Nooks and crannies. These three words became my mantra as I set out to bake one of my all-time favorite breakfast staples from scratch. Afterall, it’s an English muffin’s series of nooks and crannies that really sets it apart from the other breads in the breakfast lineup. If I was going to replicate anything close to my childhood favorite Thomas’, I was going to have to ensure the development of enough peaks and valleys to adequately support my preferred topping of butter and a little of my mom’s homemade strawberry jam.]]>Ingredients
- 12 grams active dry yeast (a little less than the contents of two 1/4-ounce packets)
- 1/4 cup lukewarm water
- 1 3/4 cups buttermilk
- 4 cups bread flour
- 1/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons kosher salt
- 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
- Nonstick vegetable oil spray
- Cornmeal as needed
Method
Step 1
Make the dough: Combine the yeast and warm water in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook attachment. Stir until the yeast has been sufficiently dissolved.
Step 2
Warm the buttermilk in a small pan over low heat or microwave until it is just lukewarm and no longer cold from the refrigerator. Stir the buttermilk into the yeast/water mixture.
Step 3
Add the flour, sugar and kosher salt to the wet ingredients in the bowl, turn the mixer on to medium-low speed and process just until a shaggy, loose dough comes together, about 3 to 4 minutes.
Step 4
With the mixer still running, add the room-temperature butter into the bowl one tablespoon at a time until each is almost fully incorporated. Knead the dough on medium-low speed for 7-8 minutes, or until it is tacky but no longer sticky and holds it’s shape. The dough will never fully collect from the side of the bowl, but will begin to slowly climb up the hook attachment.
Step 5
Lightly spray a large mixing bowl with vegetable oil and scrape the dough from the mixer into it. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and allow it to rest and expand for about 1 hour.
Step 6
After the dough has risen, place the bowl into the refrigerator for 30 minutes to 1 hour to chill, thus making the dough easier to handle.
Step 7
Shape the muffins: Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper and evenly scatter on a 1/4-inch thick layer of cornmeal. Set aside.
Step 8
Scatter your work surface with a very fine dusting of flour and lightly flour your hands as well. Turn the dough out onto the work surface and knead it a few times to deflate it. Shape it into a fat, smoothish log.
Step 9
Pinch off a clump of dough slightly larger than a golf ball (about 40-50 grams if you have a kitchen scale) and lightly roll the piece of dough into a neat ball, applying as little pressure as possible. As you shape each ball, transfer the balls of dough, one by one, to the cornmeal-lined baking sheet, then pat it down gently to adhere some of the cornmeal.
Step 10
Grab the ball very gently by it’s sides and flip it over, gently adhering cornmeal to the other side. Leave about an inch of space between each future muffin to allow for rise as they may need. From here you can proceed with the recipe directly or refrigerate the baking sheet, wrapped in plastic wrap for up to three days.
Step 11
Griddle-bake the muffins: Preheat the oven to 250°. Warm a cast-iron skillet or griddle over very low heat for 5 minutes. Sprinkle the skillet with a light, even layer of cornmeal.
Step 12
Grab one of the proofed muffins by it’s uncornmealed sides and dust off any excess cornmeal clinging to their tops and bottoms. Working in batches, transfer the muffins to the griddle. Griddle-bake the muffins very slowly, allowing a full 4-5 minutes or until their tops are slightly puffed up. Using an offset spatula, carefully flip each muffin and allow to griddle-bake on their other side for another 4-5 minutes. You should notice the muffins beginning to form a noticeable skin. Flip them again and cook for another 5-6 minutes and then flip them again. This may seem tedious and unnecessary, but this process aids in the development of a light-as-air interior. At this point you can slightly bump up the heat and gently toast their tops and bottoms, flipping every 2-3 minutes or until they are patchy brown and uniformly golden.
Step 13
Place the muffins on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and bake them in the oven for 10-12 minutes to finish cooking. Remove from the oven and let them cool on the baking sheet until cooled to room temperature.
Step 14
To Serve: Using a fork, puncture an equator of tiny holes around the middle of each muffin and then pry apart the two halves.
Warm 2 tablespoons of the butter in large, nonstick skillet over low heat. Rub the inside of a 3-inch ring mold or cookie cutter with some butter or spray liberally with nonstick cooking spray. Repeat with the remaining molds and set them inside of the skillet to heat up slightly.]]>
To me, there’s no item in the pastry case sexier than the sticky bun. Cloaked in a caramel and studded with candied pecans, the cinnamon bun seems downright dowdy when compared with these breakfast beauties. Like I said in my post for Ham and Cheese Breakfast Sandwiches, I’m not big on sweet starts to my morning. But there is something I find irresistible about the chewy-crisp texture and sweet cinnamon aroma of a good sticky bun. And man are these things sweet!]]>
It may not be in my best interest to admit this, but here goes nothing: grilling chicken scares me. It’s just too easy to get wrong. Black, cremated skin on the outside with an interior so pink that just looking at it might give you salmonella. Or worse, well-cooked flesh with skin so flabby that it can be removed in a single piece. I think this is why I am especially in awe of Vietnamese chefs. I’m not exactly sure how they do it, but somehow they’re able to keep their grilled chicken juicy and moist inside, but with a crisp exterior reminiscent of deep-fried chicken skin. While I’ve yet to master this elusive technique, with this fairly simple preparation the delicious results were worth the potential for failure.]]>
I first experienced these biscuits on a visit home for dinner with my parents. My mom had just come across the recipe in a New York Times article about buttermilk and thought they might make a good addition to the dinner she was preparing. I’m sure whatever she made that night was delicious, but all I can really remember from that meal were the biscuits.]]>
Like roast beef, I’ll sometime make meatloaf just for the sandwiches. Funny, considering I wouldn’t touch them as a kid. I’m not sure if it was a texture thing or the idea of eating a ‘loaf’ in between two pieces of bread that threw me off, but whatever it was, I made sure they never ended up in my lunch bag. These days, however, leftover meatloaf is a godsend and something that rarely lasts more than a day in our fridge. You see, as good as meatloaf is straight from the oven, something magical seems to take place after an overnight rest in the cold. Not only do the savory flavors concentrate, but the consistency of the loaf changes as well, firming up a bit for easy sandwich slicing. Served warm or cold, a good meatloaf sandwich seems to hit all the right notes. You don’t need a recipe for a meatloaf sandwich, just the inspiration to make one.]]>
If you are looking for a jalapeño popper that looks like this, then sadly, this recipe is not for you. If, however, you are a popper purist looking for the authentic, crispy-fried variety, then you have come to the right place.
I’ve been looking for a good jalapeño popper recipe for some time now, and, after several failed attempts to find anything I could truly be proud of, I’ve finally cobbled together a version that lives up to the high bar set by frozen versions sold in bars around the country. I tried everything: versions with fresh jalapeños, versions with cream cheese, fine breadcrumbs and egg batters. These same iterations, were either raw, greasy or simply exploded in the frying oil. My winning version utilizes a combination of quality pickled jalapenos, a combo of cheddar and jack cheese, hot sauce and a buttermilk/panko batter. Served alongside some buttermilk dip, and you have a appetizer that has few equals in the fabulous world of fried food.]]>
I’m sure they wouldn’t like to admit it, but even some of the world’s most accomplished home cooks struggle when attempting to roast the perfect chicken. The fact is it’s far easier to make a roasted chicken look good than it is to make it taste good. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down to enjoy what I believed to be a perfectly roasted chicken — the quintessential golden brown bird flecked with black pepper and fragrant herbs — only to cut into the thing and find it bone dry or worse, still raw at the bone. Or, and this is perhaps worst of all, a combination of both, so that you end up hacking it up and destroying the only thing it had going for it: its good looks.]]>
As I pointed out in my recipe for the B.E.L.T., canned tuna has long had a negative stigma connected to it. This was not the case growing up in my family where I was routinely fed tuna melts, tuna salad and one of my all-time childhood favorites, tuna noodle casserole.]]>
Thai food for a while before a friend of mine insisted that we order Nua Yang Nam Tok, or Waterfall Beef Salad as a starter. While I’d had American beef salads before – usually romaine lettuces topped with freshly grilled strip steak – I had never come across one in which nearly the entire “salad” was the beef. Having already familiarized myself with the typical (and sometimes boring) Thai staples of Pad Thai and Chicken Satay, this dish caught me by surprise with its intensely refreshing impact on the palate. Its been years now since I first experienced Thai beef salad, and there is seldom an occasion when I do not order this salty, sour, and fiery dish before a Thai feast.]]>