Homemade English muffins

Weighing the dough

One of the fan favorites of the Rambakery are the English muffins.

These are so much better than Thomas' that it's hard to believe. Rambo learned how to make them at Zingerman's Bake classes. Some of you may know that  Zingerman's Deli is an amazing business  in Ann Arbor, MI. They have the deli, a restaurant, a bakery an mail order business. And, they also have a great cooking school where you can learn to cook amazing breads like these English muffins. 

English muffins resting

The English muffin batter should be separated into 8 equal portions. Gently round each piece and let rest for 10-15 minutes

Resting and rising

 Reshape the pieces into discs that are 4" wide and 1/2 " tall. Let rest and ferment for another 45 minutes

English muffins ready to be cooked

 You can preheat an over to 400 degrees but we prefer to cook them the old fashioned way.

Baking the muffins in a cast iron pan

We like to bake them on a hot griddle until golden brown. This is the traditional way to prepare English muffins.

first flip

Looking golden brown

Muffins cooling on a rack

Once the muffins have cooled, grab a fork and make indentations along the circumference of the muffin. This is the classic "fork splitting" technique.

Fork splitting the muffins

English muffins ready to eat

Now the muffins are ready to be popped into a toaster to make golden brown all the delicious nooks and crannies that get filled with butter. Eat and enjoy. A bit of butter and peach jam are perfect accoutrements to a delicious English breakfast. 

Ok. Back on the effort for the better baguette. Trying this time around the Tartine style baguette with leaven and polish. Really gigantic baguettes. simple and easy but I need to cut the initial dough into 6 even chunks instead of 4.

The poolish just seemed to launch these loaves into hyper rise. No sooner did I shape them then they began to rise like crazy. They were slated to rise for 2 and 1/2 hours and 45 minutes in I had to do a quick oven heat up and get them baked. Sadly they look terrible. I strayed from the baking recipe and added spray water directly to the dough once in the oven. Not a good idea for this dough. I think that this resealed my fairly deep slashes on the loaves. Next time no direct spray. The only steam I need is the mini cast iron pan in the bottom of the oven.

Even with the short rise they still had oven spring. Since they were so big my baguette pans were too small. Slid these directly on to the pizza stone.

The crumb is pretty light and airy. Not nearly as dense as the Ramleaven bread. Crust is fairly thin and good and crispy.

Good start overall. Just need to work on the look now.

Country Rye - Baguette Style

Rye baguettes

Ok. Starting from the end and working backwards. Here you see my second attempt at the "Tartine" style country rye. This version includes an 80/20 percentage of bread flour to rye flour. Also for a bit of fun I threw in some caraway seeds. I think, and so do my testers, that the seeds really jump the flavor up a notch. I used 2 tablespoons of the caraway seeds. These seeds were mixed in with the salt after the initial dough rest.

As always, it seems there is no tastier bread than that which has been made from a starter. This rye contains the same starter as my white loaves. Tasty! I question my shaping technique but that comes with practice. These loaves could have been much tighter and more even from end to end. For those in the know, rye flour makes for some seriously sticky dough. Tough to work with and still keep the additional flour to a minimum.

To bake these I used a special baguette pan for oversize loaves as seen below. Then I slid them on to a baking stone with the oven set to 500 degrees on the stone setting. 3 water spritzes every minute for the first three minutes. Then put the oven temperature down to 450 degrees. 30 minutes total after that and done! Since I didn't plan this that well I did not have the usual pan for ice cubes or water that I would normally have when baking baguettes. Next time I will remember, maybe.

Large baguette pan

Breadifesto

Thought I would give this a try. Bread blogging. Perhaps others may have some interest and perhaps not. Everything all about bread. Specifically my bread.

Most of the information will be all about notes and experiments I am trying to perfect and lock in a recipe on each loaf. I won't typically include a recipe but for those who are interested I will gladly oblige. No secrets here.

I will say I highly recommend the Tartine book by Chad Robertson and for those who want to just get started with something fairly simple and easy and tasty I would say try the No Knead bread by Jim Lahey. It is available all over the internet and on youtube. Make sure it is Jim Lahey. There are many knock offs but he is the original. I've included the original video here.

Jim Lahey No Knead bread video

Jump in with both feet and get started people. Baking is easy and fun and highly rewarding.