Food 21 May 2006 06:04 pm
Steppin’ it up a notch…
Today I had a fun discovery: I made my own english muffins! We still have Eggs Benedict every Lord’s Day morning for breakfast and while the eggs are better (thanks to my blessed landlord and his homegrown offering) the muffins have been worse. For whatever reason it’s been hard to find consistancy within a brand. A bad muffin is just a cardboardish, gritty, ruination to an otherwise blissfull mouthful of golden and buttery warmth. So, they matter.
My favorite breakfast cookbook, which is going to be my Recomendation of the Month for June (see May’s suggestion in the sidebar), has a recipe for English Muffins. With my bread curse seeminly lifted I decided this weekend to give them a shot.
I used half wheat/half white flour. The recipe is pretty basic: just yeast/water, oil, flour, and salt. The dough was soft and not sticky at all and felt really good to work with. Best of all, I mixed it last night and it did it’s first rise in the refridgerator overnight. This morning I got up and set it out to bring it up to room temp, and then rolled them, cut them, and sprinkled both sides with cornmeal.
They are “baked” on the griddle and smell heavenly while cooking! So toasty and really fragrant. The even heat of the griddle gave them a beautiful color and they timed perfectly with the boiling water for the eggs and the thickening of the Hollandaise Sauce.
Alas, we had storebought eggs for today’s breakfast. Watery and thin and pale. In a word, Anemic. They are kind of like calling Capri Sun “juice”. We had no other choice so we made do but every time I do it renews my determination to limit the times we have to injest these pathetic things.
The muffins helped to compensate :-). David whooped and almost fell over. They were crispy on the outside and tender and soft inside. Yeasty and velvety. I’d also gotten a better quality of Canadian Bacon and if we’d had good eggs it would have been nearly too perfect. I think the muffins might even better lightly toasted before using, or maybe I’m just so used to the dried out store bought stuff that I need to acquire a taste for this kind of excellence ;-). Sounds like it calls for more practice…..