By Andy Valencia
If your store-bought muffins have become flat little pucks of shrinkflation, bake them for yourself and get the classic muffin you remember, while saving some money.
Ingredients
Dry mix:
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 2 tsp salt
- 2¼ tsp active dry yeast
Mix dry ingredients together in large mixing bowl.
Wet mix:
- 1¾ cup whole milk
- ¼ cup water
- 1 tbsp butter
Pour wet ingredients together in sauce pan, with butter cut into chunks. Put on medium-low heat, stir until butter entirely melts into liquid. Pour wet mix gradually into dry mix, stirring. Beat at low speed for a couple minutes. Add:
- 1 egg
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
Beat at high speed for a couple more minutes. Add flour until mixture can be kneaded without sticking aggressively to your hands. Knead until smooth and stretchy. Don’t knead so long that it becomes tough!
Form a ball, put it back into mixing bowl, cover with damp dish towel, and put in oven set to “bread proof.” If your oven doesn’t do this, put it somewhere draft-free at room temperature or a little warmer. Let it rise until double in size, about an hour.
Punch down, form ball, and let rise again until double, about 45 minutes. In the meantime, put out a pair of cookie sheets dusted with corn meal. When the dough is ready, dump it out onto a floured surface and roll out to ½ inch thick. Use a 3¼ inch circular cutter to cut out each muffin – by eye with a knife is fine if you don’t have one. Put each muffin on the sheet, spaced at least ¼ inch apart (they’ll spread out a little bit during the final rise).
Dust each muffin top with some corn meal. Cover with plastic wrap. (Alas, the damp towel here would bond with the muffins.) Put back into the proving drawer and wait for them to double in height, about 45 minutes.
Heat up a griddle, or whatever you have with a large, flat surface (our flat cast-iron skillet works well). You want medium-low heat. Coat it lightly with oil or grease. Use your widest spatula and put the muffins onto the hot surface. Move them gently, as they’re very soft and want to collapse. It should take about 9 minutes per side; each will get brown and sound hollow when tapped.
Your oil/grease will dry off as you progress, so refresh as needed. It helps with non-stick, but also helps transfer heat into the muffin. After one muffin finishes both sides, move it to a cookie rack and put another uncooked one in its place. It’s an assembly line! Your muffins won’t have all raised at exactly the same rate, so take the tallest uncooked ones first.
After griddling, use a fork and split one open. If you find the outside is quite brown, but the inside is pretty soft, damp, or even still raw, preheat your oven to 325 degrees, and put them all in for about 20 minutes until baked through. Next time try for a lower skillet temperature and a slower brown on the muffins, that way the heat can bake them all the way through.
Let cool, fork split, toast, and enjoy.
