Dumbo the Accidental Baker - #1: Simple English Muffins

I had always wanted to try my hands at baking bread. Long I had dreamed of the days when I no longer need to buy those mass-produced-bland-tasting-bread with who-knows-what-additives inside. But somehow, I never really, seriously, attempted to make a bread, until the events I related in the previous post.

My eldest sister had once tried to convince me to buy a fully-automatic bread machine from her (she is really into her Amway business), but I still preferred the idea of making breads with my own hands, so I declined. (Besides, she demonstrated making bread with the machine, and the loaf turned out to have one corner not properly mixed - you could still see the flour and sugar and what-not we added as the ingredients.)

Actually, after the events related in the previous post, what I was trying to make was muffin, not bread, but then I came across this unbelievably simple recipe for "Simple English Muffins", and my direction was all together altered from that point on.

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An English muffin is more bread-like, unlike the cake-like muffins (American muffins) that we normally think of when we use the word "muffin". And I like the recipe I found because it is the simplest recipe I had ever seen for baked good: everything is spelled out in terms of cups or tablespoon or teaspoon rather than the complicated units of pounds and ounces and grams and liters. The simplicity of the recipe makes it very easy to remember.

Nevertheless, the recipe being simple did not mean the process of making it was simple. For my first attempt, I made only half the amount stated in the recipe, in case it was not successful.

I rolled the ingredients into a lump of dough, as instructed, and waited eagerly for it to rise.

Five hours later, it remained this limp lump of dough. :-(


The dry yeast that I used in that batch was bought over a year ago, and I wasn't sure it was still active, so I went out a bought another bag - a huge bag; they ran out of the small sachet version - and made another dough with the new "instant dry yeast". The following picture shows how it looked like in the beginning:


Barely ten minutes later, it had already risen visibly.


About half and hour later, it had doubled in size. I was elated!


The recipe calls for some cornmeal for dusting, but I did not have any, so I took some instant Quaker oat, some muesli, and ground them together into fine powder using the blender.



I added dried fruits into the dough, then I divided it into six smaller pieces. Here, I believe I had made a mistake: I should have directly placed the small pieces onto the baking pan for the second proofing, but I let them proof in one pan and then transfer them to the other for baking. Big mistake...


As soon as I touched them, they "degassed", and went limp. So, after baking, the texture turned out to be denser than I had hoped.


Nevertheless, for the first attempt, I was quite happy with the result.



It tasted quite nice, actually, if you think of it as a cross between a bread and a cookie. :-p