English muffins

Without straining the gray matter too much, you might’ve guessed that I don’t haul five kids out to eat breakfast in restaurants very often. Leaving aside the expense of the endeavour, can you even imagine me getting them all ready to go BEFORE I’ve been sufficiently caffeinated? Or before they’ve actually eaten? Because my kids don’t budge out that door until they’ve consumed a few dozen eggs, half a pig and the amount of juice it takes an entire orchard to produce. And I’ve mentioned here before that cold cereal just doesn’t cut it around here. When we have it, we tear through an entire box at breakfast. On my continuing quest to provide home-cooked breakfasts for my kids we entered homemade English muffin territory a week or so ago. They were so delicious and so stinkin’ easy to make that we’ve been playing variations on the English muffin theme most days since.

The current favorite variation is one that bears a striking resemblance to a breakfast sandwich available at a restaurant chain that employs a clown to hawk its wares. My kids love these sandwiches; English muffin topped with fried eggs, Canadian bacon or smoked bacon, and sliced cheese. I eat mine with a superhuman quantity of hot sauce: My husband eats his plain. **This is extreme roll reversal and I can only explain it by saying that eggs belong with hot sauce. That is how it is and always shall be. He is missing out.

Not only do my kids love this breakfast, it seems to make them behave better. Perhaps its the uber-dose of protein with breakfast that keeps ‘em calm. Perhaps it’s the fact that they’re so full that chills them out. I don’t know what does it. I only know that I like it because it keeps them happy and comes together in a flash.

My father-in-law, a charming man, has a not-so-appetizing name for these sandwiches (having apparently produced more than his fair share of these for my husband and siblings while they were young): Tub-stoppers. Thus named, says my husband, “because they look like tub-stoppers.” Oh yes. That would be logical. I was hoping for something more obtuse. I have a call into Pappy right now hoping he’ll give me a more outlandish story to reprint here about how they procured their name.

In the meantime, I’ll pass along the recipe for Tub-Stoppers.

Tub-Stoppers

Scale this down if you need to do so. Once again, I’m writing for large families, but this recipe is easily and infinitely scalable.

Ingredients:

8 English muffins, preferably homemade, split
8 large eggs
8 slices Canadian bacon
8 slices cheese
butter for coating the griddle and muffin rings (if using for eggs)

Heat a large griddle over medium-high heat. Lay Canadian bacon slices on hot surface and cook until underside is lightly browned. Flip over and heat through, removing when second side is also lightly browned. Transfer to a piece of foil and cover until the rest of the sandwich components are done.

Butter the griddle and toast all English muffin halves, split side down. Remove to a plate and lightly cover with a paper towel.

Lower griddle heat to low-medium. If you want perfectly round eggs, butter the muffin rings and lay them on the griddle to preheat. Crack an egg into each ring (or directly on the griddle) and cover. Cook about 5 minutes or until cooked to desired doneness. If using a ring, shake the ring gently and remove.

To assemble the sandwiches, stack an egg, a piece of Canadian bacon and a slice of cheese on the toasted side of an English muffin half. Pour half a bottle of hot sauce on top (if desired) and top with another English muffin half. Serve hot, warm, or room temperature.

You could do worse than to serve this with a thick slice each of garden fresh tomato and red onion. Mmmmm.

How did we like this recipe?

This gets a solid 14 thumbs up out of 14 after one child removes the cheese from his sandwich, another removes his eggs, and a third removes everything but the Canadian bacon and adds blueberry jam. English muffin, blueberry jam and Canadian bacon? There’s no accounting for kids’ tastes.

In last Monday’s column for the Record-Eagle, I ran a recipe for Speed of Light English Muffins. Due to the constraints of space, I was unable to go on and on and on about what I do with those English muffins. Mercifully for my family, the unusal ‘beneficiaries’ of conversations about my culinary obsessions, I have this blog as an outlet.

English muffins have been one of my favorite bread forms since I can remember. I like them pure- split with a little butter-, toasted, as a sandwich base, loaded with marmalade or jam, holding a poached egg and some hollandaise sauce, and just about anything else you can think of to do with it. I’ve tried making English muffins many times over the years. They were all decent, but they lacked that je ne sais quois that the perfect English muffin has; the chewiness, the crust, the holes and ‘nooks and crannies’ to trap the melting butter and running warm jam.

A couple weeks ago, while gnoshing on bread from yet another successful experiment with the ‘Artisan Bread in Five Minutes’ dough, my husband tossed out an idea.

“Hey! You should make English muffins with this dough. I bet it’d be perfect,” quoth he. I have said before that my hubby is an Evil Genius, but it bears repeating. His mind works unlike others and he has had brilliant ideas before, but this one was BRILLIANT! (So brilliant that it requires all-caps and italics.)

I pulled out the muffin rings and the griddle and went to town (metaphorically- town’s pretty far. I just mean I went to work.) The resulting muffins rivalled the best I had ever eaten (starts with a ‘W’ ends with an ‘S’ and rhymes with Pull-For-Fans.) I was so excited about it that I wrote to Zoë François , one of the book’s co-authors, and requested her permission to print the recipe in my newspaper column as well as here on the blog. She was incredibly gracious and generous and granted the requested permission. Here’s the thing. I’m giving you one of their recipes, but by no means is that the only thing of value the book has to offer. I suggest you procure a copy. It is invaluable.

Master Recipe

*The recipe, as it appears here, has been condensed by cutting out the author’s commentary and paraphrasing. To read all of their instructions and comments, see “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day”.

6 cups lukewarm water
3 Tablespoons instant yeast
3 Tablespoons kosher salt
13 cups all-purpose flour

Mix water, yeast and salt together in the bowl of a large stand mixer or in a 10 quart food-safe container. Add flour and stir until the mixture is uniform. You don’t have to knead, but you want everything uniformly moist, without dry patches. The dough will be wet and will conform to the shape of its container.

Cover with a lid that fits well, but is not airtight and allow to rise at room temperature for about 2 hours or until the dough collapses back in on itself. You can now refrigerate the dough for up to two weeks, using the dough whenever you need it or you may use it immediately.

This is what the dough looks like midway through the process of making muffins. It ain’t perty, but it sure makes gorgeous bread.

And here’s what the muffins do inside the rings while cooking on the griddle. I tell you- don’t worry if it doesn’t fit perfectly, it’ll fill in the rings!

Speed of Light English Muffins

*For this recipe you will need English muffin or egg rings. If you do not have either of these, you can cut the bottom and top off of tuna cans and wash them thoroughly or use round, metal cookie or biscuit cutters. I did make a couple free-form, and they’re still good, but not as tall. In a pinch, though, it can be done. These are best prepared a couple hours or a day in advance so they can cool and the crumb can set up.

To make these you need:

Master Recipe Dough
Semolina Flour or cornmeal for sprinkling

Oil as many muffin rings as you plan on using. Preheat a griddle or frying pan to approximately 325F. Place rings on hot surface and sprinkle about a teaspoon of semolina flour in the bottom of each ring. Pull of scant ½ cup pieces of the dough with wet hands. If you’re having trouble determining what ½ a cup of wet dough is, use water to rinse a ½ cup measure and put the dough in the still wet measuring cup. It will slide right out! Gently stretch the dough to approximately the size and shape of your ring and carefully put it down on the semolina. Don’t fret if it’s not the exact size or shape. As it cooks, it will expand.

Sprinkle the tops of the muffins with another teaspoon of semolina flour and allow to cook until the bottom crust is a lovely brown color and is crisp. Remove rings using an oven mitt or tongs and flip the muffins over. Continue cooking until second side is also golden brown and delicious and crisp. Remove to a rack to cool.

When muffins are cool, use a fork to split them. If you’ve never split a muffin with a fork, don’t be afraid. It’s not tough. Just hold the muffin flat in the palm of your hand and slide the tines of a fork in parallel to the edge but halfway down on the side of the muffin. Remove tines, turn muffin partway and repeat until you’ve poked a line of holes around the center of the muffin. Use your fingers to gently pry apart the muffins. Opening them this way ensures the lovely butter trapping holes that we all want in our English muffins…

Splitting the muffins with a fork is the only way to get those ‘nooks and crannies’. If you use a knife it just won’t be the same!

This muffin is just screaming for cold butter and blueberry jam.

If you tune back in tomorrow I’ll show you the breakfast that has changed my boys’ lives. This makes everyone happy and propels our household into an alternate universe where kids do their chores quickly after breakfast, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ at the table, don’t fight with each other, and sing wonderful old-timey bluegrass songs in five part harmony with perfect pitch. **That last part was a momentary blip away from ‘honest’ on my moral compass. I realized that what I was saying sounded too good to be true, so I threw that in there, but the other stuff really does happen. Such is the power of the good breakfast.