English Muffins- experiment 1, not so great

I do so love an English muffin.  A lot of people talk about the nooks and crannies and how it's the butter inside those nooks and crannies that makes an English muffin stand out amongst a crowd of biscuits.  For me, it's not just nooks and crannies- it's everything that an English muffin becomes. 

A stage for eggs benedict, a platform for my version of bagels and lox, and a simple way to enjoy butter and jam without eating it with just a spoon.

When I decided to try English muffin recipes, I went with the All Recipes version found here.  I of course changed the recipe a little:  I substituted 4 cups of the 6 cups of flour for whole wheat flour and salted butter for shortening.   Maybe if I had followed the recipe to the letter of the law, it would have come out better.  But let's digress a little on what I didn't like.

This recipe came out more dense than I would have liked; a partial by-product, I'm sure, of using whole wheat flour.  It tends to give you a denser texture than regular flour.  However, the proportion of liquid to dry seemed off to begin with and I had to add a little water and a little flour to get the dough texture just right.  In addition, the dough was really kind of tough.  I think I probably overworked the dough in an attempt to get it to flatten and combine the way it should have.  But ultimately, even if I had worked the dough less or used a different kind of flour, I'm fairly certain, even from the reviews, that I would only have gotten me "kind of" close to where I wanted to be with these English muffins. 

Next week, I'll be trying this recipe.  It's a completely different method, but the reviews have been fantastic thus far.  Plus, who better to trust on the scientific end of baking than Alton Brown?