We'll be closing up shop at Joe Pastry world headquarters for the next week or so. Back on Monday the 14th, tan, rested and ready. Happy 4th to all!

Here we are, about to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of America's Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, and what am I making this week: English muffins. Clearly I have some sort of patriotism issue. That or I just love muffins. I couldn't even keep my mitts off this one long enough to snap a picture. Sorry about that.

I've had a weakness for English muffins all my life. The pity is I've bought almost all of them from the grocery store. To think, all the while I could have been making a far superior — and far cheaper — product myself! It's not as if they're even remotely difficult to make...about like pancakes. The only specialized equipment you need are rings, which are both cheap and easy to find. Here I'm using Alton Brown's recipe, which is likewise easy to find on the Food Network Web site, but you can use just about any one you wish (they're all pretty similar).

Begin by mixing your batter ingredients together à la the sponge method, or as specified in whichever recipe you happen to be using. If you're using instant yeast there's no reason to proof it separately as many classic (and some modern) recipes call for — just mix it all up together. The only odd feature of English muffin batter is that it requires a small amount of fat to be melted into the liquid, which is usually milk. Other than that it works pretty much like a wet bread dough. Mix all your ingredients together gently (no need to build up too much activated gluten here):

Allow your batter to sit for half an hour to an hour until it at least doubles in size, at which point it's ready to use. The Alton Brown procedure is curious in that it calls for adding only half the salt in the mixing stage, then stirring the rest in right before the batter is used. This has the effect of breaking most of the gas bubbles in the mixture — not bad if you like a tight-crumbed muffin, but I generally prefer a more open, hole-filled crumb. If you're of like mind, go ahead and add all the salt in the mixing stage of Mr. Brown's recipe. The only side effect is that it will take a full hour to rise. So then...scooping up a spoonful of your batter (this has been stirred according to the Brown recipe)...

...plop it right into your mold. Hey! How did I suddenly manage to switch spoons? Oh, I remember, this batter is very gooey and hard to pick up. That's the reason Mr. Brown uses an ice cream scoop. A metal spoon and a finger work just fine for me.

Let them cook on a 300-degree griddle for about five minutes, then get out your spatula...

...and flip those puppies over.

Cook for another five minutes until golden. That's it! A more flavorful and softer muffin you shall not find at the grocery store (in fact the word "muffin" comes from the Old French word moufflet which means "soft", did I mention that?). Can you use a skillet instead of a griddle if you want? Yes. However low heat is the trick to a well-made muffin. Being as thick as they are, they need time to "bake" all the way through before the outsides get too well done (remember you're going to toast these things later). As long as you keep the flame low, you'll do just fine.

As a final note, recipe writers (including Mr. Brown) love to advise that in place of buying rings for various culinary applications, you can simply "cut the bottoms off empty tuna cans". That trick hasn't worked since the 80's, since modern tuna cans have lipless, rounded bottoms. These make the cans easy to stack on store shelves, but render them impossible to cut with a conventional opener. So don't risk opening up an artery messing with jagged metal. If you don't want to bother with ordering rings, just plop the batter right on the griddle. The muffins won't be quite as round or tall, but they'll be every bit as good.

The most well-known and fanciful culinary application of the English muffin is of course Eggs Benedict. But where did this dish, which consists of poached eggs, ham (or bacon, or Canadian bacon) and Hollandaise sauce on an English muffin, come from? And where did it get its name? It is not, as many have asserted, named for Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary War general who plotted to surrender the American fort at West Point, New York, to the British. And that's a shame, because it would have been one of the all-time cleverest culinary jokes if it had been (like General Arnold, Eggs Benedict is English underneath).

There are at least two competing theories about the origin of Eggs Benedict, both having to do with prominent patrons of New York restaurants. Both are dated to around 1895, a time when English muffins were still quite popular, both in England and America. However there is strong evidence that the original foundation for Eggs Benedict was not an English muffin but rather toast. Despite the various claims by prominent New Yorkers to having invented the dish, Elizabeth David (English food historian extraordinaire and author of the seminal English Bread and Yeast Cookery) found what is probably the predecessor to Eggs Benedict in provincial French cuisine. It is a dish that consists of brandade (a purée of salt cod, potatoes and garlic) and poached eggs on toast, topped with a dollop of Hollandaise. Its name: œufs bénédictine.

The English muffin has the distinction of being the only savory bread we modern Americans eat that's cooked on a griddle. As I mentioned in a previous post, "griddling" is a style of bread cookery that's long been out of style in the Old World. Yet once upon a time British cuisine was chock-a-block with so-called "bakestone breads": oat cakes, barley cakes and other simple fare that people (especially in the north of England and in Scotland) ate when they didn't have access to either ovens or baking fuel. Here in America where fuel is abundant, bakestone breads never gained much of a following, with the possible exception of "johnny" cakes and other types of cornmeal-based pancakes. Precisely why English muffins have remained popular for so long despite the disappearance of griddle-based bakery is something of a mystery — at least to me. I guess we owe a debt of thanks to Mr. Thomas' marketing department.

The wife seems to be generating as much mail as I am with her muffin post. Here's a good one from reader and mother Jo-Lee:

Bravo Mrs. Pastry! With regards to the blog entry you wrote about kids and eating. My children (5 and 1) sound exactly the same as yours. I have thought about, and attempted, to sneak in "healthy" ingredients, but it usually backfires. I do much better when I eat vegetables on my own simply because I like them. I don't offer my son any and then he wonders what he is missing out on! He now absolutely loves sushi as well as most Mexican and Chinese food. It is just a matter of growing into taste I think.

Mrs. Pastry's response:

Dear Jo-Lee,

Thanks so much for your kind words. I never even thought about oohing and aahing over my own vegetables. (As Joe will tell you, I can't have dinner without a green veggie on my plate.) And I'm heartened to know that your son now likes a wider variety of foods. A friend of mine, an author of a great book called What Kindergarten Teachers Know, sent me the following information that might be of help to you as well:

"My suggestion for you: Have you tried Mollie Katzen's cookbooks for children? Our favorite is Salad People, though Pretend Soup is fun as well. (Other great books about feeding children -- though not cook books -- are by Ellyn Satter. I think her most recent is Your Child's Weight, Helping Without Harming, though don't be turned off by the title: the basic idea is that parents are responsible for providing their kids with healthy meals, but the kids are responsible for eating.)"

All the best,

Jo Pastry

Oh for the days when I still had comment fields. Should I just set up a phone call between you two? For what it's worth though, I have a thought or two on this issue (surprised?). Namely that it seems to me that as a society we've become obsessed with the particulars of diet over the broader notion of a "balanced diet". This is the impulse that's spawned books like Deceptively Delicious which assumes that inserting a few beneficial inputs every now and again into a child's diet is more important than teaching that child how to eat well. For a people who are supposedly thinking more and more "holistically" about eating, we've instead become obsessed with the minutiae of food. A few beneficial ingredients in an overall unbalanced diet are every bit as ineffectual as a few "bad" ingredients (i.e. a few trans fats or grams of HFCS) are in an overall balanced one. Our grandparents understood that all too well. How have we become so messed up in our thinking?

Today's New York Times food section includes a profile of Jeff Varasano, a former New Yorker whose obsession with reproducing real New York-style pizza has made him the number one authority on New York and/or Neapolitan pizza on the internet. If you've never been to his web site, it's worth a trip. It's got everything you need to know to convert your kitchen into a Manhattan-style pizza joint, provided you don't mind disabling the safety features of your electric oven so it can be turned up to a thousand degrees. I demurred from that, preferring instead to build my own brick oven. I'm not sure which project, in the end, has proven more dangerous.

In fact nobody in England has seen a muffin man — a real one — since before World War II, for the sad fact is that the thing we know in America as the "English Muffin" no longer exists in England. The original "tea muffin" from which the English muffin originated went out of fashion in Britain long ago. The hatted, bell-ringing merchants that once roamed the streets of London with flannel-draped baskets of hot muffins now only exist in children's rhymes and literature. Indeed as early as 1899 the mantle of muffin cookery was already being passed to the States, or so said Victorian-era cookbook writer Theodore Francis Garrett:

It has been claimed for the British baker that he alone can make a muffin; but it is [a thing] almost to be feared...the prestige has passed over to America, where muffins are made of various flours, and so light and digestible that it is a question if they are not rather an American dish.

Clearly there were quite a few former Brits making and enjoying "English" muffins at the time (though I suppose it's also possible what Mr. Garrett was referring to were the more modern American quick bread-like muffins). Of particular note, however, was one intrepid young baker by the name of Samuel Bath Thomas, who emigrated to America with his mother's muffin recipe in 1875. Some have argued that without him, the English muffin may well have vanished into the mists of time, leaving us forever at a loss as to what to put poached eggs and Canadian bacon on. Happily, Thomas prospered in America, and the company he founded eventually re-introduced the English muffin back to England. So far they have yet to catch on there though. I dunno, maybe the English don't eat brunch.

I've spent several days on American muffins, but while I'm on the subject, why not whip up a batch of the American muffin's English-style cousin? Click here:
www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_23595,00.html.

Pick...

...eat...

...repeat.

At least little Joan did until she all but blew up into a purple ball like Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka. You mean these things grow on trees? Nice to see that the local fruit orchards are managing to make a comeback after last year's disastrous frosts. The patch where we usually go produced a total of 3,000 pounds of blueberries last year, which is nothing. Joan ate that much in 50 minutes. With the rest of us working, we managed to pull about two gallons, which is enough for jam, a weekend 4th of July cobbler, and another batch of muffins. This variety is known as the BlueRay, it grows well in the Ohio Valley heat and offers a mix of sweetness and acidity that I prefer both for jam and baking.

Make that the bush. I may post lightly today. The sky is blue, it's 78 degrees and the word from the local blueberry orchard is there's a bumper crop of my favorite jam berry. Pack up the kids and the sun screen, we're headed to Indiana.

Allow me to introduce myself, I am Jo Pastry. I rarely appear on this site, and then mostly as the butt of one of my husband's snide remarks. However after reading yesterday's post on the history of the "health" muffin, I decided it was high time I put up a post of my own. Though I am not a regular baker, I have been making my share of muffins the last several months, most of them out of the book Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld.

However I haven't been especially happy about it. In fact I've been trying to figure out just what it is that bothers me about this new trend in feeding kids, i.e. hiding good-for-you ingredients in packages kids will find appealing (as Joe has I'm sure mentioned, we have two children, both girls, ages 4 and 1). This morning, as I set out to make a batch of Jessica's "Peanut Butter & Jelly Muffins", which feature carrots, it hit me. Cooking this way undermines my two main purposes in the kitchen: including the kids in the food preparation process and teaching them to like strange foods.

I’m no Joe Pastry, which means I am neither quick nor efficient in the kitchen, so when I take on a cooking project I like to make it a group effort. This is especially true when I make pancakes or muffins. Josephine always accompanies me, at least when she gets to be in charge of adding ingredients to the bowl and stirring the batter. However when she saw me measuring out the pureed carrots for our batch of deceptive PB & J muffins, she threw a fit. "Daddy doesn't put carrots in my muffins!" she complained. Kids, I thought to myself, they're a lot smarter than we think.

Of course when the muffins cooled, little Josephine barely touched hers, save for licking some of the jam off the top — but then she knew what was in them! Personally I thought the muffins tasted great (though I confess they did have the gumminess and weight of a too-healthy snack), so I froze the rest hoping that one day soon Josephine will forget about the carrots (fat chance), or maybe Joe will eat them for midnight snacks.

Much of my disappointment comes from the fact that I yearn for my children to become adventurous eaters. I confess I seethed with jealousy over last week's New York Times food section article “Scorpions for Breakfast and Snails for Dinner.” It was written by a fellow who lives in Beijing, where his children eat pickled turnips in nursery school. It was interesting, but in the end not very helpful. Mostly the author just bragged and wagged his finger: “My children eat anything. My 9-year-old daughter reaches for second helpings of spinach, and when we eat out I have to stop her brother, now 13, from showing off the weird things he’ll consume by ordering goat testicles.” Well goodie for you!

But in absence of moving to Beijing or force-feeding Josephine those darn Seinfeld carrot muffins, where do I go from here? What's a poor Kentuckian whose daughters love rainbow goldfish to do? I suppose just keep on cooking (and baking) in hopes the children will one day take an interest in things they don't see on TV or on a typical school menu. Eventually they’ll have to start liking a greater variety of foods (won't they?). For now though I'm giving up the deceptions, since I've come to see that healthy eating is more than a few spoonfuls of beet puree, which are only incidentally nutritious. Healthy eating is a habit that lasts a lifetime, and it's one that parents have a responsibility to teach.

It's tempting to blame modernity for the abomination that is the bran muffin. Dry as dirt (though nowhere near as tasty) bran muffins have been impossible to get away from since at least the late 70's. There's an artisan bake shop not two blocks from here that sells only one kind of muffin — one kind! — without some whole or alternative grain additive. Blasted hippies!

Unfortunately we can't blame the boomers, at least not completely, for the "health" muffin, since even the very earliest muffins were made from whole wheat, rye and — the miracle food of the age — Graham flour. It seems even a hundred years ago people viewed the morning muffin as a (mostly) painless way to kick start their digestive tracts.

The American-style muffin, as distinct from the English muffin, evolved around the time of the Second Industrial Revolution, which is to say the time when North Americans really got into the industrialization act (the second half of the 19th century). This was the golden age of American baking, when cast iron home stoves — complete with their own small ovens — rolled off American assembly lines. Well they didn't roll off exactly, they had to be carried...by like 18 guys, because those things were heavy. And then I guess now that I think about it the moving assembly line wasn't perfected in America until 1908. Other than that though, the phrase was apt.

Just how and when the American muffin diverged from the English muffin isn't known. However I will posit the following guess: because it was a lot faster and easier to make. The English muffin is made from a risen yeast batter that is "baked", really fried, in a small ring mold on a griddle. The American muffin, as demonstrated below, is made from a batter that is simply mixed together and baked in a mold. Start-to-finish, a collection of raw ingredients can be turned into hot ready-to-eat muffins in as little as 40 minutes. Plus chemical leavening, as long as it's been stored properly, is never-fail. The same cannot be said of either packaged yeast (at least in those days) or a home-made starter.

So then the American-style muffin was clearly convenient, since it allowed a home baker to throw a batch together and bake them up quick (very likely in the residual heat of the wood-fired stove while dinner was being prepared). However it also allowed for improvisation in a way that the English muffin didn't. Just about anything can be added to American muffin batter without interfering with the rising ability of baking powder or soda. That feature has been rather abused, at least to my mind, since American bakers started gettin' jiggy with the ingredients around the 1920's and 30's. Prior to that point additions to American muffins were largely limited to things like raisins, dates and nuts (maybe bits of bacon or ham for a savory twist). Starting around 1940 fresh fruits like berries began to show up, after which point all hell broke loose: chocolate, carrots, cheese, squash. By the 1970's there were muffins sporting things like pineapple and Spam. Today we have everything from peanut butter fudge to spinach, rhubarb, fennel, shellfish, lemon-chive-pepper, bleu cheese and walnuts...you name it.

Just more American baking ingenuity? Or a good idea gone horribly wrong? You be the judge.

The muffin method has many virtues, chief among them that it's very fast and can be done — and is indeed better done — without the use of a machine. It's my belief that machine mixing is the chief cause of the inferior muffins mass producers churn out, and why so many bigger bakeries (when they don't use mixes) employ the creaming method, which results in cupcake-like muffins instead of the real thing. Here we have large bowl A, which contains our dry ingredients, thoroughly sifted and blended so as to evenly distribute the leavening (you can use a whisk or even a food processor if you want to get really obsessive).

Next we have medium bowl B, containing all my miscellaneous wet ingredients, including sugar, whisked together. Why is sugar considered a "wet" ingredient in the baking world? Because it dissolves so quickly in anything watery. Here I should emphasize that all your wet ingredients MUST be at room temperature. All of them. Got that? All. Of. Them. Room temperature. The lot.

Now then, spatula in hand, we apply bowl B to bowl A.

And begin to fold, gently, scraping from the bottom and flipping over the top...lightly. The trick here is to fold only as much as it takes to moisten all the dry ingredients and no more. For this double batch of muffins I folded for about 45 seconds, until there were no more large pockets of flour to be found.

Here you can see there are a few small areas of unmixed flour, right around the edges. This is the time to stop folding:

With the mix more or less blended, now's the time to add any other items to your muffin (or pancake or quick bread) batter, in this case blueberries. Fold them in only to the point they are evenly distributed, no more.

Fill your molds with batter and bake.

That was pretty darn easy, wasn't it? For an indication of how well you've mixed, pay attention to the behavior of your leftover batter as you wash out your bowl. If the muffin or quick bread batter simply dissolves in the faucet stream, you've got a superior product to look forward to. If it puts up a fight or leaves slick, stringy and/or rubbery deposits on your wash cloth or sponge, you'll want to ease up on elbow grease next time, killer.

How did I do on these? A near perfect muffin crumb, irregular holes with a few large ones (indicating a slightly uneven mix of leavening), but no "tunnels" caused by gluten formation. I think I'll put the kettle on.

There are certain cynics out there, most of them European pastry chefs and New York Times food writers, who claim that the blueberry muffin is the only real contribution the New World has made to the global (and when they say that they mean European) baking tradition. The entire idea is preposterous of course, since along with so-so blueberry muffins you can also find plenty of limp chocolate chip cookies and saggy brownies tucked into the ghetto sections of Parisian pastry cases. These of course are only the "greatest hits" of North American baking. The contributions of New World home bakers, being the most creative and prolific the world has ever seen, are legion. Layer cakes, open-topped fruit pies, quick breads and biscuits leap to mind. And then there's just about anything made with corn meal.

So then I suppose the real question is, given all that, why has the blueberry muffin of all things become the emblem of New World (and specifically American) baking? A large part of the answer lies in the fact that blueberry muffins are quick breads, which are very American sorts of devices. By that of course I mean that muffins are leavened with baking soda and/or powder, common ingredients in America due to — and I've written extensively on this before — the abundance of wood in North America. They're also mostly made by home bakers, which is again very New World since most sweet baking on the continent was done, and still is done, by professionals. The last part of the answer, I think, resides in the fact that blueberries are a New World fruit. Enjoyed by American Indians all along the Eastern seaboard for millennia before the settlers ever arrived, they have to this day a certain authentic caché on the continent.

But now that I think about it, the continental baking tradition doesn't really have anything quite like a muffin: a small, single-serving sweet cake that's baked in a mold. The closest analogous thing I can think of is the English muffin, the American muffin's direct ancestor. But more on that next week.

An anonymous email came in late last evening from someone claiming to be a representative of New Metro, manufacturer of the BeaterBlade, a product I expressed skepticism about in the below post, Scrape-O-Matic. I couldn't tell anything about the sender because the email originated from a commercial ISP (Time Warner), apparently from a server in San Diego. It went like so:

You mention in your blog that the scraper misses the bottom, but in fact it does scrape the dimple. There is no flour left in the bowl after using our product. Also, why don’t you ‘dig’ plastic? It’s lightweight, costs less than metal and is extremely strong. What the product offers is success…no matter your skill level…that all the ingredients will be mixed properly. We hope you get to try it one day to see its advantages.

That's good solid PR writing, so my guess is it's genuine (maybe a freelance publicist working from home?). If the scraper does scrape the dimple of the bowl out completely then I certainly stand corrected. To answer the question, the reason I don't trust plastic for a mixer implement is that it simply isn't as strong as metal. It would be more likely to snap off during use if a) the mixer motor was strong and b) the contents of the bowl put up much resistance.

If the BeaterBlade does everything New Metro claims it does than I'm sure it would be excellent for light duty jobs like small batches of cake or tea bread batter. I suppose I'm a born skeptic, but as this fellow/gal insinuated...I should try it before I criticize it.

Yesterday I left off talking about the differences between cakes and muffins. But why talk when I can show? Let's start with a small wedge of cake, cut cross-wise to reveal what's under the hood:

We have a few larger holes here, but notice how small and regular most of the rest of them are. Notice also the yellow color and satiny sheen you get from all those extra eggs. You can tell what this is going to feel like in your mouth just by looking at it, can't you? Very moist and tender and just a little bit crumbly. Now compare that to a muffin:

Here we see a very different thing. Lots of larger holes and a larger average hole size. Add to that a paler color and a crumb that could easily pass for sandwich bread if the brown sugar topping wasn't so obvious around the edges. There's no mistaking that this crumb is flour-heavy, and mixed in such a way that it left uneven pockets of leavening here and there. The good news is that there are no long "tunnels", a telltale sign of overmixing. Though it isn't cake, it's still a very fluffy and tender crumb, I can vouch for that fact myself (*burp*). A very well-mixed muffin.

"Overmixing" is a term that's generally applied to batters versus doughs. It means that the mixture has been agitated to the point that the gluten in the flour has been developed. Most often it's pancake batters and muffin batters (things made via the muffin method) that are said to be overmixed, though cookie and cake batters can be overmixed, so can biscuit doughs, though I always think of that as "over-kneading". Call me a hair-splitter, I won't deny it.

What are the telltale signs of overmixing? For virtually all types of baked goods, know an overmixed product by its tough texture, the result of stretchy, developed gluten. Where muffins are concerned, overly large and/or long holes, or "tunnels", are one of the telltale signs. The reason, because developed gluten networks trap and hold expanding steam. Where there is little developed gluten, much of the steam produced by a baking muffin escapes out the top and sides. In an overmixed muffin the steam has a much harder time escaping, and so forms bubbles. This, as you might expect, increases the volume of the muffin, which is why a small slightly domed, even flattish muffin is always to be preferred over one with a prominent, conical peak. For the visual thrill of such a dramatic rise is invariably paid for by a rubbery interior.

The Dictionary of American Regional English defines a muffin this way: "A small cake; a cupcake." And indeed most people, if asked on the street what a muffin most closely resembles, would probably say the same thing. Certainly there are a lot of cakey muffins out there (especially these days), but how accurate is that? Let's take the base components of this blueberry muffin recipe:

15 ounces flour
5 ounces butter
7 ounces sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups yogurt

...and compare them to the base components of Rose Levy Berenbaum's basic yellow butter cake (I've doubled the quantity for the purposes of comparison):

14 ounces flour
12 ounces butter
14 ounces sugar
8 eggs
1 1/3 cups sour cream

The flour weight is just about the same, but relative to that we can see that there's a whole lot of just about everything else: double or more of the butter and sugar, and quadruple the eggs.

What does it mean? Firstly, it means that a cake is a much more delicate, sweet and tender affair than a muffin. Relative to everything that a cake batter has to lift (lots of butter and sugar) it has very little flour. Cake makers compensate for the scarcity of wheat-based building material by employing a unique mixing method (the creaming method) that seeks to develop at least some of the gluten in the cake flour, then use eggs to make up the rest of the structure.

Muffins don't need all those eggs since there's plenty of flour in the mix (literally). The danger there, however, is that because of all that flour, gluten can develop and make the muffin tough. The solution to that problem, for muffin makers, is to employ a mixing method that agitates the ingredients as little as humanly possible: the muffin method. A well mixed muffin is one that's agitated only to the point that the ingredients are fully moistened. Even distribution of fat and leavening is somewhat beside the point, which is why muffins have a much more irregular crumb than a slice of cake. But more on that tomorrow.

While I'm on the subject of requests, I've had six or eight of them over as many months for muffins. Since muffins are just about my all-time favorite breakfast food, I think it's high time I blogged about them. The timing is good too, since blueberries are out here in Kentucky (or at least they are at the orchards across the river in Indiana), might as well make the first batch the all-American favorite.