No-Knead Homemade Crumpets (No Oven Needed!)

Hi Bold Bakers, crumpets are an Irish person's guilty pleasure. We toast them, cover them in Kerrygold and we are in heaven. I'm going to share with you my no-knead crumpet recipe and best of all, it's 100% made on the stovetop. As always, this recipe along with all of my other recipes can be found on BiggerBolderBaking.com. Okay, let's get started in a nice big bowl. Add in your flour, salt, baking soda, sugar, and then dried yeast. And then mix all these ingredients together. So I do put salt on one side of the bowl and then yeast on the other because you don't want them to mix directly on top of each other, but once you whisk it all together, it's totally fine. It's just that salt has a tendency to deactivate yeast and you don't want that. Also, I use instant dried yeast, which means you can put it directly into your flour. If you don't do that and you use like an active dried yeast, you will have to sponge it in your warm liquid first. Okay, lovely. This is looking good. This is such a simple recipe. So I'm just going to move this over to the side and then into a separate jug. I'm going to add in some water and some milk. So when working with doughs, you always want to warm up your liquids so it activates the yeast faster. So what I like to do is pop this into the microwave for around 30 seconds, let it get lukewarm, and then we're going to add it into the rest of our ingredients. So my liquid is nice and warm and I'm just going to stream it into my dry ingredients and whisk at the same time. And then just keep on whisking this mix until it's nice and smooth and there's no more lumps. It only takes around two minutes or so. So considering this is a bread dough, it's almost like a batter rather than a dough. It's very, very thin, but that is exactly what this is supposed to be like. It's supposed to be thin and really bubbly. This is what we're going for. Fantastic. This really is such a fast bread to make. So now I'm going to place some cling wrap over it and a nice clean tea towel. All I'm going to do is set it over to the side for a minimum of an hour. And what will happen is it will get really lovely and bubbly. And this is what will give our crumpets really great texture. So sometimes life gets a little bit crazy and maybe you planned on making crumpets, but then you ran out of time. What you can do after the hour is pop it into the fridge for up to two days and then you can cook off your crumpets whenever you want them. So to save us some time, I already prepared a dough in advance and I want you to take a look at what's supposed to look like. Check that out. After around an hour or so, it'll be really lovely and bubbly like this. You can actually see the bubbles pop on the surface, which is just what I love to see. This is the kind of thing that makes me very happy. It's not handbags or shoes. It's bubbly yeast like this. So he is ready to rumble. I'm going to set it over to the side and I'm going to talk about our pan and the rings that we need. So over to my left here, I have a lovely, large nonstick frying pan. This is a really good quality one. It's got a thick bottom. I have this on low, medium to low heat. You do not want your pan too hot when you're cooking off crumpets because you want it to go low and slow. I'm just going to let that heat up there for around 10 minutes or so. You always want to get the heat into your pan before you add anything to it. And that applies to cooking, too. So I'm just going to let that guy chill, heat up, and we are going to talk about rings. So these are English muffin rings or crumpet rings. These are really necessary for this because the batter is so thin that you need these to hold their shape. Now, the good thing is you can buy these on Amazon. I got these on Amazon. You get for less than $8. So don't pay too much money for them. They're really inexpensive. The great thing about it is you will get a lot of use out of them. You can also buy silicone ones instead. So pop your rings on your pan and then with some flavorless oil, like a vegetable oil or a sunflower oil, generously grease around the edges of the rings. Now you have to do this and I'll tell you why. I did it the other day. I didn't grease them and those crumpets weren't coming out for love nor money. So make sure you get them nice and greased and your crumpets will pop right out. So our pan is preheated. Our rings are nice and warm and they're greased. I'm going to go for it now. So I have a little ladle here and I'm going to spoon. Oh my gosh, look at the amount of holes in that batter. I'm going to spoon enough batter into each ring just until they're around halfway full. Now don't go higher than halfway and I'll tell you why. They'll get too big and you won't get the bubbles on top. So just do them halfway and that will be big enough. There we go. It's really tempting to add in more, but don't. Lovely. Now here's the deal. With these guys, like I said before, low and slow, what you want to do is let them just sit here and you're slowly going to see bubbles form on the top. And what you want to do is just wait until it kind of turns a bit of a matte color. The dough doesn't look wet. There's lots of bubbles on top. Then you can flip it over. So stay with me because I'm going to show you that. So on this side, the crumpets are going to take around six to eight minutes until we're able to flip them over. Now, while they're cooking away there, I'm going to tell you the difference between a crumpet and an English muffin because not a lot of people know this. An English muffin we've made before, also no need on the stovetop, really popular recipe on BiggerBolderBaking.com. These are little sandwiches and they are kind of bubbly and light and airy, but they're little sandwiches and you can cut them in the middle and then you can put eggs in them, cheese, whatever you like. The crumpets are made just kind of one little smaller layer and they'll have bubbles all on the surface. And if you've done them right, that's what they should look like. And then you will put butter over the surface. You don't cut them in half or anything like that. So they're a little bit different. So the same, but they're different. So you see those bubbles popping away. Now this is the time where we want to turn them before you turn them. I want your crumpets to look like this. You see around the edge, the dough was kind of turned a different color. It's not as shiny. It doesn't look as raw. And you have all of these bubbles formed on top. This is when you can flip it over. You don't want to flip it over when it looks kind of doughy and raw. And maybe you think there should be more bubbles. This is perfect. So very gently with my tongs and a spatula, I am just going to flip it over and then just leave it cook there on the other side for roughly around two minutes or so and let them get nice and brown. So I took a little peek at these guys are brown on the other side. So I'm going to gently lift them off, remove the ring. And as you're doing this, in case your crumpet does get caught in the ring, run a butter knife around the edges and you can kind of shimmy it out. No big deal. And there you have it. How gorgeous are those? Look at all those bubbles on top. Now come here to me because I want you to see these, all of these crevices. These all exist because we didn't flip them too early. We waited for just the right time. So those are absolutely actually I'm thrilled with these. These are lovely, gorgeous. Look at that. My first crumpets and I think they're absolutely gorgeous. This batter makes around 10 crumpets. So I'm just going to set these over to the side to chill out and we're going to cook off the rest of the batter. So crumpets stay fresh at room temperature for around three days. They also freeze really well. But in my opinion, once you cook them, you got to eat them. So I'm going to put lots of butter on top of this guy. This is a good looking guy. You can hear the holes when you bite in. For those of you who haven't had crumpets, it's like a bread sponge, a bread sponge made to soak up lots of lovely butter. My suggestion is invest in some rings. You'll have them for a long time and then you can make crumpets whenever you want them. Once you make these crumpets, definitely rate them on my website because in my opinion, these are five star crumpets. I'll see you back here really soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking.