Muffins and the Perfect Poached Egg

Having new laid eggs again, made me want to make Eggs Benedict which is basically a poached egg on bacon on half a toasted muffin with hollandaise sauce on top. Delicious.

All I needed was to pick up a pack of muffins from the supermarket, but then I thought it would be cheaper and more fun to make my own.For bread makers amongst you, it is a pound of flour (I used half and half strong white and wholemeal) and then uses milk instead of water, the recipe said 12 fl oz but as always, I added more liquid when it looked too dry and then had to add more flour. A teaspoon of dried yeast (I use the sort that has to be reconstituted as I find it more flexible to have a tub rather than sachets), a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of butter. Put all that in the dough maker and set it to dough and go away and leave it for a while, or thump it around for ten minutes if you are kneading by hand. My bread-maker was the cheapest model available, is now three or four years old and is invaluable, but I only ever use it on the dough setting to take the effort out of kneading and give the dough a good start that it wouldn't get otherwise in my none too warm kitchen.

When the dough was well risen ( I went out and left it for a while but I'd say a couple of hours after the dough programme had finished), I rolled it out and cut it into 3 1/2 inch rounds and left them twenty minutes or so to prove. The recipe said to sprinkle them with rice flour or semolina, I had ground rice in the cupboard which worked just as well but I don't think it would have mattered if I'd skipped that bit. Certainly not worth buying anything specially.

Then came the interesting bit of cooking them on a griddle which I haven't got so used a frying pan instead.

It said cook on a medium heat for 7 minutes each side but I found myself turning the heat down so they didn't become too brown too quickly. Probably because my frying pan is too thin.

So there you are, eight large muffins for maybe 30p. Four of them have already been tucked away in the freezer to stop me eating them all at once. Another time I would make a double batch, as it was a bit of an effort for only eight, I would also make them thinner as they are too fat for my toaster.

So this morning, Rosie, said she would like a poached egg on a muffin. The huge benefit of keeping chickens is the freshness of the eggs (when they lay) and the ease with which they will poach. All that is needed is to slip the egg into an inch or so of barely simmering water like this:

And a couple of minutes later, you have the perfect poached egg, like this: