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Breakfast

English Muffins

English muffins are small, round breads made from a stiff batter with eggs, yeast, and butter, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

English Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until very light.

  2. Add salt, softened butter, sugar, warm milk, and the dissolved yeast.

  3. Stir in enough flour to make a stiff batter and beat thoroughly.

  4. Let the batter stand overnight in a cool place.

Rise and bake

  1. In the morning, beat the batter thoroughly again.

  2. Turn the batter into well-buttered muffin pans and let rise slowly for 1 hour.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for about 20 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the batter its stiff structure and holds the rise.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and help the batter hold air when beaten.
Yeast cake
Produces gas during the long rise, giving the muffins their airy, open crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor, and helps the muffins brown at the edges.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness, and feeds the yeast with warm liquid to start fermentation.

The step that matters

Overnight stand in a cool place. Slow fermentation at cool temperature develops flavor and gas gradually. Too warm a spot can over-ferment the yeast, leaving a sour taste and a collapsed batter.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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