Cooking Crumpets
Help! My crumpets keep turning out poorly.
Using a commonly-found crumpet recipe, I'm having a great deal of trouble getting my crumpets to cook all the way through. The outsides are crisp and golden brown but the insides are invariably way underdone, doughy and gummy, almost like mashed potatoes in texture and not breadlike. The taste of this raw, undercooked dough is quite unappetizing. I can't believe it's what real crumpets are supposed to be like. They taste rather yucky, not the divine taste treat people rave about.
I've tried low heat, high heat, medium heat, it doesn't seem to matter. I've tried letting them cook for as long as 15 minutes and they're still doughy and gummy inside. I get plenty of surface holes on top from gas bubbles. The outside is "set" when tested with a finger. I've watched several YouTube videos to no avail.
What could I be doing wrong?
Thank you.
(Update: if you're using buttermilk, skip directly to the next comment.)
It's hard to make a guess because you don't give the recipe, and you don't say what kinds and brands of ingredients you are using in your attempt to duplicate the recipe.
When trying to duplicate a tried-and-true recipe, challenges and frustration can arise from:
- not matching the ingredients closely enough. This is mainly the flour, but could also be the water, leavening agents, etc. For instance... are you trying to make a British recipe with American ingredients?
- making ingredient substitutions that are not close enough to the recipe's specifications or intent.
- not following the recipe's procedures closely enough.
- not making hydration adjustments due to your flour being drier or moister than the recipe-author's flour. Sometimes you just have to use more (or less) water than the recipe calls for.
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And, depending on the web site, there are just some bad recipes out on the internet. Spammers and scammers sometimes make up recipes out of thin air, for the sole purpose of creating an "ad farm" web site, or selling a junk recipe book on Amazon.
Then other spammers and scammers copy and paste those recipes for their own ad farms and junk books, making the recipe look popular, when it's actually just made-up nonsense.
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Bottom line: Please give a link to the recipe, then please list the exact ingredients, including brand and type of flour, that you actually used.
If it's a good recipe, you just made a simple mistake in something.
But then, depending on where you got it, it may be a bad recipe.
Update/edit, see next comment.
If you are using American buttermilk in a British recipe, that could cause your problem, depending on brand.
If you are using American "low fat" buttermilk in a British recipe that would make it even worse.
If you are using American "low fat" buttermilk in an American recipe that calls for just "buttermilk", that would also cause your problem.
If you get a chance, next time you are in an American grocery store, compare the ingredient list of regular buttermilk to "low fat" buttermilk. It's not the same. Low fat buttermilk is more like imitation buttermilk, and has extra thickeners and other things, that regular buttermilk does not have.
That's true at least with the Kroger brand buttermilk products I used. Other brands may behave differently.
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I discovered this "imitation buttermilk" (ie, "low fat" buttermilk) problem when trying to make buttermilk pancakes and buttermilk biscuits.
and crowd them on the sheet or pan. Crowding makes them rise higher!
Be sure to check your oven temps and that both upper and lower heating elements are working properly. :)
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/35019/biscuits-amoris-aunts-angel-biscuits
Well, ok, these are biscuits done in the oven and not on a range.
Crumpets are cooked on a heated skillet like pancakes, not baked in an oven.
Hi Mini! When I click on "try these" it just comes back to your comment. Wondering if you have some sort of baked crumpets recipe? I had also only seen them done on a stovetop.
Thanks!
Mary
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/57270/problem-sourdough-pancakes-crumpets
Or skip down near the bottom of the page. https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/57270/problem-sourdough-pancakes-crumpets#comment-459400
I fixed the link "Try this" by adding it in the script above. I admit I was hoping to win a crumpet clamper over to biscuits. My bad. ( But I like biscuits better!). :)
Why are you posting a link to an oven-baked biscuit recipe in a thread asking about cooking crumpets on a skillet?
In one of the threads you linked to, the poster never arrives at a satisfactory solution to the problem of undercooked insides.
and what exactly are the ingredients used? Perhaps knowing this it would be easier to help. Checking the baking powder and soda for freshness is a good place to start as well. Finding out why the bubble matrix inside the batter/ dough is falling flat is key.
https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/44124/why-didnt-my-crumpets-cook-in-the-middle
Today on the recommendation of a friend I picked up some store-bought crumpets at Trader Joe's and put them in the freezer. They are Trader Joe's house brand.
Was I surprised! They're pretty darn good! I pan fried a frozen crumpet in a little butter to heat it up. It was great! No muss, no fuss, and the inside was well cooked :) Now I know what a real crumpet is like without traveling all the way to England, and I know why the British rave about them. No jam, no honey, just butter. One side is uncooked and has the little holes a crumpet is supposed to have, and the other side is smooth and golden brown.
I had tried another brand of store-bought crumpet and they were pretty disappointing.
In a couple of YouTube videos they cook the crumpets in olive oil. I did this exactly once thinking it would be healthier, but the flavor was wretched. Never again. It has to be butter (or margarine). I use unsalted butter on doctor's recommendation and the crumpets are perfectly delicious.