Serious Eats: Recipes
Fast Breads' Crumpets
As always with our Knead the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Fast Breads to give away this week. Enter the contest here.
Tea and crumpets. That phrase is absolutely everything I knew about crumpets before I tried this recipe from Fast Breads. Crumpets are sort of like thin English muffins. Since they're so thin, you don't cut them in half; you simply slather them with butter and eat them as they are. They reminded me of a cross between an English muffin and a pancake.
I love the crunchy hills and tender valleys of an English muffin, but this was an entirely different experience since it's not cut and/or toasted. Instead of serving them with butter as suggested, I preferred mine with jam.
And I don't know if it's traditional, but I found that popping them in the toaster to re-warm them wasn't a bad idea.
What Worked: Another great use for my cast iron pizza pan. And it's always fun to try making something I've never eaten before.
What Didn't: Just like pancakes, the first batch didn't cook as well as the second. Not the recipe's fault, I just wasn't sure exactly about the temperature. Next time I'll know what to aim for, but if you're cooking these for the first time I suggest making one sacrifice crumpet before committing to a whole griddle full.
Suggested Tweaks: I'd cut back on the salt just a tad next time, particularly if I was going to serve it with salted butter.
Adapted from Fast Breads by Elinor Klivans. Copyright © 2010. Published by Chronicle Books. Available wherever books are sold. All Rights Reserved
About the author: Donna Currie has been cooking for fun and writing for pay since the days when typewritten articles traveled by snail mail. When she combined those talents in a food column for a newspaper in her area, she realized that writing about food is almost as much fun as eating. You can find her on her blog, Cookistry or follow her on Twitter at @dbcurrie or @cookistry.
