Shop-bought crumpets are decent. Warm, chewy, faintly sour, engineered to hold a lake of butter. Homemade ones are better, and most people avoid making them because they assume some dark art is involved. There isn't. A crumpet is a yeasted batter cooked inside a metal ring, and the holes appear on their own if you get three things right: a wet enough batter, a long enough rise, and a pan that isn't too hot. Get those and you'll have a tray of properly holey crumpets within a couple of hours, most of which is waiting around.
What you need before you start
This makes eight to ten crumpets using 8cm rings.
- 350g strong white bread flour
- 1 tsp dried yeast, or 10g fresh yeast
- 1 tsp caster sugar
- 1 tsp fine salt
- 350ml warm water, or 250ml water plus 100ml whole milk for a softer crumb
- ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 2 tbsp warm water, to dissolve the bicarb
- Butter or neutral oil, for greasing
Strong white flour matters more than you'd think. The gluten needs to stretch and hold bubbles long enough for them to rise to the surface, and plain flour gives you a flatter, denser crumpet. Beyond that you need metal crumpet rings (8-9cm across, about 2.5cm deep), a heavy frying pan or flat griddle, a fish slice and a clean tea towel. Metal pastry cutters work at a push, but flimsy ones buckle and foil rings leak.
Making the batter
The first mix
Whisk the flour, yeast, sugar and salt together in a large bowl — bigger than you think, because the batter roughly doubles. Pour in the warm water. Warm here means blood temperature: if you can't comfortably hold a finger in it, it's too hot and will knock the yeast back. Whisk hard for two or three minutes until you have a thick, glossy batter with the consistency of double cream, falling from the whisk in a slow ribbon rather than a stream. A hand mixer makes short work of this.
The rise
Cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave it somewhere warm for an hour to ninety minutes, until the batter has doubled and the surface is covered in a network of bubbles. A cold kitchen slows this down; a spot near a radiator speeds it up. If you want to split the work, cover the bowl and leave it in the fridge overnight, then bring it back to room temperature for an hour before cooking. The batter is ready when it smells yeasty and slightly sour and looks alive.
The bicarbonate step
Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in the 2 tbsp of warm water and whisk it through. It will froth immediately and the batter will loosen, turning noticeably more liquid. This is the step that makes the holes. The alkaline batter sets faster at the surface, trapping the bubbles rising from below just long enough for them to burst and leave a crater. Skip it and you get flat, chewy discs that look like pikelets. Rest the batter for 15 to 20 minutes after whisking — no longer than half an hour, or it deflates and you lose the lift you just created.
Heating the pan and prepping the rings
Set your pan or griddle over medium-low heat and give it a full five minutes to come up to temperature. On a gas hob that means a flame barely above the lowest setting; on an electric ring, roughly four out of ten. Too hot is the most common reason crumpets fail, so err on the cool side and adjust upwards if needed.
Test with a drop of batter: it should sizzle quietly, not spit or smoke. If you keep a probe thermometer around, the surface of the pan wants to be roughly 170-180C. Butter the pan and the inside of each ring generously, sit the rings in the pan for a minute to heat through, then grease them again. Re-grease between every batch — ungreased rings are the ones crumpets stick to.
Cooking the crumpets
Spoon batter into each ring until it's about halfway up: roughly 1cm deep, or a generous two tablespoons per ring. Don't fill past two-thirds, or the batter will spill over the sides as it rises.
Then leave them alone. Somewhere between five and eight minutes in, the glossy surface turns matte and a rash of holes opens across the top. Watch for the moment the holes stop expanding and hold their shape. That's your cue.
Run a thin knife around the inside of each ring, lift the ring away with tongs — mind the steam — and flip the crumpet for 30 to 60 seconds to colour the top. Some cooks prefer to leave them hole-side up and finish them under a hot grill for a minute instead, which keeps the tops pale and the holes crisp. Either works. Move each finished crumpet to a wire rack and don't stack them while hot, or they'll steam and go floppy. Stir the batter gently between batches, because it settles.
Troubleshooting
- No holes at all. The batter is too thick, the pan is too cool, or the bicarb was forgotten. Thin it with a splash of warm water and nudge the heat up.
- Holes only around the edges. The centre of the pan is too hot, so the batter sets before bubbles get going. Turn the heat down and let the pan even out.
- Burnt base, raw middle. Cooking too fast. Lower the heat and give them longer.
- Stuck in the rings. Not enough grease, or the batter leaked underneath. Grease properly and check the rings sit flat.
- Pale, doughy discs with no lift. Usually tired yeast or a rise that ran too long and collapsed. Use fresh yeast and stop the first rise when the batter has doubled.
Toasting, serving and storing
A crumpet straight from the pan is only half finished. Toast it under a grill or in a toaster until the outside is golden and the holes have crisped, then butter it while it's hot and let it pool in the craters. That's the whole point. Beyond butter, they take jam, honey, cheese melted under the grill, or a poached egg on top.
Cool leftovers completely before bagging them, or they'll sweat. They keep for two days at room temperature, and freeze well for a couple of months — toast them straight from frozen.
The first batch is a test run
Your first two or three crumpets will probably be wrong, and that's fine. Adjust as you go: if the batter feels thick as you spoon it in, add a splash of water; if the holes take more than about eight minutes to appear, drop the heat and wait. Note the hob setting that worked and how the batter looked at its best, and the next batch will be quicker and better. Make them twice and they become a weekend habit rather than a project.
Photo: Towfiqu barbhuiya / Pexels
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