I absolutely love English muffins...give me an English muffin and a poached egg for breakfast and I am one happy gal!
What I don't like about English muffins is the cost. A package of 6 Thomas' is about $3.50, although you can often find them on a BOGO sale.
I happened upon this recipe the other day and I thought I would give them a try. I'm glad that I did, because I ended up with 20 English muffins for a grand total of $1.80!
Whenever I try a recipe for the first time, I always make it as written...I don't like to get in to tweaking it until I've tried it as intended. The muffins were delicious, but they had more of a "yeast biscuit" texture....there were a few tweaks that I intend to try for the next time:
1. Some of the best recipes that I have call for proofing the yeast (when you soak it in the water for 10 minutes) with the sugar. Rather than dissolving the sugar in the warmed milk, I think I will try dissolving the sugar in the warm water and then adding the yeast to the water.
2. I rarely do this, but I actually pulled out a ruler to ensure that I was rolling the dough out to ½". The next time I will roll out to ⅜" or even ¼". Rolling out to ½" made for a slightly thicker English muffin than I am used to.
3. I'm not a big fan of shortening (even though I use the trans-fat-free version). The next time I think I will try it with butter and see how it turns out.
4. The muffins take a total of 20 minutes to cook and I had to do them in 2 batches. The second batch had an extra 20 minutes to rise and had more of the "holes" that are the hallmark of English muffins.
But the bottom line? This was a VERY easy recipe that was less than ½ the price of buying them in the store. Give it a try!
