Yesterday I was determined to spend some quality time baking bread — well, not exactly bread—english muffins. Which are the same as bread, only you eat them in the morning with eggs and ham… or bacon… whatever!
In any event, my sister had great luck with a new recipe which she passed on to me. She said they were the best english muffins evah!!! and I must try the recipe. So I did.
Result: total failure. The muffins looked fine, cooked up easily, but tasted absolutely ghastly!!!! I thought it might be just my taste buds…. who knows?… so I bagged a few muffins and trotted over to my sister (1/2 mile away) and had her do a taste test…
Result? She couldn’t even swallow even a single bit. Spit it out right into the garden. (We were both standing outside in her yard because of the corona virus thing…)
So what did I do wrong? Were the ingredients spoiled before I mixed them in? I checked expiration dates…. can flour grow old? I was using bleached flour … but the taste between that and unbleached flour is not that great… and the yeast was new from the store a month ago… Used water from the sink (we have good water)… It is a mystery.
So my efforts were in vain… except I now have a dozen English muffins to feed to the ducks at the nearby shoreline. Hopefully the ducks will survive.
Sigh.
It is a puzzle why her muffins were so terrible. They tasted of chemicals which suggests it was the result of using bleached flour. I will stick with unbleached for now. They have really been worth making. The ducks will be fine.