How about some – English Crumpets!!

Moving from England to the U.S. brought with it a lot of adjustments.
The biggest, for me, was the food.
All the tried and trusted brands I was familiar with, for example,  Oxo cubes, Heinz soups, Bisto etc; were no more…unless I wanted to pay the exuberant prices at an import store that is.
And forget things like a good old ‘banger’ ‘pork pie’ ‘cornish pasty’ or ‘yorkshire pud’..they just don’t exist.
And don’t even get me started on what the Americans refer to as bacon 😉

All was not lost, over the years I’ve learned to find comparable products….and make my own.
( food, not brands 😉 )

But one of the things I found myself missing the most was the good old English crumpet!
Seriously…of all things.
So, last week after pricing them online
(and deciding $16 with shipping, for ONE pack was beyond ridiculous)
I figured I’d have a bash at making my own.

Off to good old Google I went…..
A bazillion recipes later, I stumbled upon one from Delia Smith.
Ahhhh, now that’s a name I recognized…I couldn’t possibly go wrong with her recipe.
It states it makes 12 crumpets!! Yay, 12 delicious buttery pieces of heaven.
I could hardly wait to get started!!
I rushed over to Amazon, placed an order for crumpet/muffin rings…selected free two day shipping.
And off to the store we went to get the ingredients.
(well the bread flour..the rest I had in)

Well, I followed the recipe to the T…every step did exactly what she said it would…until:
1 tablespoon of batter in each ring???
Are you serious?….I want to make crumpets, not pancakes.
So I used 3 tablespoons per ring.
I ended up with 8 crumpets….they were nice but maybe a tad too yeasty tasting, and still pretty thin even using 3 times the amount she suggested.

Crumpets using Delia Smith’s Recipe

Next I tried modifying the recipe a little…made it with a blend of half bread flour, half AP flour. Size wise, they were perfect…holey, as they should be…but now pretty blah tasting!

Modified Recipe 1

And sooo….Modification #2.
And you know what they say? Third time’s a charm!!

So I made a couple of adjustments to the recipe.
I ended up with 12 crumpets of a decent size and they tasted just how I remember them.
Not too bland…not too yeasty!

So…let’s get to it…

Ingredients

16oz (2 cups) Bread flour.
1/2 Pint (1 cup) Milk.
1/2 Pint (1 cup) Water.
1 teaspoon Sugar.
1 teaspoon Salt.
I x 7g packet of Active Dry Yeast.

Heat the milk and water together in a saucepan until hand hot.
Then pour into a bowl, add sugar and yeast and whisk a little to mix.
Cover with cling film and leave in a warm place for 10-15 minutes until the yeast activates and it gets a frothy head on it

Yeast Mixture

In the meantime, sift the flour and salt into a bowl.
When the yeast mixture is ready, pour it into a mixing bowl and give it a whisk.
Slowly add the flour, whisking after each addition to maintain a smooth batter.

Add flour to yeast mixture!

Now cover the batter mix, and leave in a warm place for approx One hour 30 minutes, until it has risen, fell and frothy.

Frothy Batter

Now comes the bit you’ve been waiting for…making Crumpets!!
I used a scrunched up piece of plastic wrap and a spread similar to ‘Can’t Believe its not Butter’ to grease both the crumpet rings and my heavy bottomed non stick ceramic frying pan.

grease the rings

Put the frying pan over a medium/low heat and arrange the crumpet rings in the middle.

heating the pan and rings

When the pan is heated (I checked by putting my hand over it until I could feel the warmth) ladle in some of the oooey gooey elasticky batter to approx half way up the rings.

batter

(I overfilled the first couple of rings as you can see in the photo)

Cook them slowly for about 8 to 10 minutes until the top has dried out and filled with holes.

Remove the rings (you can remove them when the outer part of the crumpet is dry) but be careful, they are HOT. I used a folded piece of kitchen towel to grab the ring.
They should slip out easy if you greased the rings well, if not, give them a little nudge with a knife.
Now flip the crumpets over, and cook for just a minute.

flip crumpets

Cool on a wire rack while you prepare for the next batch.
(I allowed the pan to cool slightly between batches so that the crumpets didn’t cook too fast on the bottoms.)
Clean the rings if necessary, or just re grease them well and re grease the frying pan.
And you are set for batch two!

Here’s my batch of perfect crumpets!
I know I said there was 12…but a couple may have disappeared already 😉

Finished Product!

If you are new to crumpets….let me warn you…you never eat them cold.
Cold crumpets are nothing short of YUK! EEEW! GROSS!
You pop them in the toaster, and serve them hot with lashings of butter.
Or if you prefer, a fruit spread or even honey.

I prefer butter…lots of butter 😉

That’s where that pesky Crumpet went to 😉