Crumpets from Home at Home

So, good old Warburtons. By no means the only crumpet maker in the UK, but probably the best known. There was no objection to trying out this recipe, but definitely some scepticism that the end result would come close to their packaged product. The recipe itself is published by the British newspaper the Daily Mail (for some reason !). Here it is with the only amendment I made – “make twice as many !”).

This was also surprisingly quick to do. I thought the “standing time” would be longer, but this was very similar to a morning “pancake process”. Here’s some photos, pre-griddling…

It was reassuring to see those bubbles develop in the batter. Bubbles are a key part of crumpets. The cook was a simple frying pan job…I could have got the griddle fired up, or indeed got the baking steel involved. We found a few steel rings to contain the batter…

Things to watch out for…

1. Making sure the pan and rings are well oiled. Spray EVOO was key for this.
2. Getting the quantity right. Although I circled 60g as maybe being a little light…don’t overfill. The trick with this recipe is to allow the cook to develop from the bottom and AVOID flipping it. If you look at the picture above, there’s a “flipped” crumpet there. Flipping effectively blocks the holes at the top of the crumpet.
3. Get the heat right. “Medium High” seemed about right. This is about having enough heat to cook upwards through the crumpet all the way to the top…without burning the bottom with too much heat.
4. A pan lid might be helpful to finish the top of the crumpets by steaming.
5. And a baking steel might also have helped to increase and stabilise the heat for exactly the reasons above.

So in the end, what should be a simple thing has lots of scope for further improvement. For a first try though, I was happy with the result. See below. 12 crumpets pretty much lasted two days…and much butter was used to top them…of course ! :-).