Sourdough English muffins – so much easier and tasty than I thought they would be!

Last week, I explored sourdough cheese crackers. The week before, though, I tried English muffins. I’d never made them before, with or without sourdough. It turns out they are incredibly easy to make and much tastier than store-bought.

To my surprise, English muffins are cooked on the stove top, not in the oven. I don’t know why I never realized this, but I didn’t. Muffins cook in just a few minutes, so even though the recipe I used made over two dozen, it really didn’t take too long. I was thrilled with the final product.

If you are familiar with sourdough at all, you probably recognize Bim ‘s Sourdough English Muffins. I modified the cooking a bit; Otherwise, the recipe is the same as published all over the internet.

As is normal in the rest of the world, ingredients are weighed, not measured. So that’s how I did it, and I haven’t converted the recipe. Weighing is actually a much more precise way to bake. 100 grams is always 100 grams, whereas, depending on how flour (for instance) is measured, a cup might weigh 85 grams or maybe 110 grams. That could change proportions in a recipe quite a bit.

Use a Scale

I bought a beautiful Salter scale over twenty years ago, and it has come in handy for measuring ingredients now. By the way, if you even measure out meat, say 8 oz, you might be surprised at how small it looks. We Americans eat portions way too large most of the time. Anyway, back to measuring grams. Although I am pretty familiar with the metric system, I’ve never weighed for baking. Therefore, I was unsure of what to expect with ratios of baking ingredients, or even how big a bowl to use.

Put your container on the scale, zero it out (like the bowl weighs nothing), then add the flour, oil, or whatever. It’s a new way of thinking about baking, but I like the precision of measuring. Less room for error this way.

English muffins are made of the same components as bread: flour, milk (or water), honey (or sugar), salt, eggs, and sourdough starter. That’s it.

Stretch and Fold the Dough

Everything just gets mixed together and rests in a greased bowl. Rather than kneading, as would be the case with a yeast bread, sourdough is stretched and folded. My Google AI search described it this way:
“To stretch and fold sourdough dough, gently wet your hands, grab one side of the dough, stretch it up, and fold it over the center, then rotate the bowl and repeat for all four sides, strengthening the gluten and developing the dough’s structure. ” In English: Just fold the dough over itself a few times every 30 minutes for a couple of hours. It helps strengthen the gluten so the dough will rise.

Bim’s method does call for setting the dough in the refrigerator overnight, which I did. This “cold retard” helps develop flavor. I have also made them without the cold retard (the refrigerate overnight part), and just gone on to form and bake the same day. I did not find a big difference.

Get the scale out again as pieces of dough are weighed to keep them all a consistent size, which also means consistent baking. Dough is shaped into a ball, flattened, and then left to rise a couple hours on the counter prior to “baking” in a cast iron skillet.

I used a diffuser on my gas burner to create a consistent heat for the skillet without getting it too hot. The muffins should turn out nicely browned and cooked through, but not burned. Bim’s original recipe called for putting the muffins in a 375°F oven and baking for 4 minutes. I discovered that the muffins were fully cooked with slow baking on the stove top, so I skipped the oven part.

A little cornmeal in the skillet makes them look like the ones from the market. And adds a bit of texture.

I can’t even describe how good these are. Full of flavor, not at all bland. Maybe not all the “nooks and crannies” of store-bought, but really good split and toasted.

It made so many that I divided the batch into freezer bags of six muffins. I just take a bag out of the freezer, let it thaw in the bag on the counter, and put it in the bread box for the week.

If you are not familiar with sourdough starter, here’s a recipe to get you going. Once you have a starter jar on the counter or in the refrigerator, a whole new world of baking opens up. It’s not a hugely tricky science project, as the process is often described. Sourdough is very forgiving, and it grows after being “fed” with some form of flour and water. It gets bubbly and smells yeasty. It’s nature’s own leavening agent. Baking bread will take some practice, and these English muffins are a perfect way to start.