English Muffin Bread: Easy yeast bread in about 1 hour

Why this toasting bread recipe will change how you think about homemade bread forever

1. So quick: It only takes about 5 minutes to get this bread ready for the oven. After that, the dough rises in the pans for baking as it doesn’t need any shaping. Once ready to bake, these loaves only take 25 minutes. All total, you can make this bread in about 1 hour from start to finish! If you’ve seen the timelines for making sourdough bread and gone cross-eyed with anxiety, this bread will wipe that overwhelm away. You can make this quite literally at the last minute.
2. No fancy equipment: All you need is a bowl, a spoon, and something to warm up your butter and milk in. No mixers, no bread machine. Just you and 5 minutes!
3. No fancy techniques: If you can stir, you can make this bread. There’s no shaping necessary for this bread, so even if you’ve never made sandwich bread before, you will be successful with this recipe.
4. Pantry ingredients: There are no weird ingredients here, just everyday pantry ingredients.
5. Legendary Toast: When I say this toast is incredible, it’s possibly the best toast I’ve ever made. I say that as a toast connoisseur. This toast is so utterly perfect I wouldn’t even dare to profane it with the addition of avocado and a fried egg per my usual favorite way to enjoy toast. It just needs butter plain and simple.

The kinds of people who should bake English Muffin Toasting Bread

1. Kids: This could easily be a child’s first yeast bread he or she makes. This recipe has beginner bread making all over it.
2. People strapped for time: If ever I could convince you that store-bought bread is not worth eating, this is the recipe for that. It takes 5 minutes to get ready for the oven and it’s in the oven in 35 minutes. Everybody has time for that.
3. Anyone intimidated by yeast breads: If you’ve never been successful with making sandwich bread or really any yeast bread, this is the absolute best place to start.
4. Bulk bakers: If you want to bake up multiple loaves and freeze them, this recipe is much less cumbersome to double or triple than a standard loaf bread. I always tell people that freezer cooking is a gift to your future self, and bulk baking is no different.

The magic of batter breads like English Muffin Bread

Most sandwich breads require the dough to rise once before shaping it into loaves.

English Muffin Bread is a batter bread. Batter breads are yeast breads with a high proportion of liquids–so much that you can’t shape them like traditional loaves. Because of this, batter breads are mixed up and divided directly into the pan that they’re baked in, saving you an extra step. The resulting dough is incredibly forgiving, so you need absolutely no skill to put it together.

Additionally, English muffin bread has baking soda in it, which reacts with the acidic ingredients in the dough to create extra bubbles for even more lift. Typically, the dough is ready to go into the oven after just 30 minutes, which is insanely fast for yeast breads.

Does English Muffin Bread taste like English muffins?

In a way yes it does! Once you cut into English Muffin Bread, you’ll notice the large open holes on the inside that you’d also find in a good English muffin. Once toasted, these little nooks and crannies are perfect for holding butter and jam and all the other things that make English muffins lovely.

This bread and English muffins both taste the best when you toast them, though both are soft enough to enjoy freshly baked as well.

English muffins are different in that they are a griddle bread, so the outside of the bread is more baked than the inside, not unlike homemade pita bread.

Recipes to go with your English Muffin Bread to make it even more awesome

All the jams and spreads recipes here on Baking With Tradition will absolutely elevate your fresh homemade bread!

Beyond that, absolutely save a loaf and turn it into Homemade Texas Toast. Undoubtedly ever good loaf of bread aspires to be as amazing as Texas Toast.

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  The easiest homemade strawberry jam for sunny bakes any time

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  Easy plum jam with low sugar you’ll want to put on everything

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  Quick poppy seed filling is the forgotten jam that’ll make all your baked goods better

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  The easy raspberry jam recipe you’ll want to make on repeat (seedless!)

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  Lazy homemade applesauce is the easiest and the best

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  Cranberry Curd is the beauty queen of Fall jams

Process for making English Muffin Bread

1. Prep the pans: Butter the pans and dust them with cornmeal. The cornmeal helps the bread retain some of that extra crunch you get from a traditional English muffin.
2. Mix the batter: Warm the butter with the water, honey, and 1/2 cup of the milk just until the butter is melted. Whisk in the baking soda and the rest of the milk. Measure the flour into a large bowl, making a well in the middle of the flour. Add the yeast into the well and then pour in a little of the liquid. Whisk to dissolve the yeast, and then pour in the rest of the liquid and the salt. Stir quickly to make a sticky batter.
3. Scrape and press: Divide the dough between the two pans as evenly as you can. Use a wet hand to press the dough into the pans. Cover the dough with oiled plastic wrap to rise for 30-40 minutes, until it is about 1/2″-1/4″ from the top of the pan.
4. Bake: Bake the bread for 25-30 minutes until the loaves are well-browned and sound hollow when you rap your knuckles on the top.  If you have an instant-read thermometer, the finished loaves should be 200 F when you stick the probe into the center of the loaf. Cool loaves completely before slicing.

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