Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.

Nicholas Gavin

Long before the “nooks and crannies” of the Thomas’ English Muffins slogan, there were the nooks and crannies of eighteenth-century English muffins. As early as 1747, recipes were being penned for the quintessential breakfast bread, one of which appeared in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery and noted that the muffin’s interior should resemble a honeycomb. Turns out it’s exceedingly difficult to get dough to resemble a honeycomb. The mixture of flour, yeast, and milk fat has to be quite soft—closer to pancake batter than bread dough—for those bubbles to form. If it’s too stiff, the steam bubbles will remain round and separate as the dough bakes and expands, and the final product will be breadlike. If, however, the dough is loose, wet, and admittedly difficult to handle, then expanding steam will form large columns in the baking dough, giving the final muffin that traditional honeycomb look.

Scratch English Muffins, The Fast Way