Baking Bouchon - Recipe 81: English Muffins

Now this is a bread I can get excited about!  You should be excited too because you don't have to hear me whine and moan about the latest bread recipe in this cookbook.  Maybe because it's a bread that is firmly engrained in the breakfast category and I love breakfast.  We buy English Muffins on a regular basis so making this is actually quite useful.

I've made English Muffins a few times before but the recipes were significantly different than this one.  The dough was always much thicker than this one and was formed into little patties, grilled on a griddle and then finished in the oven.  These were totally different.  Good thing because I have always been disappointed in my English Muffin attempts.  They never had enough nooks and crannies in them which is the crux of a good English Muffin.

The difference between this dough and the ones used for the other breads in this cookbook is the amount of levain in it.  There is more than double the amount in this bread that is in the others.  It also has more milk in it.  Both of these make the dough significantly thinner, more like batter than dough.  Because the dough is so thin, you can't form it into little bread loaves like the regular dough so it has to be baked in molds.  This meant another equipment purchase which I don't mind too much because I think I'll make these fairly often.

The dough rises and gets scooped into the molds and rises again.  I could tell even before I put them in the oven that there were a ton of little air bubbles in them which was very promising in the nooks and crannies department.

I was a little nervous when I cut open the English Muffins but inside I found a plethora of nooks and crannies.  Hooray!

I've been eating these things like mad.  I've eaten them with butter and jam, with just butter, with peanut butter, as a breakfast sandwich.  I refuse to give any of them away.  CA is lucky I gave him any because this is one bread I want to eat.

There are a few more breads left to make but so far these are my absolute favorite from the bread chapter.  I'm so glad that I got to make these because I think it's just the lift I needed to get through the rest of the breads.

Enjoy!
Julie