The EASIEST English Muffins EVER! You’ll Think They Are Store Bought!

hey everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead my name is Kevin well I love to bake on our homestead I probably do most of the baking on our homestead sarah is very good at it as well but it's something that I really enjoy so a lot of times it's just something that I do on my own today I'm going to teach you how to make something that for a long time I shied away from making because I thought they were super complicated and would take a really long time and that is English muffins English muffins are one of the things that we used to buy a lot before we became homesteaders and before we started raising our own food but we gave up buying those from the store because to be honest these days we just don't buy bread items at the store in the small town that we live by organic bread is super expensive and honestly the selection of it isn't very good so we just choose to make it all at home ourselves now in the past I've showed you how to make a couple different things that we've also given up from the store the first was homemade bagels if you haven't seen that video check it out the other was my homemade crunchy bread which you guys have said you've tried and has been fantastic that's a recipe that we love especially in the winter as the weather cools down and we have a lot of soup and things like that that crunchy bread goes great with it but English muffins are something that we love to have for breakfast we'd love to have egg sandwiches maybe even like an egg McMuffin but healthier at home so today I'm going to teach you how to make those I searched for a long time to find a recipe that I liked before I started making these and like I said I shied away from making them for quite a long time because most of the recipes that I found took several hours with different Rises and you had to bake them a certain way and it just seemed time consuming and to be honest we're so busy here on our farm that I don't plan things a whole day ahead or several days ahead sometimes not even a couple hours ahead and that's why this recipe is great it takes less than two hours to make an entire batch and they're so easy so let's get started alright so the first thing that we need to do is get some yeast proofing in our bowl now this is a very easy process all you need to do is take some warm water in this case we're using one and a quarter cups of warm water we're gonna put that in our Bowl and then we're gonna add a tablespoon of sugar now I'm using raw organic sugar but if all you have is a regular white sugar that's fine to use whatever you have so we're going to just mix the sugar into the water until it dissolves and basically what this is doing is just kind of creating some food for our yeast once all of that sugar is dissolved we're just going to take our yeast and just sprinkle it on top of the water this is one teaspoon of active dry yeast you can use any kind of yeast that you have on hand whether it's the fast yeast or the regular yeast it doesn't matter you just want to sprinkle it on top and then we're going to just cover that bowl with a towel and we're gonna let that rest for about ten minutes until it's kind of bubbly on top and then we'll be ready to start adding our ingredients into the water okay our timer just went off it's been just over ten minutes since we put the east and sugar in the warm water and you can see that it is starting to get a little bit bubbly that's exactly what you want it to look like so now to our yeast mixture mixture we're going to add a teaspoon of salt now I'm using pink Himalayan salt but again you can just use table salt if that's what you have or you can use sea salt whatever you have and then we're also going to add two tablespoons of oil I'm using sunflower oil you can use melted butter you can use olive oil whatever you want I like sunflower oil because it doesn't really add any taste and I like these to turn out just you know the way that they should I don't really like the taste of olive oil and things like this but that's preference and now we're just going to mix this around just a little bit just to get that salt and oil you know dispersed around and then we're gonna start adding our flour now I'm using organic all-purpose flour you can use regular all-purpose flour you can substitute some of it with whole wheat flour I don't make these with whole wheat flour because I just think they turn out better with the organic all-purpose flour and I also haven't tried the month any of the gluten-free flours but you know give it a try you know it may turn out just fine we're not a gluten-free family but if you are give it a try and see how they turn out so we're gonna start by adding about half of the flour this is 2 and 3/4 cups flour so we're just going to add about half of it to start and start mixing that around now if you want to do it in your mixer like I have a KitchenAid and I do a lot of my baking in the KitchenAid mixer for some reason with this recipe I just like to do it by hand so we're just gonna put our flour in and we're just going to work that around until it starts to form a dough if you need to add just a little bit more flour you can it's gonna be a fairly sticky dough but we're just gonna keep working it until it starts to form a dough ball and you can see that this is starting to come together into a dough ball now it's going to be a very soft dough and fairly sticky that's okay that's what you want again if you're using whole wheat flour it'll probably be a little bit heavier you know and stiffer than this but with the organic all-purpose flour it should look very similar to this and it's going to be fairly sticky you're going to add a little more flour when we start to knead it alright so now that our dough is pretty well mixed in our bowl we're going to put it out on do quite a bit of flour you can either do this on the counter or I have this board that I use for kneading dough what I need to when I need to knead it so I'm going to put that onto the board and again this is pretty sticky but there's quite a bit of flour on my board so I'm actually going to sprinkle a little more flour on top we're just gonna start kneading it and you can see even now it's it's still pretty sticky it's a very very thin fluffy dough and have some extra flour around because you're gonna need to add a little let it go we're going to knead this dough for about three or four minutes until it's you know very nice and soft and everything is incorporating it in well and just keep adding more flour if you need to you don't want to add so much that it becomes a really stiff dough but you don't want it to stick to your board or to your counter or whatever you're using so now whenever I do bread baking recipes on our channel here I get a lot of questions about my kneading board and what it is and where people can get one and well it's nothing special honestly I bought this board probably ten years ago and it's just a piece of oak plywood that I bought at Lowe's it's a I think three foot by three foot board and you don't want to put any kind of coating on it like like a cutting board you would like oil or something but for this I just leave it plain and the more you use it of the flour kind of works into it and you know it works really well I think it works much better than just doing it on the counter but sometimes even I if I'm doing something fast don't even get the board out I just do it on the counter so but that's all it is nothing that special just a piece of oak plywood all right so our dough is done being needed so now what we're going to do is we're going to take another ball I rubbed just a little bit of oil inside of here just so it doesn't stick and we're gonna put our dough ball down inside of the bowl now this is the only real long part of this entire process and it's just passive time but we're just going to cover it and we're gonna put it in a warm spot for one hour or until the dough doubles in size now tonight we're supposed to be getting our fur snow here in the Ozarks so we actually have our wood stove going today because it's pretty chilly out so I'm actually gonna set this on a shelf near our wood stove which is great it in the winter that's the perfect place to proof bread dough there we go that's the perfect spot right next to the wood stove nice little warm up here this is actually a cabinet that was made by my great-grandpa and a bowl for my grandma so it's kind of a nice family thing here so we're gonna leave that there we're gonna let that double in size and then we'll be back to finish them up in the kitchen all right it's been a little over an hour and our dough has definitely doubled in size you can see that it is really nice right now so what we're going to do is we're going to get ready to actually form it into the English muffins now what I'm going to do is kind of divide my board here in half if you don't have a board you can lay down a piece of parchment paper on your counter but what I'm going to do is take a little bit of cornflour and shake it out here on my board this is just to help it from sticking more than anything now because we grind our own this is really finely ground corn flour you probably can't buy that in the store but cornmeal is what you want so just get some cornmeal and all it does is stop it from sticking so when you buy English muffins in the store you can always tell that they have a little cornmeal on them that's what it's for on the other half of the board I'm going to put a little more just regular flour and then we're gonna take our dough and we're gonna get it out of this bowl onto the board and we're gonna need it just a couple times just to get some of that flour on the outside so it's not super sticky we're gonna kind of make it into a long thing here and now we're gonna cut this into 10 equal ish parts remember my saying here on the homestead doesn't have to be perfect it needs to be homestead perfect which means pretty good so we're gonna form that and we're gonna cut that into ten equal parts alright so we're gonna cut that in half now we're gonna try our best to just cut this into five fairly equal parts remember it doesn't need to be perfect if you want perfect go buy them at the store they have a machine that does it alright so once we have that cut into five equal parts we're going to kind of roll them into a little ball and then we're gonna put them over here on the corn meal and flatten it out I don't know to you know an inch half inch thick whatever we're going to just do that with all ten of them that we're about to cut and these are going to turn out so good by the time that you're done that you're actually going to be a little bit glad that they're not perfect because otherwise people would accuse you of just going to the store and buying them that's how good they're gonna be so you want them to look a little bit homemade all right so now that all of those are formed what we're gonna do is just take our towel one more time we're gonna cover these up and we're gonna let them sit for 20 minutes now during that time we need to get a pan heat it up on the stove so I'm gonna go grab my favorite pan that I like freezing for this and we'll get that heated up on the stove all right so I'm gonna use my biggest cast-iron pan but if you don't have cast iron that's okay you can use whatever kind of pan you have and you can do these in several batches now I can normally do eight or all 10 of these at once in this big pan but that's okay you can do them you know do five at a time or whatever we're gonna put this on the stove we're not going to turn it on quite yet because these need to sit for 20 minutes but in about 10 minutes I'm gonna turn this on and we're gonna let this heat up you want to do it on a very low heat now the main reason that I really like this recipe is because you do all of the cooking right here in the pan on the stove top you never actually put it in the oven other recipes that I've looked at first have you cook them a little bit in the pan then transfer them to a baking sheet then put them in the oven and it's a big time-consuming process but this recipe works out perfectly just on the stovetop so we're gonna let these wait until my timer here gets down to 10 minutes then I'm gonna turn this on to a low heat the key is you don't want to do this too hot you want it to be a nice low heat all right so we have just a couple minutes left before the English muffins are ready to start cooking I've had this pan on now for quite a while well since they got down to 10 minutes it's getting pretty warm so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take just a little bit more oil and I'm going to brush my pan with it now if you just have you know cooking spray and you want to use that that's fine we don't use your look cooking spray so I'm just going to brush it with a little bit of oil this is just some more sunflower oil and now we're gonna get ready to put our English muffins in here this is good and warmed up at this point but again it's on low heat the highest that I had it just to get it warming up was you know one notch above low but now it's really warmed up so we're gonna put our English muffins on all right so I'm gonna bring the English muffins over I'm gonna put them on the pan one at a time and I'm gonna try to get as many as I can on here now they are gonna puff up a little bit as I put them on all right so that's as many as I'm gonna get on this first batch now you want to cover these I don't have a lid for this big pan so what I actually use is my pizza pan and I just put that on top like that that just helps hold in some of the heat if you have a big pan that has a cover great that's even better but this works good for what I use so we're gonna put these on I'm gonna set a timer now for eight minutes I'm actually probably gonna check them a couple minutes before that just to make sure they're not getting too done but as soon as they're kind of golden brown on the bottom I'm gonna flip them over so we're gonna leave these just as they are for now until they get golden brown all right so we're down to two minutes I'm gonna check them and just see how they're doing you can see that they've definitely puffed up from what they were when we put them in there but let's take a look at one they're getting a little bit brown on the bottom but I'm gonna flip them back over I'm gonna leave them just like this for a few more minutes at least until the timer goes off now the more times that you make these the more you'll just kind of know when they're ready so it's kind of a guessing game the times that I'm giving you are just a starting point so just do your best to make sure that they're done but not too done all right the time we've gone off again now I did move the one out of the center over to the side just because on my pan most of the heat is right here in the center so now we're just going to flip all of these over I only use man I do better like that than I do with the spatula this is the one that was in the center and you can see it was getting more done than the rest we're gonna flip all of these over we're gonna cover it back up and we're gonna put them on for about another five minutes I'll check them after about three or four just to make sure but about five minutes total cover them back up we'll set our timer and we'll see where they're at in five minutes all right our timer is just about to go off let's see where these are at well you can definitely see that there are a lot more puffed up than they were when we first put them in and they are looking awesome now from here you just kind of go by how they feel and they will cook even a little more once they're out of the pan I think for right now I'm gonna leave these in for about another two minutes just because I feel like they need just a tiny bit more time so I'm gonna cover these back up for two more minutes and then we'll be ready to put the next batch in alright our timers going off again this time I think they're definitely gonna be done so I've actually got one of our cookie sheets here I'm gonna just start taking them off and you can see just how amazing these look now like I said they'll keep baking even for a little while after they're off the pan if you want to use a spatula that's fine it's a little bit hot but after you get used to it it's no big deal I've got just a couple more to do I'm gonna put those on we're gonna do them exactly the same way and then we'll see them all when they're all done [Music] all right these last three are done and they look awesome we're gonna take them off bring them over to our pan look at that all ten of them are done I really wish you guys could smell just how amazing these smell we're gonna let them cool for just a few minutes and then we'll cut one open and we'll see just how great they look on the inside all right so let them cool for about ten minutes let's take a look at one and see how they look now the real test of any English muffin is how they look when you break them apart from here if you want to you can definitely toast them or whatever or just go around them with a fork and let's open it up and see how it looks look at that perfect looks exactly the way in English muffinz should look I've got some of the homemade peach jam that Sarah made last fall I'm going to put that on there and see how it tastes perfect now nobody ever does a cooking video and says all that's terrible but I guarantee this isn't terrible this is exactly how an English muffin should be and you guys will absolutely love making this recipe well I hope you enjoyed learning how to make English muffins this is something that I wanted to learn for a really long time and I'll be honest I shied away from it but ever since I started making these our family has loved them I hope you guys will give this a try if you do post a picture on instagram and tag us on it so that we can see how awesome yours turned out as well if you're not a subscriber to our channel yet hit that subscribe button before you leave if you want to help support our channel the best way to do that is to share our videos share them with anybody that you think might enjoy our lifestyle you can live a life that you absolutely love without being caught up in the rat race you guys until next time thank you so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 389,295

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, homemade bread, no knead bread, no knead, how to bake bread, bread (food), bread recipe, how to make homemade bread, how to make bread, bread baking, easy bread recipe, how to, fresh bread, how to make no knead bread, homemade english muffins, english muffins, simple english muffins, english muffin recipe, fast english muffins

Id: tY0qlIt8s4M

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019