've eaten so far). And the ones where I happily hit upon a good combination of rising, cooking temp, and cooking time, are very good indeed.

So, Yvonne Rodahl's English Raisin Muffins: For 10 muffins, use 1 package dry yeast, 1 cup warm water, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons honey, a quarter cup of oil, a half cup of raisins, 3 cups unbleached white flour, and 2 tablespoons cornmeal.

In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast in warm water. Add the salt, honey, oil, raisins, and the flour and stir until smooth.

On a floured surface roll out dough, and cut into 3 1/2-inch circles. Use a cookie cutter, the edge of a drinking glass, or a small can.

Sprinkle cornmeal on an ungreased cookie sheet, place the muffins on the sheet and sprinkle the remaining cornmeal over the muffins. Cover and let rise in a warm spot for about 1 hour.

Heat a griddle; transfer muffins onto griddle and cook over the burner of the stove for about 7 minutes on each side. Keep the flame low so the muffins don't scorch.

Cool, split and toast or serve warm with butter and comb honey.

What, no kneading? That surprised me, but I did it as written and to my amazement it worked. There's another English muffin recipe in the book, for sourdough muffins, and it does include kneading. I have no idea which is more traditional. These muffins, I might add, are lighter than the ones I can buy in the store.

I was a bit too timid with the cornmeal and only used about half of the amount called for in the recipe - a mistake. The muffins sitting on the cookie sheet where I'd sprinkled liberally came up easily. The ones where I'd scrimped had a tendency to stick.

The subtitle of Bread Winners is "More Than 200 Superior Bread Recipes and Their Remarkable Bakers." It's got some fun thumbnail bios, some of which include stories of bread failures (just in case you think everybody but you always but always has terrific luck in the kitchen...). The recipes are quite wide ranging, from rice and cornmeal breakfast bread supposedly big on plantations in the Old South, to recipes to use while on mountain climbing expeditions, to ethnic breads, to novelty breads, to holiday breads, to basics. This being a Rodale book, it's big on whole grains and advises against using salt, but (as in the recipe I shared), it allows white flour in traditional recipes or for specific uses, and lists the salt, but marked as optional. By far and away most of the recipes look do-able, many even look easy, and most use nothing but common ingredients.

I see from a bit of looking on the Internet that there was a sequel, Bread Winners Too.