Recipe

How to Make Delicious, One-Pan Sourdough English Muffins

You may never buy them again!

8 min readAug 28, 2022

These delicious English muffins are made using sourdough starter! — These English muffins are made using my sourdough starter! Photo by Patricia J. Davis.

I have been on a sourdough journey since early in the COVID-19 pandemic. I created a starter (I named mine Herman) and have been pampering it for over two years now. For the sourdough expert, that is nothing. I’ve heard people still hand down their four-times great grandmother’s 100 year old mixture. Still, I have enjoyed learning how to make all kinds of things with it.

Including my most recent concoction — Sourdough English Muffins!

Okay, I know they’ve been around forever. Samuel Thomas immigrated to the US and made them popular here around 1880. Of course they were already popular in England long before that. They just call them muffins, though, and were sold door-to-door. Do you remember singing “Oh, do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man?”

Why didn’t I just buy them?

I recently made a poolish mixture for a loaf of white sandwich bread, but I only used half. I wanted to use the other half and had been trying to work up the courage to make English muffins. The price had gone up to $4.00 in my store for a package of six. We used to be able to get them for under $2.00.

I thought they were complicated to make and I would need special equipment. I didn’t want to buy, nor did I have room to store, 12–24 muffin rings. Many of the recipes listed special ingredients like seminola, and I hate buying something only to take up space. Several recipes had you toast each side in a cast iron skillet (which I didn’t have) and then bake them.

I decided that I could afford to experiment a bit. What follows is the recipe I used to make the English muffins in the picture. My intention was to make this as simple and fool-proof as possible. The muffins turned out beautifully and so tasty. Much better than any store-bought brands.

If you haven’t created your own sourdough starter, try my easy method.