English Muffins Worth Traveling For

For years, our deli manager and buyer, Elyse Hoang, drove thirty-five minutes to Phinney Ridge for English muffins. Not for loaves or pastries — for English muffins, the thing most of us grab at the supermarket without thinking. That’s the first thing to know about Ben’s Bread: they make an English muffin worth the drive. The second thing: now you don’t have to. They’re on our shelves downtown.

Ben Campbell learned bread the hard way. As a line cook at Lark, he was handed a job he’d never done — start an in-house bread program. Within two years the restaurant was baking ten kinds of bread. He went on to run bread for Renée Erickson’s Sea Creatures restaurants and was an early advocate for Washington-grown grain. He ran Ben’s Bread as a pop-up for eight years before opening his family-run Phinney Ridge bakery in 2023. In 2024, the James Beard Foundation named him a semifinalist for Outstanding Baker. The muffins have been on the menu since day one: 100% naturally leavened, made with local flours from Cairnspring Mills and Shepherd’s Grain, and griddled in (a lot of) clarified butter. “Perfectly squidgy, tangy, and sour,” Elyse says. All those nooks are there to hold butter and jam.

For the butter, we like Little Island Creamery, a small farm on Puget Island in the lower Columbia River. Dick McDonald, a Washington native and career economist, retired to the island and kept eyeing the big white barn for sale across the highway. He bought the farm in 2010, restored its 1946 barn, and opened the creamery in 2015 with his sister Kathleen. Their purebred Jersey cows give milk high in butterfat. You can see it in the butter, which comes out deep gold, in small batches.

Then the jam. We’ve carried Girl Meets Dirt for years. Audra Lawlor cooks fruit on Orcas Island, much of it from trees planted more than a century ago. She taught herself to make jam the summer her Shiro plum tree dropped 150 pounds. She works with island farmers and uses no pectin, stirring until the preserves set on their own sugar and acid. The fruit tastes like fruit. Start with Orcas Pear — island pears cooked rosy with bay leaves from her garden.

Fork-split a muffin, toast it, butter it while it’s hot, and finish with a spoonful of pear jam. Three Washington makers on one plate — no thirty-five-minute drive required.

Bens’s Bread Co Sourdough English Muffins, 4ct
Little Island Creamery Butter, 8oz
Girl Meets Dirt Orcas Pear, 7.75oz