The English Muffin Experiment: Homemade vs. Store-Bought
This dispatch comes to us from serious eater Melinda McCamant, who lives in Portland, Oregon. She pointed out to us that English muffins are neither English nor muffins. An avid home baker with a taste for brioche and a budget for Wonder Bread, she's always interested in combining flour, yeast, and water into tasty new forms. Take it away, Melinda! —Erin
I confess—right around the time I reached thirty-something I developed a fondness for baking. I get an absurd pride from neglecting the store-bought in favor of the homemade. But every time I make something from scratch, I feel obligated to never buy it premade again.
This has considerably crimped the amount of breakfast sandwiches I can consume. On a recent Sunday morning when I got out of bed a full hour before my boyfriend to make English muffins, I began to wonder if it was worth it. Are my English muffins really worth the flour handprints on the back of my pajamas? Was I even saving money?
As I turned on the griddle to start my first batch I decided to perform an experiment: buy English muffins and compare them to my own. So, in fairness, I took some homemade English muffins from that Sunday batch and put them in the freezer until I thought they were at least as old as four kinds from the supermarket shelf: the generic kind at Fred Meyer (a subsidiary of The Kroger Co.), Wolferman's, Trader Joe's, and the classic Thomas'.
Photograph from bmannon Flickr
My homemade sourdough English muffins are pretty simple. The only special equipment needed are English muffin rings, which can also be used to fry up the toppings for breakfast sandwiches, keeping them perfectly round and almost corporate in appearance.
I got my recipe from The Fresh Loaf, an online community for amateur bakers of all skill levels. Not only are they tasty but it’s a great way to use up the extra sourdough starter that inevitably accumulates when you keep up a starter (but don’t feel like going through the trouble of sourdough bread baking). When they are fresh, homemade English muffins are unbeatable if for no other reason than that “I made these” is molecularly bound to the steam that escapes upon breaking them open.
Samuel Bath Thomas, an English émigré, created the first English muffins in 1880 in his Manhattan bakery. Originally called a "toaster crumpet," Thomas's creation bore only a slight family resemblance to its British cousin.
Both are cooked on griddles but the crumpet, only crisped on one side, lacks the crunch (fanatics insist that toasting is a must) and chew of what eventually came to be called an English muffin. Wolferman's, a gourmet brand of English muffin available by mail order, are thicker and have been around since 1910. Unlike the rest of the bread world, English muffins have not experienced a gourmet renaissance—there are two choices: what you make at home and what you can buy in a plastic bag.
Price Comparison
The English muffins I bought ranged from Fred Meyer's generic brand (ridiculously cheap at 59¢ for six) to Wolferman's ($4.95 for four Brobdingnagian muffins) to the Trader Joe's store brand ($1.99 for six) and of course Thomas' ($3.00 for six).
Ingredients
All four had a similar mix of recognizable ingredients like flour, water, and yeast alongside things like calcium sulfate, which is considered harmless but has been used to kill rodents. The Trader Joe’s and Wolferman’s muffins, which were noticeably fluffier than the rest, use bleached flour while the others use unbleached. Only the Fred Meyer brand contained high fructose corn syrup. In fact, the Thomas' label proudly proclaims they no longer use HFCS—an ingredient with a questionable role in obesity that still strikes me (and Michael Pollan) as environmentally unsound.
Shape and Texture
Compared to the store-bought brands, my homemade muffins looked Lilliputian and decidedly unround. When I split all five open the Thomas’ muffins easily won for nooks and crannies (two words inexorably tied to a good English muffin, largely due to Thomas’ advertising) followed closely by the Fred Meyer brand. My homemade version and the Trader Joe’s brand had nooks but no crannies. The Wolferman's were in a category of their own, double the size of the rest, with small sandwich bread-like crumbs.
Toastability
The muffins were toasted and topped on with butter on one side and egg on the other. Oddly, my little guys toasted much faster than the others, perhaps due to size but the 13 additional ingredients in the store-bought kinds might also have played a role.
Sourness
Compared to the competition, which list an impressive array of souring agents, my sourdough muffins were decidedly un-sour. Both the Wolferman's and the Thomas' had the tang of sourdough without it being overwhelming. The Fred Meyer brand also had a nice balance but that was unfortunately overwhelmed by a distinctive sock-like aftertaste. The TJ’s muffins were the sourest, almost vinegary, but I noticed that the egg softened the vinegar taste and were my favorite with yolk. The homemade muffins, even after a week in the freezer, tasted fresher than the store-bought and had a clean finish that none of the others possessed.
Best Bang for the Buck?
What about the cost? The Wolferman's were the heftiest both in size and out of pocket expense, extravagant like a gift you give others but can’t buy for yourself. And at the other end of the sock flavor spectrum, even at 59¢, seemed a so-so bargain. The TJ’s and Thomas’ were good and definitely the superior products combined with egg (and, as I later found out, bacon) but cost considerably more than the homemade muffins which were smaller but the clear cost winner with only 50¢ worth of ingredients. Of course my time is worth money but if I hadn’t made the muffins I would have just slept in.
The Winner
I wanted my English Muffins to win and in the end, based on overall taste, cost, and quality of ingredients, they did. What I didn’t count on was the guilty thrill of having something perfectly round and so emotionally unencumbered waiting for me in the freezer.
Breakfast muffins in three minutes, mini pizzas in five—for one sweet week I ate like it was 1994, reveling in the prefab foods of my misspent youth. Next week I’ll be back to slow and local, AKA cheap and homemade, but it’s nice to know the convenience is out there—a time machine in a plastic bag.
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39 Comments:
I really enjoyed this post. The curiosity kept me beeming until the end. I think all the readers were secretly rooting for the home-made. Thank goodness they won. This idea has also peaked my curiosity and has been a popular subject among a wide variety of cooking / food blogs. Is home-made, indeed, cheaper? Is it WORTH the time? Thanks for tapping into this popular subject for all budget-watching chefs.
rockinTACO at 3:11PM on 05/12/09
Awesome read!... But flour handprints on the BACK of your pajamas? Ur doin it wrong :)
conky at 3:46PM on 05/12/09
Melinda, maybe I missed something here.........I went to the site you mentioned, The Fresh Loaf, for the English Muffin Recipe, and did not see a recipe using sourdough starter...? I understood you to say the recipe there that you used was a great way to use up leftover starter mix?? I'm salivating to try my hand at these, as I've always found store bought english muffins a bit too sour for my taste. Loved the article and want to make these this weekend.
dixiesue at 3:46PM on 05/12/09
I believe homemade is always better, the chance to cut back on chemicals, fillers, dyes, things I don't even know what they are. Just look at the ingredients list on some items and it makes you wonder if there is any real food in there. Bravo to you for your efforts with home baking.
DELICIOUS at 3:50PM on 05/12/09
@dixiesue: Here's the recipe. Melinda just sent it over!
Erin Zimmer at 4:04PM on 05/12/09
LOVE your post, please write again... and while I MAY not make mine from scratch (my husband is a Thomas man) at least I know someone has totally investigated all the possibilities and I am now well informed, and somewhat less floured than you!
I do buy Thomas's when they are on sale [buy one, get one free], so perhaps that brings them in closer to "homemade" cost wise.. obviously not superior in taste, but HE is the one eating them lol!
TeriN at 4:13PM on 05/12/09
As we say in the south, "Thank you very, very much Melinda." Appreciate the swift reply to my question!
dixiesue at 4:26PM on 05/12/09
I'm a big fan of the homemade v store bought taste comparisons. It gives a great picture of how much more exciting and flavorful homemade can be from the store bought familiar. But the price comparisons will never hold up without factoring in the time spent. If you "pay" yourself the federal minimum wage and it took you two hours to produce those muffins those are some $15 muffins. That's the trade off cheap and convenient v yummy and time consuming. It's not cheaper to produce homemade, it's a love thing.
VerasTastyFreeze at 4:54PM on 05/12/09
About factoring in the cost of labour: I make most of my bread from scratch. Usually I spend 15~30 minutes working on bread while it does its own thing for a few hours (or days). BUT it's not like I'm taking time off to bake -- it's time I would have spent watching TV or browsing the internet. That time isn't really "worth" anything to me as I wouldn't have been paid otherwise.
It would be a different story if I were baking for profit.
milkytea at 5:09PM on 05/12/09
I've made my own English Muffins using a trimmed can for a cutter. Of course, I wouldn't recommend keeping one around because they rust, but it worked nicely. They came out a little small but it was really exciting! Mine also lacked awesome nooks and crannies. This just means i have to keep working at it. :]
What kind of griddle do you use? I wonder if I'm not doing it at a high enough temperature.
engmcmuffin at 5:21PM on 05/12/09
Just a small trick to make them rounder. Instead of cutting out the muffins I split the dough by weight (in my recipe's case 8), and roll them into flat balls. Then pop them into the rings for the rise but place a couple of heavy baking sheets on top (greasing the bottom of the one that will touch the dough). After you transfer them to the griddle use the sheet pans again on top for the first side's cooking. This keeps the dough perfectly contained to the muffin rings and makes a nicer, rounder, flatter muffin!
mgnnn at 5:31PM on 05/12/09
I've found the wetter the dough the more nooks and crannies you get, that is where the english muffin rings come in handy to help hold the shape. And the rings work great for making McMuffiny round eggs that fit perfectly atop your muffin (homemade or otherwise). As for cost, I agree with milkytea, if not baking I'd be sleeping or otherwise wasting my time. Thanks for all the great comments.
-Melinda
toastercrumpet at 5:42PM on 05/12/09
It's so hard to quantify your at-home time with a dollar value... I don't think I would even want to try. My home time should just be me doing something I enjoy without margin calculations getting involved. And it usually does.
I loved this article, by the way.
bmessina at 7:06PM on 05/12/09
please don't consider sleeping a waste of time...
PeanutButter at 7:47PM on 05/12/09
I truely enjoyed reading this entry...thank you for taking the time to document your experiement and sharing it with us.
kathyvegas at 8:00PM on 05/12/09
Ah, good old 1994. Those were the days!
I have to admit that although I have baked almost every conceivable kind of pastry and bread, I have never made English Muffins. They have been on my list for eons but somehow never get the green light. Thanks for the nudge!
DanaMcCauley at 8:52PM on 05/12/09
This was a welcome article, Thomas muffins take me back to my childhood, that's how long I've been eating them, on and off, and they seem to have remained consistent, unlike other beloved foods of my youth.
I'm not sure how you felt about the overall taste of the Wolferman's, (costly treat that they are), other than that they equalled the Thomas' muffins for sourness (I would take this as a good thing).
But you didn't say how they paired with the egg/egg yolk.
Thanks for baking, thanks for the article. Eng. Muff Pizzas! Yeah! I remember how much burnt tomato sauce and cheese I left on the bottom of my 'rents toaster oven.
chanterelle at 9:48PM on 05/12/09
It seems to me that we need a follow-up article here... how to make these English muffins!
ErikaWaz at 8:11AM on 05/13/09
Why is it that I have a love of English muffins and I bake, yet I never thought to make my own? Thanks for the article. It has inspired me to think outside of the bread box.
meem21 at 8:58AM on 05/13/09
i would have loved to see pictures of each!
carriebwc at 9:20AM on 05/13/09
Ha! I graduated high school and joined the Army in 1994... talk about misspent youth!
At any rate, I loved the article. Comparison testing always makes for interesting reading, and it's nice to see something that most take for granted - like English muffins - made from scratch.
SSG Snuffy at 9:21AM on 05/13/09
You may want to try Bays (pronounced Byz) English muffins; I think they're by far the best store-bought kind, though they can be hard to find. When stores carry them, they're in the refrigerated case.
Ciaohound48 at 10:49AM on 05/13/09
I completely agree about Bays English muffins. I tried the Thomas brand once and was totally disappointed. Bays is the only kind I'll buy. I love them so much I wouldn't even consider trying to make homemade english muffins.
debralu at 11:37AM on 05/13/09
I think I just found a new project for Mongo! I'm going to have to try out the recipe from the site you linked to over Memorial Day weekend!
Amandarama at 11:57AM on 05/13/09
Melinda, this was a great article - thanks! However, I have a problem with part of your premise: you "took some homemade English muffins from that Sunday batch and put them in the freezer until I thought they were at least as old as four kinds from the supermarket shelf." Why? Part of the point of baking things is that they are fresher than the supermarket brands. I'm glad yours won anyway, but they should have even more of an advantage!
Thanks for the recipe. They look great.
CEBakes at 12:56PM on 05/13/09
Impressive! Glad yours turned out to be the best! I love a good English muffin. Did you test who's muffins became stale faster? How did you keep them staying fresh?
Hillary
Chew on That at 1:01PM on 05/13/09
I have to admit that I really just don't have the patience to be a baker... though the pictures of your muffin looked sooo yummy, I might have to reconsider. Do you have any suggestions on what to use if you don't keep (and don't want to keep!) a sourdough starter around? If you want to live like it's 1994 again, we pick up the Thomas whole grain english muffins at costco for pretty cheap (compared to the grocery store anyway).
Mhlia at 4:31PM on 05/13/09
what is the difference between a nook and a cranny?
Cebca at 5:17PM on 05/13/09
I remember Julia Child making English muffins from scratch using tuna cans to mold them. My mom always made us English Muffin Pizzas for just about every birthday party we ever had from when we were 5 to when we were about 17. (To be honest, I still love them today!)
I have a feeling the English Muffin is going to experience a much deserved renaissance...
therealchiffonade at 10:49AM on 05/14/09
I've made Julia Child's homemade English muffins from 'Julia Child & Company ~ Breakfast Party' and they are fabulous! Her batter is heavier than pancake batter, but not as thick as conventional dough. She scoops batter into ring molds ~ too loose to form into balls. Not difficult at all, but does need a double rise of about 2 1/2 hours total.
Totally worth making, especially if you aren't pressed for time. Also, they keep very well in the freezer.
duncan1205 at 3:38PM on 05/14/09
I love home-baked bread, so after reading this post hopefully I’ll wake up an hour earlier to craft fresh breakfast bread too. Since the above references HFCS’s questionable role in obesity, I thought I’d chime in. HFCS has been the subject of a lot of attention and misinformation in the past few years. Even former critics of HFCS dispel long-held myths and distance themselves from earlier speculation about the sweetener’s link to obesity.
Both HFCS and table sugar contain the same simple sugars (glucose and fructose), they both have the same number of calories, and your body metabolizes them the same way.
It also keeps foods fresh, enhances fruit and spice flavors and retains moisture breads.
There has been significant confusion about just how much HFCS is contained in everyday foods. It is true that its versatility makes it useful in many food preparations, but it does so in most cases using very small amounts. How small? For bread (like an English Muffin), you would need to eat 39 slices in a single day to reach the recommended daily allowance of added sugars from HFCS.
I’ve gone on long enough, so to sum up, no single food or ingredient is the sole cause of obesity – rather, the primary cause is too many calories and too little exercise.
Thank you for your consideration.
Mark on behalf of the Corn Refiner’s Association
cramark1 at 5:14PM on 05/14/09
Not a baker, but love English muffins and impressed with anyone who gets up to make them.
Best deal on Thomas English Muffins, at Costco, two six muffin sleeves for $3.99.
kmitch218 at 9:39AM on 05/16/09
I believe Melinda when she touts her own homemade English muffins, but for those of us not so ambitious, there is only one English muffin, Thomas' They are the standard by which all others pale in comparison. However, I have noticed a slight, barely discernible, yet still evident, decline in the texture of Thomas' since George Weston bakeries took them over. I hope this trend does not continue, or else I may be forced to bake my own, as Melinda does. (By the way, I hate to be judgmental, Melinda, and your lifestyle choices are your own, but advertising the fact that you live with your boyfriend outside of marriage in a public column is setting a very bad example for your younger readers. This used to be called "living in sin" for a reason. So live the way you want, but please keep it to yourself. Your living arrangements have no impact on the quality of your English muffins, one way or the other.)
JerseyWarren at 9:35AM on 05/18/09
Great experiment! And I agree with EricaWaz, what's the recipe? I am now living in Spain and can't get English muffins here. My 4-year-old loved them last time we were in New York. So I'll take a crack at making them with her!
Olinda at 9:53AM on 05/18/09
The question "what is the difference between a nook and a cranny" also makes me wonder what "grape nuts" really are. What the hell are THEY? They don't seem related to grapes or nuts, just like there is no English or muffin in the English muffin. Melinda, you go girl vis-a -vis your living situation. 1st amendment rights and all that...say whatever and whenever you want! No need for that negative comment, jerseywarren.
Besides, aren't we talking about English muffins? and now, maybe how grape nuts fit into the picture? ;-)
joannabar at 3:06PM on 05/18/09
I just wish that Thomas's would go back to having the original size for all their line, my kids used to love pizzas made with Thomas's but as they shrunk, they needed two or three of them. Why do manufacturers think we are fooled by cutting back on size and portions?
Jayburn at 4:39PM on 05/18/09
I just did a homemade batch using my old 1978 Presto electric griddle. I used the recipe out of Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice book. It's pretty basic, much like one bread recipe that I do. Outstanding. No more store bought for us.
buffalobaker at 1:10AM on 05/19/09
What a great article and a lot of effort to make these English Muffins.
I also very much liked this phrase as part of the intro! "a taste for brioche and a budget for Wonder Bread"... ;o)
It never occurred to me to make English Muffins, but I'm now very interested and glad there is a link! Our family loves English Muffin Pizzas!
Thanks!
Cindy H
Hard Brown Sugar
sugarbrown at 11:55AM on 05/19/09
As an American expat living in the Netherlands, I've had a serious jones for English muffins these past years - but you can't get them here! You can't imagine how much I've missed Eggs Benedict all this time. I already make a mean Hollandaise, and now I have the English muffin recipe I've been waiting for!
kiki b at 1:44PM on 11/27/09