Have you ever wondered if you could make English muffins from scratch? Of course you can! And it is not as difficult as you might have thought. This basic English muffin recipe makes a dozen english muffins that can either be baked or fried in the morning and served warm or you can make them the night before and split and toast them in the morning. You can even make English muffin pizzas with the leftovers for lunch or dinner.

Yield: 12 English muffins

See Also

Breakfast Waffles

Apricot Breakfast Braids

Oatmeal Breakfast Rolls

Ingredients

• 1-1/4 cups milk, room temperature
• 2-1/4 tsp or 1 packet (1/4 oz) active dry yeast
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 cups all-purpose flour, about

• Prep Time: 120 minutes
• Cook Time: 20 minutes

• Total Time: 140 minutes

Preparation

1. In a medium bowl, mix milk and yeast. Stir in salt. Slowly add in flour until you have a soft dough that follows the spoon around the bowl. Turn dough out onto lightly floured surface and knead for 4 minutes, adding more flour as needed until the dough is soft and smooth to the touch. Place dough in medium greased bowl. Turn dough over in bowl so that the top is also lightly greased. Cover with clean cloth and let rise in warm, draft-free place for 1 hour or until doubled in size.
   
   

1. Punch down dough. Turn dough out onto lightly floured board and knead for 4 minutes or until the bubbles are out of the bread. Roll dough out on lightly floured board to about 1/2-inch thickness. Cut rounds with a 3-inch round cookie or biscuit cutter. Place rounds on lightly floured baking sheet and dust lightly with more flour. Let rise in warm, draft-free place for 30 minutes.
   
   
2. You can gently cook the English muffins on a greased griddle or frying pan for roughly 5 minutes on each side. Both sides should be golden brown when finished. You can also bake the English muffins in the oven, preheated to 400 degrees F, for 15 to 20 minutes.

Bread Baking Tips:

Keep yeast stored in an airtight container and in the refrigerator. Heat, moisture, and air kills the yeast and prevents bread dough from rising.

To keep bread soft, store in a plastic bag.

Store flour properly to keep it from spoiling.

Bread flour has a higher amount of gluten than all-purpose flour. This means that bread made with bread flour will rise higher than bread made with all-purpose flour. You can make your own bread flour by adding 1-1/2 teaspoons gluten to each cup of all-purpose flour you use in your bread recipe.

You can use any type of milk in this recipe: whole milk, skim, low fat, etc. Milk can also be replaced with water and nonfat dry milk.

Milk can be replaced with soy milk.

There is a milk to dry milk powder conversion table. Use it to figure out how much dry milk to add to the water when replacing the milk in the recipe.

Add a half cup of raisins or dried cranberries to the bread dough for extra sweetness.