English muffin's egg-ring eggsploits eggsposed!English Muffin, beloved of breakfasters everywhere, was found getting a freshly laid egg yesterday. A tip off was received by Jeanne and our canny reporters were on the case.
The only comment released was that the English Muffin wanted to be like her cousin MacMuffin, but she is English not Scottish! The lure of the perfectly formed fried egg laid on a toasted cheese base with a couple of rashers of bacon was too much for English Muffin to resist. We quite understand.
English Muffins
makes 9
300g of white stoneground unbleached flour
1/2 teaspoon of sugar
1 teaspoon of salt
1 1/2 teaspoons of yeast
1 tablespoon of shortening (or a mixture of shortening and butter, or all butter)
1/2 cup of buttermilk (why not make the butter to go with the muffins first and then use the resulting buttermilk!?)
polenta for sprinkling
Make a very soft dough with all the ingredients except the polenta. The dough should be very soft, tacky, but not really sticky.
Rise in an oiled bowl covered with plastic wrap for an hour or until doubled in size.
Prepare a proofing pan by lining a baking sheet with non stick paper, spraying with oil and sprinkling with polenta.
Divide into 9 pieces, shape into balls and place at least 2 inches apart in the proofing pan. Spray with oil, sprinkle with polenta, cover in plastic again and leave to double in size, about an hour.
Preheat a heavy pan to medium and the oven to 180°C.
Spray or brush the pan with oil and gently lift the risen muffin dough balls with a spatular into the pan, only as many at a time as fit comfortably leaving enough room to turn them. Cook each side for about 4 minutes then put in the oven for 4 minutes.
Leave to rest for 30 minutes before eating.
Incidently, the correct way to open an english muffin is to push the tines of a fork into the circumfrance all the way round then pull the two halves apart with your hands!
7 comments:
Oh YUM! That looks amazing (and a lot better than the "Scottish" version!!). Lol about your tabloid article as well, and your eggstraordinary collection of puns :-)
Eeewwww!! Another revolting display of soft yolk. ;-) Your English muffins look great though! When it gets a little cooler in our kitchen, I must try them.
-Elizabeth
Thanks, Jeanne it was fun!
Ejm - just the thing the make on a cool autumn day I think.
Definitely will be making these, Emma. I mentioned "English Muffin" to my husband and he asked if it wasn't cool enough in the kitchen now....
I've bookmarked the page but want to ask a question (or two) now for when it really is cool enough in the kitchen.
When you say "white stoneground unbleached flour", does it look like white flour or does it resemble whole wheat flour by having a few shards of bran floating around? I don't suppose you know the protein percent on the flour? (ie: is it about the same gluten content as allpurpose - around 12% or is it higher gluten as for bread flour - around 13.5%?)
-Elizabeth
I am not sure of the protein content of the flour, sorry. This is a page showing the flour : Unbleached Flour. It seems like good strong bread flour, makes good bread, not so good for cakes. It looks like slightly grey/brown flour, but does not have much bran through it. I think strong bread flour would be fine. I hope that helps! Let me know how it goes!
Rats. That link bounced me to the opening page of the shop and when I hit the links to flours, I couldn't find the Unbleached flour.
No matter though, if you say that it is a stronger flour good for bread making and if it has some bran shards, I'll do what I usually do for bread making and use mostly unbleached allpurpose and a little bit of all purpose whole wheat flours to add those few bran shards that mimic a stone ground flour.
It's getting close and warm again though so it will be a while before I will be making English muffins. I'll be sure to report when I make them though!
oh my god. that looks so good!!! drool
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