English Muffins - A Sourdough Staple

so this is currently needing to be 18 in long and 54 wide that will yield 108 English muffins normally our standard dimensions are always 24x 45 with a bin of English muffin dough this one is a slightly modified bin of English muffin dough so it will take on a different shape but the rest of it will be exactly the same I flower the top so that my rolling pin can inter act smoothly and the bottom has to have enough flour that I can slide the dough if the dough is stuck to the bottom you can dust a little bit more flour I do like to draw on the table and find out the exact dimensions we're going to get it to 54 it's going to be here I always add a couple inches as a buffer you want to make sure there's a little bit of flower all that way so I'll draw a line in the sand or in the flower that is now I understand stand where my product has to end up at and I only need 18 here which is just a foot and a half so there's not a whole lot needing to be done on that side I'll give myself another buffer as well draw the Box my box is slightly larger than my final product and now the goal is to get it there with as gentle of an interaction with the dough and as smooth an interaction as possible as well as even so as I engaged my rolling pin I gave it a stretch at first and got what I could get from it I'm going to start in the middle push down and then out until the d starts to fight now I can go the other way so now I've stretched it both ways and the dough had some resistance so I'm going to go ahead and and go to the 18 in that I need in terms of width because the dough really isn't resisting me at all in that direction and by the time I do this I can return to lengthening again in order to keep it straight over time I can use a straight edge and basically reshape it into more of a rectangle what that ends up doing is creating some unevenness in the dough and then you can work through that unevenness on the next lengthening event and so the appropriate way to handle this is to not fight the dough really at all if you can help it if the dough is fighting with you and pulling back then you're probably overh handling it and you should layer some other activity in that can pass the time maybe cleaning a dish or checking on something else that you're doing folding a dough so the muffin sometimes are best handled with a little bit of rest right now this dough is pretty resistant at this level and it's not open to where I need it to be yet so I still have a fair amount of lengthening to do I've overdone it this way meaning it's exceeding 18 in in this direction so what I can do is knock it in and basically use that action to further lengthen so I probably just added a few inches I did so what I need is 54 in here's 48 49 50 51 52 I just need a little bit more length my guess is that the dough will allow me to go those couple inches after bumping it in now I have the length that I need and I already had the width 1T 6 in so I have a little bit of a buffer actually now let's just check and see how even it looks I'm going to look at it from this perspective I can bring that dough back through I can also finish by boxing off the edges corners are particularly challenging to create looking pretty good this way just bumping out those Corners Next Step I'm going to grab another tool this is a b cleta I'm going to open it up to 3 in gaps so that last opening is important to go to the foot and that way I know that they're even three in separations and the first thing I'll do is score this dough all the way down so very gentle in terms of how much pressure I'm applying all I'm trying to do is draw lines I'm not trying to cut the dough I'm going to have a little bit of scrap two three four five six rows which is what I wanted and 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 13 14 15 16 17 18 and there's only one muffin that isn't really Speck made up for an extra here that will be so I will get my 108 I'll have some scrap and we can talk about things you can do with English muffin scraps so my first step is just to carve around the the ones that I'm going to keep our English muffins are square and so giving this extra cut really helps sharpen that squared off edge here's my extra the rest of this line is going this way so there's my scrap dough we'll cut out the primary muffin dough now so you have to watch out with English muffins because if you cut this Dough too early after scoring you'll actually see what's beginning to occur here where there's a scrunching effect there's too much tension built up in in the dough and so these are significantly smaller than those and there's basically not much you can do to uh stop what's already occurred you could stop the rest of it from occurring by allowing this dough a little bit of time to relax so I'm not even going to go ahead and cut it the other direction cuz I don't want many muffins so instead again I have to find something else to do with my time in a production environment this is an easy time to res set objects do some dishes reset your station do a quick sweep of your area things that will make your life a lot more comfortable in the upcoming hour or two if you just take a few moments right now this is not a production context I'm instead going to take the opportunity to just show some improvised examples of things you can do with English muffin dough this dough is quite soft so I could cut it into strips and turn it into a different product we've made garlic knots from English muffin dough before so for that I would just tie some form of a knot and tray that up maybe top it with some garlic butter bake it you could do it with some uh herbs as well to bring some flavor and so there's not a whole lot of reason to allow this perfectly good dough to go to waste I personally prefer doing that kind of a thing than selling substandard English muffins that are one of our staple products and people expect them to come in a particular way at a particular quality range so I want to get that product right you can say okay this is going to be something we take on and by taking on this project we're going to end up saving X amounts of kilos of dough a week per month and creating another line of revenue for ourselves I went and did another task and allowed this dough to rest just to avoid that spring back effect and I'm still going to get a little bit of it but it should be improved now 10 minutes later usually the middles are the worst and so far this section of dough I'm cutting is nowhere near as severe as the dough that I started with from the other side this is also exaggerated in th this particular batch of muffins because of another thing that happened and that was that the shape was different from our typical muffin shape this process hasn't changed much since the days that we were making these start to finish by hand the next part of this process is to get some semolina flour and actually this is sort of characteristic of what you expect in a final muffin and then we'll put 24 on a tray it's pretty hard to get a perfect square when you're dealing with tension and forces but you're aiming for a square and it works out best in our typical format which is spreading the dough out 45 in by 24 that particular format is a pretty good change from the bin and requires pretty minimal dough handling and that's kind of the key to this product there's definitely a good and a bad amount of semolina you need enough semolina so that the muffins don't stick to the pan they kind of have a tendency of doing so but you don't want so much semolina that at the end all you're eating is semolina I think it's appropriate to have that texture the semolina is definitely a part of the final product I think sometimes we can be a little excessive and it's worth checking 6 by four these muffins don't really require a whole lot of proofing time to bake usually an hour is what we aim for but usually also don't have them out on the table quite as long since we were doing the conas so I'm still probably going to go get the oven ready and wait for the oven to be ready but then I'll be able to move on these and bake them sooner rather than later my top tray some ways is the most rectangular I'm more or less happy with all of these they all meet the thickness criteria they all look pretty uniform in that regard some are more rectangular some are more square but they will all end up at a comparable nice size with an acceptable amount of variance and the way that I achieved that was just being delicate on the table getting an even spread on the table relaxing the dough when the dough needed some relaxing and I could have done it even more I can learn from this one myself and just remind myself of the tensioning that happens when you stretch dough out so part of my process in baking more seldomly now is to still be getting better and to be reminded of sometimes simple lessons uh it doesn't matter if you've done this a million times before it doesn't mean that you'll get it perfect Perfection is really difficult I think we're aiming for it never quite getting it and in that way it's satisfying it's it's always something to to grasp for looks like my oven's not quite preheated it's a very particular setup for English muffins and it's really important to get it right the Bottom Stone can be heated that's not a problem but the top has to be off entirely on this oven and if you don't have that function on your oven you got to distribute the heat through the Bottom Stone as much as it allows I don't mind if there's some ambient heat on top but my top element the lights off and it's temping at about 300 that's appropriate the Bottom Stone has to reach 420 and I really don't want to load the muffins too early oddly what we've learned over time is that if you load onto a cold deck and there's a lot of bottom heat trying to heat up the deck it does change the bake significantly and actually sometimes you burn your product uh that way even though it seems counterintuitive that a lower in temperature would would burn product it's the fact that it's actively heating that seems to be the problem so we're going to have to give it a few more minutes to warm up and we can get going all right we're ready to bake these are really easy to bake all we got to do is slide them in and mimic the way a flat top would bake the Bottom Stone is hot but the top of the oven's not heating so most of the Heat's going to be coming from that Bottom Stone and we will still flip the muffins so we're going to flip them right now our standard here is after 12 to 15 minutes and what I look for is a little bit of color uh to be formed not not for them to be totally white uh so I'll set it for 13 cuz I think 12's going to be a little light and we'll check it in 13 what I need to do is just see if there's any kind of coloring on the bottom I don't need a ton cuz I am going to touch them up on this side again but I need enough that the flip is easy and so there should be at least a touch of color definitely have a few pronounced rectangles in the bunch but those can be matched together and they're still a nice size they're just a little longer and narrower see you got a little bit of touch of color and I'm not really causing any damage to these as I'm flipping them which is really what I'm most concerned over at this stage there's a little bit of stick in happening to the tray nothing I can't overcome but that's the effect with this amount of semolina and it kind of goes to show that any more semolina is really kind of excessive and begins to affect the baking process itself but it's really hard to gauge the color of the English muffins whether they have any color at all when there's just a ton of semolina caked on the tray so I like to keep it somewhat reasonable and now the whole idea is we're toasting both sides so we're going to toast this side it's going to get a really nice Circle because this side's now rounded so only a circle is going to touch the pan and then we'll get this bottom side again just for a little bit of color so I'm going to set this uh for 6 minutes and just judge the color after that our guidance is is more like eight for our team but it's nice when I'm here and I have a chance to just challenge that to see see what it's like after 6 all right so we're about 5 and 1/2 minutes into this round and what I'm interested in is to see that right there I'm getting a really pronounced Circle in the middle but not really on this side where I have very little to none so that tray merits just a little bit more time I'm going to rotate it and I don't want to overdo it so I'm going to have to be careful now these are also under from the perspective of circles I think the original 8 Minute assumption was correct so I'll add another 2 minutes this tray which I know is probably going to have the color I want and wait on the others until I flip this tray got enough color on all of them two missed out overall pretty happy these really could use another minute so I'll give them that and pretty nice color on most of these let's get the other tray out and just enough on this one I'll go three more minutes and then I'll pull that first batch and to give the leftmost tray a check it's been in the longest they're all just starting to get some color on the bottoms with the exception of those few in the middle which are at a decent completion point right now I'll give the other two trays just a couple minutes longer so nothing's burnt got nice nice color on top and just a touch of color on the bottom pretty happy with these they're going to be nice and fluffy which is what you want from muffins the ones baked this morning are arguably even better they're they're very uniform uh in their squares meaning they didn't really get the issue on the table of bouncing back they were shaped with the right Rhythm and timing two more minutes and we'll have the rest of those and I'll pop in the last tray which actually come to think of it I can go ahead and do I have have no steam coming in this oven so I have a slot I'll take it and I've got 2 minutes on the timer so that means that to my original 13 minutes that I have been going I just need to add another 11 minutes once this timer goes so these have a nice golden brown bottom as well have a little bit of a semolina dusting all part of the plan pretty happy with how these turned out my one bit of criticism to myself was the stretching on the table over tension the dough in One Direction so you got that shrinking effect and that's something that I have to take note of and adjust for next time so here I need to be able to flip these are far too delicate to flip just handling this it's it's not ready yet so rather than compete I'm going to set the timer here to 4 minutes I imagine we're ready for a flip yeah flipped really easily how it's supposed to now I need to toast the other end give it one last slip before the the finish of the bait set this timer for 8 minutes these are good to go so we have plenty of English muffins we'll be packaging those up and selling them for probably tomorrow morning after they cool down and have a chance to make it into packs of four given I really added to the count here with another 108 they may actually need to be redistributed and change facilities overnight

Channel: Proof Bread

Views: 18,135

Keywords: sourdough starter, sourdough bakery, microbakery, proof bread, proof bakery, sourdough, bread, baking, cooking, food, gourmet, artisan, homemade, handmade, handcrafted, flour, recipe, how to, kitchen, ingredients, cottage bakery, rustic, small business, entrepreneur

Id: ztc6z7-81BA

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024