Crumpets - With or Without Rings!

hello good people of the girl grids I'm mr. spork Andy's our mr. sparks hands I've been making a lot of crumpets lately the back story here is that years ago I lived in a place where just about every morning I walk to have to shop this whole fresh crumpet hot off their griddle you get a morning noon lunch teatime whenever you wanted one you'd take the beautiful little cakes they have lots of little holes on the top of them put some butter in there it melt into the holes a little bit of extra marmalade on top it was pure heaven lovely little things but that's been a while so I got the urge for a company other day went and pulled out the recipe that I learned from that very same shop and decided to tweak it and show it to you guys here today the idea behind a crumpet if you've never had one before I know in North America the griddle cake of choice is the instant gratification pancake and they are lovely right out of the pan but the staying power of a pancake isn't very good in other words if you've ever tried to reheat a pancake on the next day it's not a pleasant affair with crumpets where the clever anglo-saxons invented them the references go back to the 1300s but I suspect a batter with yeast put on a hot rock was done years and years and years earlier the idea is that the yeast in the mix gives them some more durability and some staying power so when you go and take an extra hour on a real easy weekend morning to make crumpets you make the whole batch a few of them warm if you can avoid eating all of them and you put the rest into a plastic bag and for the rest of the week all you need to do is take one pop it in the toaster to refresh it start making your cup of tea and before the tea is ready you're out the door with a warm crumpet wonderful things easy to do and everybody should make a batch of these if you've never tried them before the first thing that stops people from making crumpets actually is this concept that you have to have a ring and while a ring is traditional you put it on the crumpet stays restrained in there and it rises more you get a taller crumpet that way you don't absolutely have to have the Rings although I quite like using them I tried with this metal ring and metal rings are rather traditional but quite honestly this thing gets insanely hot just ask my scorched fingers so while I started using were these silicon rings if you need to find these go up to my website I've got some links for shopping there but generally called egg rings when you go hunting for them online why everybody has an obsession with perfectly around breakfast food I don't know but they work really well and in fact I think in my test the silicon ring released better than the metal ring what to do is you take an oil finger and you go around with the edge and just grease it lightly and it will release perfectly well you do that on the metal rings as well but even side-by-side with the same amount of lubrication shall we say the memory didn't release as well so I recommend the silicon ones if you get the champ four ingredients here somebody commented on one of my videos of the day that they couldn't tell what the white powder reserves its proper versatile for you guys I went ahead and put labels on it and even put them in different shape containers how handy is that anyway what you need for this recipe is you're going to need some baking soda some meat that's the fast-acting rather dry use that I'm using here a little bit of ordinary salt and ordinary sugar you're going to need some more milk and I'll explain that in a little bit you're going to need some hot water and you need some all-purpose flour now for those of you that regularly watch and read my website you'll know that up here in Canada we use hard Canadian wheat so our flour has ever so slightly more protein compared to other places in the world what you might need to do with your local supply and do try it with your own supply first before you worry about it but what you might need to do if you're not getting the structure that you really like substitute out maybe 20 or 30 percent all-purpose for strong flour or what's called bread flour though the higher protein higher gluten content flowers will give you a little bit more structure that's the list I'm gonna clear the decks a bit and we'll get started there are four sausage different historical interpretations of this idea of a hot risen griddle cake the term pikelet gets thrown around a lot in anglo-saxon circles for something that's very similar and the good people of Scotland call something a crumpet but there's a little bit closer to a pancake a little bit thinner and cooked in a little bit different way the term crumpet itself is actually a leftover from the Welsh language and as lovely as the people of Wales might be I can't make heads or tails of their language so I'm leaving entomology to somebody else they're the inevitable comparison however is going to be between crumpets and English muffins and as far as I can tell the main difference is that crumpets use some kind of milk or dairy in the mix whereas English muffins are all water but what I'm going to do here is a mix so it really will be a carpet and one of the clever things that they do up here in Canada with the dairy industry despite being a little bit mad for price-fixing is that on all of our dairy we label the percentage of milk fat right so if you remember that regular milk is about three and a quarter percent and then cream comes at five and ten and 18% what you're aiming for in the mix here is a total of 300 milliliters and if you've only got regular milk around I'm going to say use 150 milites of hot water and 150 milliliters of regular milk but because I don't stock regular milk and I prefer cream I've got about a hundred milliliters of 10% cream here I've done this with 50 milliliters of heavy cream or 18% cream I should say and then the rest of my 300 milliliters is hot water now because we're working with yeast here we want to make sure that the temperature is something the yeast can stand if it's too hot then you're going to want to let it cool down this is a little bit cool so what I'm going to do is go into the microwave and get this up to around 115 hundred and 20 degrees before I put the East End after a quick stint in the microwave you can see that we are now at a much more yeast friendly temperature 118 degrees that'll be just about perfect for getting the most out of our yeast I've got my handy dandy one teaspoon measure for you following along at home and I'm going to go in with some sugar that's just ordinary white sugar and then I'm going to go in with my fast-acting yeast and I'm actually going to give it really healthy maybe one and a half teaspoons actually you probably even go to teaspoons if it's cold morning like it is here leave the salt in the soda out for later but we're going to give this a good whisk to get it blend as well and then already smell that yeast activating then we're going to cover it up so that extra things bugs and cat paws and things don't fall into it cover it up I'll be back in 10 minutes to show you what it looks like so after 10 minutes of fighting with the coffee maker or tea kettle in the background you can see the yeast is nice and happy and foaming you really do want to proceed with the recipe as soon as you see that foam appear because you want the yeast at its most active it's time to get the flour into the party and I always recommend getting your scale out because it worth it to be accurate and we're going to go in with 250 grams of our flour I'm 59 in just because that's what was out on the counter but don't worry if you don't have a sister 250 grams right there we're good to go and we're going to take our salt and go in with that this is just a not particularly full teaspoon of your salt I'll use good fine sea salt there and here's where you really want to work a little bit because what we're trying to do is again build the gluten just like most of baking so really give it a good workout I've switched from the whisk into my trusty old spur ttle there's a term for you food types to Google lookups Pirtle everybody's got a fertile they just don't know it's called that but what i'm doing here is again really working this I don't know if I'd call it a dough or a batter or somewhere in between but you really want to get it going to get that gluten started gluten structure started and I think that is probably pretty good right there just take my plastic spatula to clean the decks a little bit and what we want to do here is again cover the mix and we're going to let it rise now this is the longer rise we're going to go probably anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes depending on how warm it is in your kitchen I'll show you what it looks like in about that time after a little more than an hour where you either went back to sleep on a lazy weekend morning or you got really industrious and watch my orange marmalade video down below and have a batch of that coolant on the countertop the yeast have done their work how is that for a beautifully risen batter meat dough here is where you have to decide if you're going to use the rings or if you're going to go freeform either way will work the Rings will give you a taller crumpet but the freeform method where you just put it in the pan like a pancake will also give you that unique crumpet texture and taste the difference in the method is whether or not you use a lot of water or a little water this is 75 milliliters about 5 tablespoons whether or one-and-a-half tablespoons of water which is about 25 milliliters of water whichever one you choose the smaller amount of water for freeform or the larger amount of water for rings will work I'm going to use the ring today so into my water I'm going to take my baking soda bicarb soda for you folks in the UK I'm going to put in two good teaspoons there stir this up until it dissolves well and then into my batter right on top of that beautifully risen better we go and I get out my sperm again and I give it one more really good stir incorporate all that liquid I'm going to seem a little soupy at this point don't worry about that you might have to employ your plastic spatula to get it well incorporated while this final rise happens which will take about thirty minutes or so you want to go ahead and get your pan ready I use a nonstick pan you can use a regular pan with some nonstick spray or oil but curiously enough I get better results remember we're cooking at a pretty low temperature it's not as hot a pan as you would with say pancakes and so my nonstick seems to work perfectly well without any extra grease or butter you're going to want to play around with that in your own kitchen because the equipment's going to make the difference in the setup there but that needs just about 30 more minutes of rest and we'll be ready to fry these off I want to show you a couple of time lapses here so you can see how the top of the combat looks as it finishes cooking these is pretty straightforward and if there's any trick is to get the heat just right so the bottles don't get too brown before the rest is cooked through that might take sacrificing the first few experimenting until you get the perfect temperature I aim for a range crumpet to cook it about five minutes or a free-form thinner version in about a minute left and a five-minute timer is really useful here for my four inch rings I'm using about 80 milliliters of Adder that's about a third of a cup for you folks down in America but adjust your amount depending on your setup I even saw everybody's favorite Saudis chef Gordon Ramsay make a giant crumpet once using the entire bottom of a small pan like a six or seven inch pan which you could easily do too if you happen to have a giant coming for brunch as you can see the bubbles come to the top and then burst and has the perfect cooks those holes will begin to stick around instead of filling in the edges of course will dry out first with about a minute the rings will release and then you can pull them off if you don't own enough rings to cook the whole batch you'll probably want to kitchen elf on standby to take them over to the sink for a quick rinse so the next crumpet doesn't stick to any leftover crumpets smudge with the freeform it's just the same process as you can see but put a bit of the chosen measure a batter in the pan first let it set for just a few seconds five or six seconds and then put the rest of the measure on top so that the heat has a chance to kind of set the shape of the bottom a little bit better than that just such time or a little shorter to account for them being thinner after just a bit more work in the pan I got the rest of the crumpets cooked off the recipe will make anywhere from eight to ten but clever viewers will those be decidedly fewer than eight here because I have zero willpower and they just taste that good the bottoms turned out perfectly well when you get that temperature right that's what you're looking for the recipe is out on my blog if you want to go check it out the link up there in the corner will take you there the big debate in crumpet making circles is how do you finish cooking the crumpet at the very end in the last thirty seconds as you see in the time-lapse I do a quick 10-second flip from people steams them like I did on this one over here I put a lid over the pan and finish it cooking that way some people turn on the broiler but you can go read all about those options up there in the corner if you haven't already please do subscribe to the channel because that will keep you in all my updates on crumpets and orange marmalade and everything else and I do appreciate it I love when you guys like and thumbs up and insta snap chipper and all that other stuff you do online social media kind of befuddled me but I trust you got to do the right thing I've got my orange marmalade at the ready I've got some warm crumpets left over behind the scenes I'm going to go make some tea appreciate your watching as always we'll see you next time Cheers you

Channel: Mr. Spork's Hands

Views: 75,377

Keywords: crumpet, crumpets, tea, tea time, tea cakes, pikelet, pikelets, pancake, pancakes, griddle, bake, baking, breakfast, welsh, welsh cakes, bread, ring, ring mold, egg ring, food, cook, cooking, butter, marmalade, cake, cakes

Id: ktQhwkOfKy4

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2017