I, like apparently most people, jumped on the sourdough train during quarantine. Our sourdough’s name is Bubbles. She gets her own blog post, so I won’t focus on her too much here.
The interesting thing about jumping on the sourdough train, is that the most rewarding element for me, came from the saddest part about sourdough; the discard.
You see so many comments when you’re prepping to make your sourdough starter about people not wanting to throw out their discard. It feels so wasteful and sad especially when you’re working to keep the thing alive. From another angle, the “waste due to ametuer bakers trying to make sourdough” actually became a debated issue during the first few months of everyone staying home.
Discard is a hot topic to say the least and I have to agree that I really struggled. I fought hard to not throw it away. For a while I made scallion pancakes, which were delicious, but got boring and didn’t seem worth the effort.
Then one day I found an entire webpage dedicated to the delicious possibilities sourdough discard provides. Thanks to King Arthur, I now had a creative outlet for that sludgy, smelly, liquid gold I was struggling not to trash once a week.
The first recipe I tried was biscuits. They needed work. The second, was for english muffins.
I’ve always enjoyed english muffins. They’re simple. Smaller than a bagel, but an even better holder for whatever I want to put on top of them. They make a great breakfast.
Had I ever thought of making them? No. Not ever. And I’ve made a dairy free, gluten free ice cream cake so I’ve thought of making a lot of stuff. English muffins just never seemed like something that needed to be made at home vs. bought at the store. I was very very wrong.
Homemade English muffins are everything.
My husband now expects a fresh batch every week and when we’re down under five the questions of when we’ll have more start to come up. I don’t blame him, they’re amazing. I look forward to them every morning and sometimes fall asleep thinking about them. Okay, partially I really like food, but these are GREAT.
Plus they’re simple depending on the time you have. You can make the dough and put it in the fridge to sour up for 24 hours or you can let them rise for an hour and a half if you’re looking to make them that day.
All in all the process will take you 3 hours to 27 hours depending on which method you choose, but only about 30 minutes to an hour of that will be active time. The recipe says that letting the dough chill over night will develop a more sour flavor, but I’ve made them both ways and haven’t noticed a significant difference.
Quick details:
Pearl hours: 30 minutes
Start to Finish: 3 hours or 27 hours depending on method
Difficulty: Easy - Medium
Project thoughts:
I make this recipe weekly. I’m sold and will hopefully be eating homemade english muffins for the rest of my life. If my husband has his way we certainly will!
Pearl Tips:
- Yogurt makes a great substitute for butter in baking. For this recipe the 4 tablespoons of butter is 408 calories. Instead we use 3 tablespoons of greek yogurt which comes in at around 32 calories.
- Watch your pans. When I first started making these I used your standard sauté pans and burned myself on the sides constantly when flipping the muffins. We got a griddle recently and it’s become a lot easier with a lot less burns
- English muffins freeze decently. They probably won’t last long enough to freeze, but if they do it’s not the end of the world.
Lessons learned:
- Jury is out on whether the dry milk powder does anything. I don’t own any so I've never made them with it, but I do use buttermilk powder. My family on the other hand doesn’t use any dairy, including milk powders, and theirs seemed to turn out fine as well. Let me know your thoughts if you try them and notice anything!
- Griddles = difficult temperature control. This is something I’m still learning and sometimes my muffins pay the price for it.
- These are addicting. They also work great for sandwiches and garlic bread, so english muffins for every meal!
How I'd do it differently next time:
- I’ve done so many variations on these it’s hard to say. I do want to try adding herbs like rosemary at some point.