click to enlarge - Jordan Barry ©️ Seven Days
- Breakfast sandwich with Birch Hill English Muffins
When Vermont Bread abruptly closed in April 2021, I stuffed my chest freezer with packs of the Brattleboro-based bakery's English muffins. A year later, rations depleted, I felt the local muffin void. And I wasn't the only one.
"They had become part of our routine," Eric Hill of Jericho said. "We ate those English muffins at least two or three times a week."
Hill and his wife, Sarah Marianacci, wanted something better than the standard grocery store brand that touts its "nooks & crannies." So he purchased English muffin rings — the metal molds that give the muffins their shape — and tried making a batch. The result "looked a mess," he said. But countless YouTube videos later, he had his own recipe dialed in.
Now, the couple's Birch Hill English Muffins are my new staple and a serious upgrade, even from my previous favorites. If the grocery store brand's muffins resemble hockey pucks, Birch Hill's are closer to the size of curling stones and as light as the whooshing of the brooms that sweep them down the ice. The original features organic flour, Cabot Creamery butter and Monument Farms Dairy milk; the garlic-and-herb variety adds an aromatic combo of rosemary and thyme.
Each muffin is filled with "flavor craters" — Hill's way of avoiding a trademarked phrase — that capture every drip of melty peanut butter, drizzle of maple syrup or drop of runny egg.
Hill and Marianacci got their home bakery certified and launched their biz — named for the hill behind their 1830s farmhouse — at the Jericho Farmers Market in May 2022. Their investment was minimal: insurance, licensing, a single electric griddle, a small KitchenAid mixer, and a tent and table for their biweekly market setup.
"I'm not a risk taker," Hill said. "We thought, If this is a flop, then we had a bit of fun."
They hoped to sell 30 four-packs at the first market. By the end of the day, they'd sold 62. Almost a year later, Birch Hill has expanded to 13 retailers, including Jericho Center Country Store, Sweet Clover Market in Essex and both locations of Burlington's City Market, Onion River Co-op. The couple will vend alternating weeks at the Jericho and Burlington farmers markets this summer.
Hill left his corporate job to work full time on the biz, baking three days a week for a total of 450 to 600 four-packs. Marianacci handles the marketing in addition to her day job as consumer and market insights manager at Ben & Jerry's. Recently, they upgraded from a KitchenAid to a 30-quart spiral mixer, thanks to revenue from members of their 22-week winter CSA.
The home bakery has spread from the kitchen into the couple's dining room, where six electric griddles fill the dinner table, each fitting a dozen muffins at a time. (The muffins are cooked entirely on the griddles, not in ovens.) That setup frequently tripped the old farmhouse's breaker, so they brought in an electrician to do some rewiring.
Retail outlets carry Birch Hill's two standard flavors, original and garlic-and-herb, for $6 per four-pack. Special flavors such as the Local, which contains locally grown whole-wheat flour and Vermont maple syrup, are available online as part of a mix-and-match set of three four-packs ($20) and at the farmers markets ($8 per four-pack).
"I want them to be the English muffin for everybody," Hill said, "not just people who can afford something nicer."
I'd say Birch Hill's sky-high, golden brown, crispy-on-the-outside-and-fluffy-on-the-inside English muffins are a deal at any price.
Small Pleasures is an occasional column that features delicious and distinctive Vermont-made food or drinks that pack a punch. Send us your favorite little bites or sips with big payoff at [email protected].