Tea and Crumpets #BriFri #WeekendCooking

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This post records a failure in our kitchen. I think we home cooks do a disservice to each other when we only post our successes. So, here goes….

Rick’s been playing with sourdough starter. As anyone knows who has tried it, you rapidly get to the point where you need new, quick uses of starter. Last Sunday, we decided to try crumpets. Rick learned from some source that crumpets are a very old recipe, originally made with whole wheat and sourdough. So, it seemed like a natural solution to our problem of too much whole wheat starter.

We used a sour dough crumpet recipe from the Shipton Mill website.

Since Rick has taken more of an interest in cooking, our kitchen resembles a science lab, more and more.

Weighing starter on the kitchen scale for sourdough crumpets

Weighing the starter

Weighing the baking soda on a scale that measures tiny amounts with accuracy

We tried English muffin rings to keep the batter in place, but the crumpets stuck to the sides.

Crumpet batter in English muffin rings

For later batches, we tried free-form crumpets, which turned out to look like pancakes.

Anything is good with butter and honey on top!

The tea was good!

We bought our first package of Strong English Breakfast tea at the Twinings shop in London — they’ve been in the same location since 1706!

The crumpets were okay, but we’re not sure how to improve them. The only thing we have to compare to are packaged crumpets made with white flour and yeast. So, rather than proceed down a path that isn’t very clear, our future sourdough adventures will be with pancakes or English muffins.

What was your most recent kitchen failure?

I’ll link this post to Weekend Cooking tomorrow. Check out Beth Fish Reads for a list of links to, probably, much more successful culinary adventures.

Comments

Tea and Crumpets #BriFri #WeekendCooking — 10 Comments

Sim Carter on June 5, 2015 at 12:15 pm said:

Hilarious! My husband is always trying some new concoction or other. I’ll be curious to see if you find a way to improve your crumpets while I confess to pure laziness. I love the store-bought ones, white flour and all, but find the ones they sell in our British shop better than I can find in our supermarket.

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Beth F on June 6, 2015 at 8:41 am said:

I haven’t tried to make crumpets. Fun experiment even it didn’t quite work out. My most recent mistake wasn’t so bad — I added too much sugar to the last batch of strawberry-rhubarb sauce. Still tasty, but we like a tarter flavor.

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Katherine @ I Wish I Lived in a Library on June 6, 2015 at 8:52 am said:

I’ve only tried crumpets once and didn’t care for them BUT they were these weird prepackaged things and probably didn’t fairly represent them. I definitely want to try them again but I think I’ll let someone else make them for me as these look like a challenge! I don’t know if it really counts as a failure but I had a French cookbook I was testing a few months ago and that was absolutely beautiful. The recipes were at best okay and the prep work was massive. It was so pretty though that I didn’t want to give up on it until my husband and son threatened mutiny!

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JoAnn @ Lakeside Musing on June 6, 2015 at 9:14 am said:

Packaged crumpets would be my only reference for comparison, too, but I admire your sense of culinary adventure. Even the ‘failure’ looks delicious though.

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Kay on June 6, 2015 at 9:44 am said:

I loved this post. I agree that we should probably talk about our less successful cooking adventures. Like the time I was having a bunch of people for dessert after a small group church study and my chocolate sheet cake (which is so, so tasty, usually) was just liquid in the middle. Soupy. I could not figure out what I did, but had to act fast. Still don’t know what I did. LOL

I have not had good luck with sourdough starter. Easy enough to bake with, but it kind of scares me. Bigger and bigger and bigger. I remember many years ago when a bunch of us shared starters and then we kind of got tired of it.

Love the fact that you got to go to the actual Twinings shop. I would love that.

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Tina on June 6, 2015 at 1:13 pm said:

I have put quite a few bombs from the kitchen on my site! You learn each time, right? One of my issues was actually burning up a mini food processor trying to smooth guava for a tart recipe. I smelled smoke!

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jama on June 6, 2015 at 1:47 pm said:

Thanks for sharing this “misadventure.” I haven’t tried crumpets or English muffins so I give you a lot of credit.

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Claudia on June 6, 2015 at 1:51 pm said:

I have had a number of sourdough starters, and my current one requires me to add a bit of yeast powder:) to my bread sponges. The finest one (which I killed, unfortunately) was a 200 year old French lady, named Genevieve. As to the uses of extra starter, I have made the best ever waffles with mine, and the pancakes are good too. Have made crumpets as well, but my favorite is the waffles.

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Carole from Carole's Chatter on June 6, 2015 at 9:58 pm said:

I agree about keeping it real when posting about food. Cheers

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Diane (@bookchickdi) on June 7, 2015 at 6:50 am said:

I agree that we learn more from our kitchen failures. I made a chicken recipe this week in the crock pot that was just bland and tasteless. I unpinned it immediately from Pinterest.

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