Home Made English Muffins!!

As I get older, I get more and more fussy about preservatives and chemicals in my food.  As a super busy person, however, with an average daily commute of ninety minutes, it's not always feasible to make everything from scratch.

Sometimes, you hit pay dirt, and find an easy recipe for something that you use a lot.  This past weekend, I got lucky (that sounds so BAD!).  I'm back on Weight Watchers, and one of my "go to" recipes is a mock egg mcmuffin...deli ham, scrambled egg whites, and low fat cheese on a low-calorie/high fiber english muffin.  I ran out of english muffins, and wondered if it was difficult to make them myself.

I started with my usual source...Pinterest, and found a recipe, but got a spam warning when I tried to open the link.   I decided to go to the site I used before becoming addicted to Pinterest, and found a recipe that looked good on allrecipes.com.

The recipe is for "Grandma's English Muffin Bread", and was posted by Stephanie K.  I wasn't really interested in creating a loaf of bread, but, a review by "smitty" stated that he or she tweaked the recipe a bit and made actual english muffins.  By combining the original recipe, and using smitty's adjustments, I ended up with REALLY, REALLY good English muffins.  The BEST part...you use a bread machine to work the dough!  I will never buy English muffins from the grocery store again. 

Stephanie K's "Grandma's English Muffin Bread" English Muffins 

Ingredients:

3 cups all-purpose flour

2 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast

1/2 T. white sugar

1 tsp. salt

1/8 tsp. baking powder

1 cup warm milk

1/4 cup water

cornmeal for dusting cookie sheet

Directions:

1.  Place ingredients in the bread machine pan in the order suggested by the manufacturer.  Select the dough cycle.

2.  Take dough out of bread machine at end of cycle.  Roll to 1/4 - 1/2 inch thick circle and cover with a warm, damp tea towel to let rise.  Let sit for 10 minutes.

3.  Cut 3 1/2 inch circles from dough.  "Free form" remaining scraps into similar sized circles, and place all on parchment lined cookie sheets, sprinkled with corn meal.

4.  Place in oven, with temperature set at "warm", for 30 minutes to continue rising process.

5.  Turn oven temperature to 350 degrees.  Bake for 8 minutes, then turn and bake an additional 8 minutes.

6.  Cool on wire rack.

Makes 18-20 muffins.

Not very difficult, and crunchy on the outside, with lots of nooks and crannies inside.  I will DEFINITELY be adding this recipe to my "frequently made" file!!!

Here's hoping YOU found a great new recipe recently too!!!