I have a history of “hot” thyroid nodules – nodules that spew thyroid hormone without regard for what my body  needs, making me hyperthyroid. I had a partial thyroidectomy when I was 19, and most of my thyroid was removed. My doctor told me to take synthroid for the rest of my life to suppress my thyroid activity, but I didn’t and I was fine for many years. But recently the nodules recurred.

The problem was caught in a blood test. Again my TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) was very low, indicating that my body somehow already had enough hormone – i.e., nodules again. It occurred to me that I had recently switched from regular, iodized salt to sea salt, which is not fortified with iodine. So I did a google search to see if iodine deficiency could cause hot thyroid nodules. The answer was yes, so I then researched supplements. After taking a high dose supplement (details below) for about a month, two miraculous things happened:

1. My thyroid nodules went away and my thyroid levels returned to normal.
2. My ulcerative colitis went into complete remission for the first time in 10 years. (HUH?!?!)

It turned out that my two assumed-to-be-unrelated conditions were actually related – to an iodine deficit. Iodine is heavily absorbed in the bowel, as well as the thyroid (and a few other areas, notably breast tissue). Both thyroid problems and inflammatory bowel disease run in my family. Apparently I inherited an above-average need for iodine, and/or my thyroid and bowel were vulnerable.

Iodine Supplementation

Here are the links for the iodine supplement and accompanying book I bought on Amazon:

Supplement: Optimox Iodoral 180 tabs
Book: Iodine: Why you need it, Why you can’t live without it by David Brownstein, M.D.

Iodoral, the iodine/iodide supplement, is very high dosage and the only one of its kind. The only other supplement in this dosage with both iodine and iodide is a foul tasting liquid. This is the only tablet. The associated book explains the science. It’s self-published and not well-organized, but the information is documented and the studies appear solid – solid enough that I tried it, and it’s working in my body. I had my thyroid levels checked before and after taking the supplement, with these results:

The very low TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) before I started the supplement was a sign that my “hot” thyroid nodules were back (confirmed by scan). After taking the iodine supplement, my TSH became normal – a sign that the nodules went away. Insufficient iodine sometimes causes nodules, and sometimes causes hypothyroidism. Iodine supplementation also put my colitis into remission, which I did not expect. I later found this journal article, confirming the link between iodine deficiency and inflammatory bowel disease:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/235826

Brownstein’s book argues persuasively that everyone needs iodine supplementation. It says that the US RDA for iodine is grossly underestimated. Iodized salt (which I’d stopped using right before my nodules came back) does not give enough iodine. The iodine intake levels in Japan are much higher than the US because of the sea vegetables they eat, and their rates of thyroid disease are vastly lower. Your whole body uses iodine. It’s especially used in breast tissue, and prevents breast cancer. It’s also heavily absorbed by the bowel (which is why iodine deficiency can cause inflammatory bowel disease). Even without outright disease from iodine deficiency,  people commonly experience decreased energy levels. Plus iodine keeps certain toxic substances from taking residence in your tissues – a good thing. But for this reason, when you first start taking Iodoral, there can be some detox symptoms.

Here are some links with info:

Iodine: Its Role In Health and Disease
Iodine:  An Important Detoxification Tool – this site sells the gross-tasting liquid version of the iodine I mentioned. You shouldn’t buy this – buy the pill. But the detox information still applies. Iodine has a detoxifying effect on the body which can be uncomfortable at first if you tend to eat a junky diet. I had almost no detox symptoms – just a bit of a headache the first week and nothing after that. But if you read the reviews for the supplement on Amazon, you’ll see some complaints about skin breakouts and feeling crappy (these are the 1-star reviews). These are detox reactions from a lifetime of junk food (the comments explain). It’s temporary, and you’re better off getting the poisons out of you.

Each Iodoral tablet contains 12.5mg of iodine and iodide. A maintenance dose is 0.11mg per pound of body weight. So if you weight, for example, 140 pounds, you’d multiply 140*0.11=15.4mg recommended daily dose. Each pill is 12.5mg. You can cut pills in half, so you could take 1.5 pills. That would give you 18.75mg – a little over, but that’s okay. Taking more than you need is not a problem – you just pee out the extra. So in this case 1.5 pills per day would be your maintenance dose.

But before you can take a maintenance dose, you need to get iodine sufficient. That requires taking more than your maintenance dose for a few months so your iodine-deficient tissues can absorb a baseline of iodine. The book recommends taking 50mg per day (4 pills) for 3 months. You can minimize any detox effects by slowly increasing the dose rather than starting with 50mg per day. This is what I did, except that I found I couldn’t tolerate 50mg (4 pills) per day – it gave me headaches (from iodism), so I cut back to 37.5mg  or 3 pills per day.

I started with half a pill for a week, then a whole pill for a week, then 1.5 pills for a week, then two pills for a week, and then 3 pills per day for 3 months. I probably could have ramped up faster because I experienced almost no detox symptoms.

After 3 months, I took a test for iodine sufficiency. I bought the test kit from here:

Hakala Labs
http://www.hakalalabs.com

The lab is owned by the guy who manufactures and sells Iodoral. It’s a 24-hour urine test. They couldn’t mail the test kit to New York State because of its nanny laws, so I had to have them mail it to Vermont, where I have a PO box. I also bought the bromide test option (to see if that was detoxed out of my body). The results showed I have no bromide in me. But after 3 months I was only halfway to iodine sufficiency (45%), probably because I was taking only 37.5mg per day, and probably also because I have a higher-than-average need for iodine, as evidenced by my family history of thyroid disease (mother, brother, and grandmother also had/have nodules). Had I been iodine sufficient, I’d have dropped to 1 or 1.5 pills per day for life. Since I was not yet, I continued to take 3 pills a day for another 3 or 4 months. I am now iodine sufficient. My thyroid hormone levels remain normal, and my ulcerative colitis is still in remission.

Other Health Impacts

I mentioned at the start of this post that iodine is heavily absorbed in the breasts, as well as the bowel and the thyroid. Brownstein says that iodine supplementation has been successful in treating and preventing fibrocystic breasts, and protecting against breast cancer, and well as various other problems.

I’m not a doctor, so please don’t treat this post as medical advice. I am just passing along information that I found helpful in my own life. I hope it’s helpful to someone else, but please consult your doctor if you have questions.

Windows 8 is the only tablet OS that solidly implements a form of “multitasking”. [[Correction: As discussed in the comments below, I don't really mean "multitasking" here. All the tablet OSs can run tasks in the background. I mean the number of programs that can be displayed and used at once.]] It’s a little primitive – it’s just two apps (unless you use the “workshop” app, and then you can cram a few more in there), and you’re limited to 1/3 and 2/3 of the screen, but it’s way ahead of the competition. Android 4 has the ability to pop up windows and there are some developers writing to that. Also, Samsung has a customization of Android that lets you put certain special Samsung apps on the screen at the same time. But Microsoft’s implementation works with any “modern” tablet app – much more general.

Plus there is the blessed pressure sensitivity of the stylus. Android also has this potential and Samsung has implemented it on one of their tablets as a customization, but it’s not a standard part of the OS yet. You can’t write with a pen for real on any other tablet – it’s just not realistic. I’ve tried. Nor can you do serious art work on a tablet without the exactitude of a digital stylus and pressure sensitivity.

And then, of course, there is the fact that the Surface Pro is an actual, full-powered work computer that connects to your printers and can run all your legacy software. The other tablets have all kinds of kludgy workarounds to enable you to print, and certainly can’t run your legacy Windows software – those programs that are critical for your work.

The Surface Pro is powerful, and the new UI interface is very nice. I suspect a lot of the complaints about it arise for two reasons: (1) Microsoft could not have rolled it out more badly if they tried, between putting Admin apps on the Start screen and taking away the Start button, and (2) The UI is completely new – there is a learning curve to the completely innovative gestures, keystrokes, new menu placements, and basics for how to do stuff. People will be lost at first, and Microsoft did nothing to make this transition easier.

Don’t give up too soon…

With study, I find the touch portion of Windows 8 quite usable – perhaps better than any other tablet. But it’s so unlike anything else that it does require study. You can’t guess at the new gestures and methods. You don’t benefit from transfer of learning, as with other tablet OSs. Perhaps this was a mistake on Microsoft’s part, but perhaps not – it’s very intruitive and easy to use, once you get used to it.

The only serious mistake Microsoft made was in trying to pretend that Windows 8 is one operating system. It’s really two operating systems rolled into one, almost like a dual boot system, but much more seamless. The old desktop OS has to stay for now because of the need for backward compatibility, but that’s no reason to pretend it’s part of the “real” Windows 8.

I think that the Start page should initially contain only modern apps, or that the desktop apps should be very clearly marked as such – perhaps by a special background color for the tiles. The idea that the Start page should substitute for the Start menu in the old desktop was very misguided – mongo, giant, error. Both are needed. As more apps migrate to a modern interface, Microsoft will probably be able to drop the old desktop eventually, but until then, they should present it as the legacy beast it is.

It was also a big mistake to clutter up the Start page with a huge number of desktop system and administrative apps. The touch interface is supposed to be easy and accessible. People will launch these programs just to see what they are and recoil in horror. Really dumb call. Who’s in charge over there??

My take after playing with the Surface Pro all weekend is that there’s a lot of potential here, though there are still some bugs and there’s a big deficit in available apps – especially compared to what’s available for iOS and Android. The Surface Pro is a bit heavy for a tablet and the battery life is a lot shorter than my Nexus 10, but it does way more. It’s sort of an amalgamation of engineering brilliance and management incompetence. There are clearly still some very smart people at Microsoft, but they don’t seem to be the ones in charge.

Bottom line, I like it! I hope that Microsoft fixes the design errors and bugs, and that developers create more apps for it so Windows 8 and the Surface Pro (or its successors) can reach its potential.

I took to the internet to search for an answer, and discovered that I was having this problem because I have multiple accounts, and Outlook 2010 handles junk mail filtering on a per-account basis. But there was mass confusion on how to access the settings for each account. There is no global setting area in the interface.

Even Microsoft MVPs on Microsoft sites were giving misinformation. Many were suggesting that people disable Junk E-mail in the registry. That didn’t sound right to me, and I didn’t want to do it. I do use some pieces of the Junk E-mail feature – the disabling of links and the safe/blocked sender lists. Plus, judging from peoples’ complaints, it seemed like the suggested registry tweak just disabled the interface and not the functionality!

The Solution

After some frustration, I finally found the solution. You don’t have to send email to yourself from each account (I found that erroneous advice online), and it’s not related to whether your accounts all write to the same folder or to different folders (that misinformation came from a Microsoft MVP).

All that matters is what you have set as the default account. One by one, select each account in your account list as the default. Then go to the Outlook Home page (or right click on any message) and set your Junk E-mail Options to “No automatic filtering”. Each time you switch to a different account, you’ll see that the setting is still set to “Low” until you change it to “No automatic filtering”. When you have made each account the default just long enough to change the Junk E-mail setting, you can go back into your account list and change the default back to the account you actually want to use as the default.

I hope the interface has been improved in Outlook 2013. I haven’t seen it. Has it?

I made a $5.90 purchase, and paid with a $20 and a $1 (as I recall). The cashier gave me $5.10 in change, and I said I’d given her a $20. She gave me the additional $10, but looked uncertain, so I offered my phone number in case her drawer was short.

Just then, two men (I believe the owners – they wouldn’t tell me who they were) came out from the back and accused me of stealing $10. I said I was just offering to leave my phone number in case the drawer was short. The short one sneered, “You’d never return the money.” He said I could come downstairs and watch the security video that “proved” I was a thief. It showed the cashier placing my bill in a slot where there now were no $20s. Okay, so either the $20 bill disappeared somehow, or I made an honest mistake. But he wouldn’t let me speak. He said I’d been harrassing the cashier and I called her a cheat. This was completely untrue. We’d been making small talk about salted chocolate, and when she gave me the change I thought she’d made an honest error. But nothing I said mattered. He insisted that I came into the store with the intent to steal, and demanded that I return the $10 or he’d call the police. I gave him the $10 and left.

Karma and Uncooked Muffins

I’ve lived in the West Village for 32 years, and I don’t go around cheating local businesses – or any business. I’ve never been treated like a common criminal before because I’m not a common criminal, and it felt horrible. Who did he think I was? How could this be happening? How could he not even give me a hearing? I’m a middle-class, middle-age woman. I know I don’t look like a thief. As I left, he told me to never come back, which of course I surely won’t.

It’s not good karma to accuse honest neighborhood residents of theft. If the owners of Empire Cake keep doing that, their business won’t last long, and that is how it should be.

I still think I gave the cashier a $20 bill, because I remember looking at it and thinking I should point out this is a $20 since I know cashiers often can’t remember what you gave them. I feel like they stole $10 from me. Why, then, was it not in the register? I don’t know. Perhaps someone pocketed it – perhaps even the owner himself, considering how irrationally he was behaving. Or perhaps I did make a mistake. The one thing I’m sure of is that I am not a thief. I didn’t come into the store with the intent to steal $10, like some delinquent teenager. I came in with the intent to get a chocolate cupcake, and I offered my phone number to the cashier in case her drawer was short. I live only a few blocks away, and I absolutely would have returned the $10 if I had been mistaken.

FYI, don’t buy their muffins. I bought one once, and it was uncooked inside.

Most people are unaware of the dangers of sugary beverages – or the debate from the early 1970s over which dietary factor caused heart disease: sugar or fat (it is sugar, not fat – Ancel Keys is now widely thought to have been wrong).

Read this blog post: Sugar Is Toxic: Heart Disease, Cancer & More. It clearly explains the biochemistry of sugar metabolism, and why large-sized sugary beverages are the greatest threat to health of any food.

I resisted the Kindle for a long time. I read a lot and I’m headache-prone, and those low-contrast early Kindles were not going to work for me. Also, I saw in reviews that Kindle books often lacked the footnotes and indexes of the paper versions. When I had occasion to create a Kindle book I realized why: the format is very limited and inconvenient for publishers.

But then I bought an iPad. The Kindle app is free, so I tried a couple ebooks. For most books I read, footnotes and indexes are not an issue, and I’m chronically low on bookshelf space. I like the built-in dictionary and being able to carry several books in a small package. So now I was sold on ebooks, but the iPad was not the ideal hardware. It’s just heavy enough that I don’t want to carry it around, the screen washes out in bright sunlight, and the battery life is only so-so. I can read books on my Droid X phone, which also has a Kindle app, but that drains the battery fast.

Amazon had dropped the price of the Kindle when the iPad was released, and the new Kindle 3 with its light weight, improved screen contrast, long battery life, and readability in direct sunlight was starting to look pretty good. So I bought one, and I like it a lot. I used it for a few days without reading the manual – the basics are not hard. But once I read the manual and did a little googling, I discovered some interesting things I didn’t know. What follows is a collection of tips and tricks for the Kindle 3 that I found especially useful:

• Viewing PDFs and Other Document Types
• Zapping that Ghost Dictionary in the Archive
• Hotkeys and an Easter Egg
• The Hidden Image Viewer

Viewing PDFs and Other Document Types

One way to put books onto your Kindle is to buy them on Amazon, of course, but that is not the only way. Some free book sites let you download to your Kindle over the air. You also can copy files from your PC directly to your Kindle via USB cable, or email files to your Kindle using a special email address. The email address is the interesting method because it has a special feature: it can be used to convert files in different formats into something the Kindle can read.

Your special Kindle email address is set in the “Manage Your Kindle” area on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/myk). If you have the 3G version, make sure you use username@free.kindle.com and not username@kindle.com so WiFi is used for the transfer, otherwise 3G charges will apply for the transfer. You just create a message and attach the file you want to send to your Kindle; no subject is necessary except in one special circumstance described below.

The Kindle’s native format is based on the MobiPocket format. So in addition to Kindle files (file types .AZW, .AZW1, .AZW2), the Kindle can read unprotected MobiPocket files (file type .MOBI or .PRC) without conversion. The Kindle 3 also can natively read PDFs without conversion, but they don’t display well on the 6″ unit – the type is too small. You can magnify the display, but the lowest magnification, 150%, means the entire page doesn’t fit on the screen, and panning is a pain. You can’t magnify it just enough to fill the margins.

Before the Kindle 3, if you emailed a PDF to yourself it was converted. This is no longer true with the Kindle 3 unless you put the word “Convert” in the subject. Certain other file types will be automatically converted if you email them to your Kindle including HTML, Word, text, rich text, and image files. You don’t have to put “Convert” in the subject for these file types – you don’t need any subject at all. The word "Convert" is only necessary for PDFs that you want converted.

Zapping that Ghost Dictionary in the Archive

Do you have something in your Archive called The New Oxford American Dictionary, though it’s already on your Home page? But the archive version has no author, and when you try to move it to your home page you get the message that it doesn’t exist? So it just sits there annoying you? Here’s how to get rid of it.

Amazon recently made a change so that the Kindle dictionary is not downloaded like other books; it’s built in. But somehow the The New Oxford American Dictionary remained in your list of books. If you go to the the “Manage Your Kindle” area on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/myk), you’ll see it listed in “My Orders”.

Next to every book in “My Orders” is a plus sign. Click on that. Once the title is expanded, you’ll see a button labeled “Delete this title”. Click it. It’s scary, I know, but it’s the right thing to do – promise. After you delete it, reboot your Kindle while connected to WiFi. To reboot, press the Menu button, select Settings, press the Menu button again, then press Restart. Theoretically you also can reboot by sliding the power button to the right for 15 seconds (I haven’t tried this). When your Kindle restarts, you will still have The New Oxford American Dictionary on your Home page, but the ghost in the Archive will be gone.

Hotkeys and an Easter Egg

The Easter Egg is Minesweeper.

The Hidden Image Viewer

I found the information about the image viewer on this Web site. The viewer is a little buggy, but here’s how you set it up.

Connect your Kindle to your PC via USB. Create a new folder at the same level as the other folders called “pictures”. Then inside this folder, create subfolders in which you will put the actual image collections. You can’t put the images directly inside the “pictures” folder. I created two subfolders: “people” and “screenshots”. The Kindle can read .JPG/.JPEG, .GIF, .PNG, and .BMP file types. Copy your image files into the subfolders, then eject the Kindle from the PC. Press Alt+z to add the new image collection folders to the Home page.

When you click on an image collection folder, the image viewer will launch. You can cycle forward and backwards through the pictures using next and previous page buttons. When you move to a new image, it doesn’t refresh properly – you’ll see overwriting from the previous image. I found I could get it to refresh by pressing one of the directional arrows on the 5-way

There are image viewer hotkeys. The rotate works reliably for me, but the others don’t. I was able to zoom in and out initially, but after trying it a couple times it stopped working. Maybe I need to reset my Kindle. Here are the hotkeys, for what it’s worth:

Have you found any other Kindle 3 tips or tricks? Post them here!

I was attracted to the basic concept of this book: an analytic approach to cooking that includes the whys and wherefores, not just the whats. But, for the record, I would like to clarify that as a software engineer I would call myself a “nerd” rather than a “geek”. The word “nerd” derives from the word “drink” spelled backwards. The nerds were the ones who stayed back at the dorm and studied while everyone else went out and got hammered. Geeks, on the other hand, have no special technical or intellectual gifts. They’re just inept – socially and physically uncoordinated, messing up even the simplest tasks.

The first two chapters of this book are targeted towards geeks – people who have never stepped foot inside a kitchen and don’t have any concept of nutrition. The author uses programming code as metaphors for basic cooking concepts. Now who could possibly be this in-the-dark about cooking, and find computer code enlightening as metaphor? They would have to be male. No girl grows up without any exposure to the kitchen. So the target audience is apparently the stereotypical male programmer sitting behind a keyboard 18 hours a day living on pizza and soda pop. I thought these were creatures of the 1980s and now extinct – either dead from the all-pizza diet or evolved into healthier eating, while younger programmers were not spoiled by homemaker mothers into total kitchen ignorance. Perhaps I’m wrong. Are you still out there??

The book gets much better after the first two chapters, which – in the author’s defense – he does say you can skip if you are experienced in the kitchen.

Fun Facts (Mostly Right), Great Recipes

Once you’ve cleared Chapter 2, you are rewarded with countless interesting bits of lore on the science of cooking and eating. For example, I learned I could check my oven temperature (and oven thermometer) with sugar, which melts at 367°F. Who knew? And did you know that salt makes foods taste better by selectively filtering out the taste of bitter?

These are just two examples. The topics cover everything from how taste and smell combine to create flavor to how knives are made. The book is filled with great recipes, too – over 100 of them, organized into categories in the Recipe Index. Between the fun facts and the yummy recipes Cooking for Geeks is truly nerd heaven.

That said, it does fall down in places. Cooking for Geeks is written with an air of authority, as though it’s giving the last scientific word on each issue it addresses. Much of the information is excellent, but it’s not always complete, and in the end it’s just one guy’s opinion.

For example, take the section on pots and pans. The author recommends nonstick frying pans – he himself uses them. I don’t use nonstick cookware ever. I know DuPont says they’re safe – of course they’d say that. But studies show that nonstick pans contain dangerous toxins that are released when the pan is old and the surface starts flaking into your food, or when you heat the pan above medium-low temperature, which people do all the time. Pet birds will drop dead of fumes from an overheated nonstick pan, and the fumes are not so great for humans, either.

The book also contains some bad advice in the section on cast iron cookware. Definitely do not do this (boldface mine):

As with frying pans, when washing cast iron, don’t use soap. Instead, rinse the pan and wipe the inside to dislodge any stuck-on food, and then place the pan back on the stove. If the food is really stuck, throw in a few tablespoons of course [sic] salt and a spoonful or two of vinegar or lemon juice, and “sand” it off with a paper towel.

Never ever put an acid in your cast iron pans unless you have stripped the seasoning and are now trying to remove rust. Vinegar or lemon juice (or tomatoes) will actually dissolve the iron itself, potentially damaging the pan. You shouldn’t cook acidic foods in cast iron, either. Not only can it strip the seasoning and damage the pan, it can cause excessive iron to leach into your food. The coarse salt is a good idea, but use olive oil with the salt, not an acid.

It’s also been my experience (and is logically true) that a mild dish soap will not harm cast iron. As I’ve written in my previous blog posts about stripping and seasoning cast iron, I think the oft-repeated ban on soap arises from a time when soap was homemade from lye and very harsh.

Just Add a Grain of Salt

But let me not get stuck on small nits when there is so much good in this book. If you love good food and you love to understand how things work, check out Cooking for Geeks. You can learn how to make ginger syrup for your own homemade ginger ale. Or check out the 30-second chocolate cake (it really works). Or the many fine main dish recipes. Just treat the book as a starting point for exploration and not biblical truth, and all will be well.

I didn’t like this movie half as much as I thought I would, for two reasons:

(1) The trailer gives away too much.

(2) The part the trailer doesn’t give away is the worst part of the movie.

I actually liked the trailer more than the movie.

What follows is a spoiler, so if you don’t want to know, do not continue reading!

The characters:

Nic – the macho side of the lesbian couple, and not an appealing character at all. She is hypercritical, alcoholic, and relentlessly insensitive to the feelings and needs of her family.

Jules – the more feminine side of the lesbian couple, sensitive but insecure, trying hard.

Paul – the gentle and appealing sperm donor who fathered the couple’s two children, Laser and Joni.

******* SPOILER ALERT: HERE IT COMES! *******

The kids go looking for their biological father – the guy who donated the sperm. He’s a sweet gentle guy, agrees to have his anonymity broken. He falls in love with both kids, and then falls in love with one of their mothers, the persecuted Jules, with whom he has has a torrid affair (she starts it). He’s so gentle and supportive and pleasant that she’s irresistably drawn to him, and you’re with her all the way. He’s way nicer than Nic.

But of course the movie can’t end with the lesbian couple splitting and Jules leaving the nasty, alcoholic, and completely unappealing Nic for the sweet, darling sperm donor. So with no further explanation than “marriage is tough”, she decides to stay with Nic. Paul is rejected by both children and Jules and is left alone and heartbroken – despite the great good he brought into the kids’ lives. For example, he was an effective dad with the boy and got him away from a mean, drug-addled friend who was corrupting him.

So basically, what the lovely sweet Paul gets for no greater sin than being receptive to the advances of both the children and Jules is to be kicked in the balls and completely rejected. He is left alone in his garden looking bereft, after Nic yells at him to go create his own family.

And we are supposed to celebrate this great lesbian marriage now? I left the movie theatre thinking that Nic didn’t deserve Jules, and that the entire group of them had cruelly and selfishly used Paul – just thrown him away like a used tissue when they’d gotten what they needed from him. If Nic and Jules were a heterosexual couple, the movie never would have ended that way. The triumphant end would be Jules’ escape from the horrid Nic.

So I didn’t end up liking the movie at all. But I loved the trailer!

Well, it turns out there are a million different recipes for English muffins, and they vary widely. Some are rolled out and cut like biscuits into circles. Some use a wet batter that is poured into crumpet rings. Some are baked in an oven rather than cooked on a skillet – either partially or completely. Some are cooked in a covered skillet (news flash: that is baking, not skillet cooking).

Judging from reviewer comments, most of the recipes lacked the large holes and sourdough flavor characteristic of English muffins. A few tried to correct this problem by the addition of vinegar for the sour flavor, and baking soda just before cooking to create holes. That sounded like artifice to me so I continued my research, and eventually discovered the authentic source of that characteristic taste and texture. I tested my theory with a recipe of my own creation, and the result was fantastic. Here is my recipe – with pictures!

Homemade English muffin with natural nooks and crannies.

Homemade English muffin, nooks and crannies filled with butter.

Authentic Technique for Authentic Flavor

English muffins – a yeast bread – are a 19^th century American invention. They’re probably called “English muffins” because the recipe is based on classic English crumpets, which have a very similar recipe. English muffins are an Americanized crumpet.

It occurred to me that the best place to look for authentic recipes for English muffins was in cookbooks from the time when they were invented – or at least not long after. I found a great site with links to dozens of cookbooks from 1900-1910, and it was here I found the secret. The 1901 edition of the Settlement Cookbook contains this instruction in its English muffin recipe:

Beat thoroughly, cover, and let rise overnight.

When I saw that, I thought I must have read it wrong. That would cause overproofing. Do they mean, cover and put in the refrigerator? No, that can’t be right. They didn’t have refrigerators in 1901. I looked through several more old cookbooks and saw the same instruction: mix the batter the night before, let it rise overnight, and cook in the morning for breakfast. One recipe even said explicitly to let the batter rise long enough to “collapse in on itself”.

If you’ve ever made bread you’ve heard the warnings about “overproofing”, letting the dough rise so high that it collapses. Bread recipes always warn to never allow this to happen. They say to let the dough rise to double in bulk but no more, or taste and texture are ruined. Would you like to know in what way overproofing ruins taste and texture? It creates a sourdough taste because the yeast eats all the sugar, and it weakens the structure, causing large holes to form. Sounds suspiciously like an English muffin!

The characteristic taste and texture of English muffins appears to be a happy accident, an invention of housewives trying to manage their time by making batter for breakfast bread the night before. It overproofed, but the result was tasty so they went with it.

Neither Molded Nor Rolled

Drop globs of dough in corn meal to form the muffins.

I read dozens of recipes for English muffins and crumpets, comparing the ingredients and – most importantly – the ratio of liquid to flour. In some the dough has the consistency of regular bread dough, and is rolled and cut into biscuits. Others are too liquid to hold together without support, and the dough – batter, really – is spooned into crumpet rings. But I wasn’t looking to make rolls with a bread-like texture, nor was I looking to make crumpets.

I settled on something in between: a gooey batter that wasn’t liquid, but also wasn’t firm enough to roll out. In my first effort I spooned the batter into crumpet rings, but I didn’t like the result. The shape wasn’t quite right. (Also, I set the temperature of the skillet too high so the outside was overcooked.)

When the ring experiment failed, I went back to the internet for a little more research and came across a recipe I hadn’t seen before. Like the old cookbooks, it said to make the batter the night before, let it proof overnight, then cook it in the morning. I knew this part was right.

The recipe produced dough with the same gooey consistency as my recipe, with an interesting twist: a no-ring, no-roll muffin-forming technique. The muffins were formed by dropping globs of batter into a bowl of cornmeal. Great idea! The photographs showed a final result that looked how English muffins are supposed to look. I didn’t use the ingredients listed in this recipe, but I used the technique and the results were perfect.

The Recipe

Let the formed muffins rise for about 30 minutes before cooking.

Turn over the muffins when the first side is browned – 10 to 20 minutes.

Let the muffins cool completely so they’re not doughy inside.

Split muffins for toasting by pulling apart with your fingers.

This recipe makes six muffins. You can halve it or double it if you want a different quantity.

• 1 cup milk
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 tbsp sugar or honey
• 1 packet (2¼ tsp) dry yeast
• 2 cups flour
• ½ tsp salt

Heat the milk to simmering, then drop in the butter and the sugar or honey. Stir so they melt and combine, and let the mixture cool. When it’s lukewarm, sprinkle in the yeast, stir, and let it sit for 10 minutes until bubbly. Don’t use an aluminum bowl because that can interfere with the yeast. Glass is best.

While that’s happening, measure out the flour and salt and mix together well. When the yeast mixture is bubbly, add the flour and beat vigorously for a couple minutes. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit on the counter (not in the refrigerator) overnight. It will overproof – rise and collapse. This is what creates the English muffin’s characteristic sourdough taste and large bubbles.

In the morning, scrape the sides of the bowl with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula and remix a little. Then use a spatula and spoon to drop muffin-size globs into a small bowl of cornmeal, as pictured in the previous section. Don’t try to handle the dough – it’s too sticky. Lift each muffin glob from the cornmeal with a slotted spatula, shake off the excess, and place in an ungreased skillet.

When the skillet is full, cover it (with a glass top, if you have one), and let the muffins rise for 30 minutes. They won’t rise much at this point because all the sugar has been eaten by the yeast, but they’ll puff up a little more when they start to cook. Remove the lid before cooking!

Set your stove’s burner to medium-low. If it’s electric, let the burner preheat. If you have an electric skillet, you’ll have to let the muffins rise somewhere else so you can preheat it. I’ve read that electric skillets should be set to 300°F, but I don’t have one so I can’t verify that. I used a cast iron pan and set the burner to medium-low.

Warning: don’t set the temperature too high. The muffins have to cook slowly or the inside will be doughy while the outside is burned. Don’t crank up the heat because it’s not sizzling. It’s not supposed to sizzle. Just because it’s not making any noise doesn’t mean it’s not doing anything. It’s cooking.

The muffins can take anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes per side, depending on how high you set the skillet temperature. Turn them over when the first side is browned.

When the second side is browned, remove the muffins to a cooling rack and let them cool completely. If you don’t let them cool, they will be doughy inside. Also, they taste best if they are fully cooled and then toasted. Split them for toasting by pulling them apart with your fingers, rather than cutting with a knife. This maximizes the nooks and crannies that are so great for holding butter and jam.

English muffins are a quick and easy breakfast because they were designed to be quick and easy. The batter is made the night before, and no rolling is required. You mix everything together, go to sleep, then cook them up in the morning. Overproofing is what gives the characteristic taste and texture – no vinegar or baking soda required!

Carbon is the black stuff that’s left after something is burned. A certain amount of carbon gets bound up in the polymerized fat when food is cooked in the pan. This may darken the pan, but does it make it more nonstick? Some say it does, though I don’t see the mechanism.

More interesting to me is the third element: magnetite.

Black Rust is Protective

Magnetite is an oxidized iron, also called “black rust” or “black iron oxide”. It’s magnetic; lodestones are magnetite. Chemically magnetite is Fe₃O₄. Red rust (or “hematite”) is Fe₂O₃.

Well, that may not be what it is chemically. I also read this:

“…it is not Fe₃O₄, but rather FeO. Fe₃O₄ is a common term denoting the what you have is not pure “black rust” but rather a combination of Fe₂O₃ (red rust) and FeO. Fe₂O₃ + FeO = Fe₃O₄, technically inaccurate, but not all that important.”

Here’s a good overview of the different types of rust (from the perspective of car bodies): Water + Steel = Rust.

Unlike red rust, black rust is protective and prevents corrosion. Also, things bond better to magnetite than bare iron (for example, polymerized fat). Black rust is not sufficient by itself to protect cast iron from corrosion. It must be insulated from air and water with a layer of oil, and also it’s easily removed. But when black rust is bound up in polymerized fat, the result is probably a better seasoning.

How to Create Black Rust

So how do you get magnetite on your cast iron cookware? Black rust forms on iron that’s under water or otherwise in a low oxygen environment. The type of oxidation you get on iron depends on how much oxygen there is – lots and you get red rust, not too much and you get black rust (magnetite).

There are chemical products you can buy that convert red rust to black rust, but these are generally toxic – not something you want to put on cookware.

It may be possible to convert a thin layer of red rust to black rust by boiling the pan, then drying in the oven and immediately coating in oil (before the black rust turns back into red rust). This is the traditional way of “bluing” a gun. But you have to have just the right amount of red rust to start with, and there are many other factors that are hard to control.

Heating accelerates the creation of magnetite (and many other chemical reactions). A home oven can’t create the ideal temperatures, which would melt the pan, anyway, but heating at even 450°F may encourage some magnetite to form. Many people put bare cast iron in the oven at high temperature for an hour before adding oil for seasoning because it blackens the pan. I thought this was just aesthetic, but now I realize it may create a layer of magnetite.

It also may be that the reason cast iron seasoning darkens with use from brown to black is because repeated heating causes magnetite to form. Many think pans darken over time because carbon from burnt food gets bound up in the polymerized fat, but I think it’s more likely magnetite that gets bound up. Or maybe it’s both.

So to my previous advice on how to season cast iron, I’d add the advice to heat the pan first, before smearing oil, at 450°F for an hour. This will bind magnetite into the polymerized fat of your seasoning. The polymerized fat will bind better to the pan, and your pan will be better protected from corrosion.

I can’t think why magnetite or carbon bound up in the polymerized fat would make the seasoning more nonstick, as some say it does. But maybe I’m missing something. If there’s a reason I’m not seeing, I’d be interested to hear it!