#crumpets

...So where were we? (Glance back to this post for a retrospective.)

Meanwhile, look once more (assuming you've seen it before) at the pretty butter melting. ...I continue to investigate how to film this kind of thing until it's so sensuous to behold that people slam their laptop lids shut (or slam their phones down face-first) and go off to watch some other kind of porn. 😏

...Anyway! I was comparing two versions of crumpet recipes from our vintage European Cuisines website. (Which, for those interested, will be shutting down over the course of next year. @petermorwood and I had been discussing this anyway—as there are now about a million more websites dealing with European food and recipes than there were when we started the thing up in 1995—so 2026 is as good a time to have this happen as any other. Nearly all its recipes that originated with us will be migrating to other places where they're easier to find, such as mind-palate.com).

As discussed in the post above, though, there was a change in the EC.com-based crumpet recipe from its original version, originally posted in 2008 or so, to a slightly different one in 2016. And any notes about why this change was made have been lost.

When I set out early yesterday to get into a serious comparison of the two recipes—starting with a test of the older one—a note got scribbled on the nearest pad of the Magic Grid Paper:

(a) Does 2 cups of bread flour actually equal 230g?

And,

(b) Does 1 & 2/3 cups of all-purpose flour actually equal 230g?

And as we see, the answers are: No.

I carefully redid the cup measurements—leveled—and then weighed them. There is a possibility that the difference in weights as compared to volumes had to do with us changing the flours we normally used.

Some background on this: Until 2016-ish, for our bread work at home Peter and I were stuck using Irish-supermarket "strong flours", on which there was never any guaranteed protein content. And for a good while, there was no specifically-milled "bread flour". (Partly because Irish bread-baking at home, at that point, still seemed primarily limited to making soda bread... in which the very last thing you want to do is develop its gluten. Loaf-bread baking was seen very much as a minority interest, and the big companies that supply flour to the supermarkets weren't particularly concerned about getting fancy as regarded their flours' protein/gluten content.)

Then, though, by happy chance, while visiting one of the central-European groceries near Dublin, we stumbled across this fabulous stuff.

This flour's home company is based in Lithuania, and it's some of the best bread flour it's ever been my privilege to work with. The info on the side of the package states that the flour's protein content is 11.9%, which is Just Fine for a bread flour. For this stuff's sake alone, in the mid- to late-2010s, we would always schedule shopping trips up to Dublin once a month or so to make sure we always had enough Malsena on the shelf. If you can lay your hands on it, I highly recommend it.

Bear in mind here—if you didn't already know—that, out of a joint annoyance with the generally crap quality of supermarket bread, in 2011 Peter and I started baking sandwich-loaf-quality bread at home at least twice a week. This recipe, which I got in the mid-1990s from the first online bakery in Switzerland, became our basic bread: a variation of Tessinerbrot, a bread descended from one anciently made by Roman-Spanish bakers working in Canton Ticino. (Peter later tweaked the basic recipe to suit the new bread pans we eventually acquired to make the household "sandwich bread" more manageable.)

Anyway, in 2020 along came COVID, and home baking suddenly began to be something everyone wanted to do... at which point flour (and sometimes even yeast!) routinely vanished from our local groceries due to the supply-chain troubles associated with that period. At this point P. and I decided that it made more sense to buy our flour in bulk, from more local, dependable sources.

The very best of these turned out to be Kells Wholemeal near Kilkenny. We would routinely buy 15- or 16kg bags of their bread flour—after some testing, the one we settled on was Marriage's "Golden Crust"—then decant it into (former) 5kg plastic birdseed buckets, and never again worry about suddenly running out of flour in the middle of a bake. (The trick was to re-order from Kells after opening the last of a three-bucket batch.) ...It was also seriously less costly to buy flour this way than by the 2kg bag from the local grocery (which didn't have anything this good, anyway). So we got to feel smugly economical about that, too. 😏

...Anyway, back to the crumpet end of things. The change in the bread flour (and plain flour) we were using may have been responsible for the difference in the amount of measured volume of the flours in the revised recipe. (heavy sigh) This is just one more thing that makes me want to stop using US / "imperial" measurements entirely and switch over completely to metric, which isn't susceptible to such irregularities. ...Yeah, it's not like because of using Imperial/"customary" measurements anybody's gonna lose a Mars probe in the kitchen, you know? But staying in metric means you're dealing with mass, not volume... which (depending on how much moisture your flour has absorbed from the atmosphere recently...) can change your results without warning. And in pastry and baking work, this can be a Big Deal.

The flour mass amounts that worked for the crumpet recipe, anyway, were :

260g bread flour

220g plain flour

Please also note the scrawl that says "2/3C milk is closer to 150ml." Because this too is accurate.

...Now in a day or three I'll test the newer/revised version of the recipe to see how (or indeed "if") it still works. But the old one works perfectly well with the amount restated above. When I've finished my testing, I'll revise the Mind Palate recipe accordingly.

Please note also: I did the batter mixing on these in a stand mixer, as I have better things to do with my hands and arms these days than hand-mix batter until my entire upper body aches. Two minutes with the K-beater on the Kenwood produced a batter that was thick, rich, and creamy, and in which the gluten appears to have been perfectly well developed.

Meanwhile: there are now only eight crumpets. 😄

Didn't make anything thar pretty. The closest thing to photogenic is these crumpets.