Hello. Hello! Some housekeeping.
It is springtime! Fascinating. Snow has killed my daffodils and lilacs and also, I suspect, a raccoon under my porch. Less fascinating.
I am currently and exactly 42% of the way through an 8-week stretch of Life, capital-L, that involves a lot of travel and Easter and visitors and solo parenting and Passover and a lot of packing and a lot of dear, dear people - all things that bring me a lot of joy BUT ALSO all things that encourage something of a high-stress, less-than-best version of myself to emerge. (I’m working on it!) (A lie.) This space will be a little quieter as a result, but - whether you are understanding and unbothered OR you simply have low expectations of me! - I am super grateful for your kindness and patience, either way.
Today’s issue has no original recipe in it, but Links to many others, and it does have a hefty Butterpat to make up for it.
Today’s issue also has no meatballs in it - that header, too, was a small lie. But it was a promise of things to come: a thick, juicy Meatball 101 is coming your way later this week, or early next.
Today’s issue is small, but mighty, and all about muffins. Even if you hit up every single section, it should only take you about 6 minutes to read, and who doesn’t love muffins?, so don’t skip it.
Reader Q(’s!).
Question: “I like to make a batch of muffins each week to take in the car for quick/easy breakfasts, but no matter how I store them, they’re dry and crumbly even the first day after baking. Suggestions for a better recipe?” - L.C., Las Vegas
Answer: It actually might not be the recipe that’s causing that crumbliness - it could be retrogradation (which we discussed in the body of this issue). When starches are cooked and then cooled, they undergo pretty drastic chemical and physical changes that alter their texture over time: the starch molecules form a rigid crystalline structure that gives them a dry, crumbly mouthfeel. You can’t undo retrogradation, but by warming your muffin just a little, you can soften that structure quite a bit (depends on your muffin size and your mic, but 10-20 seconds should do it). Your recipe’s fat of choice might also be the culprit: fats that are solid at room temperature (butter, ghee, coconut oil, rendered animal fats like tallow or lard) will return to a solid state as your baked goods cool, and they can lend a stiffness to your muffin’s crumb structure that we often interpret as “dry.” Again, a quick zap in the microwave or pass through a toaster will solve your problem: the fat that was incorporated into the batter will melt, and the crumb’s plushness will return. If you don’t want to reheat it (??? - I dunno, but people have their reasons I guess) you could consider switching to a recipe that uses a liquid fat, like oil or yogurt, OR explore recipes for muffins that use fruit or vegetables instead of fat for moisture and tenderness (applesauce, sweet potato, or banana muffins, for example).
Question: “Anytime I bake anything in a muffin tin, it eventually overflows and floods my oven and makes a mess. What what what am I doing wrong?” - anonymous, via Instagram
Answer: This could be caused by so many things, but here are a handful of troubleshoots. First: do not overfill the wells of your pan. If your finished, raw mixture has the consistency of batter - it flows, like liquid - then your cups should not be more than 2/3 full. If the mixture if thick, like a dough - it holds shape when scooped - then your cups can be completely full, with dough even mounding up over them a little bit, but not by more than 1/2” or so. Next: check your chemical leaveners! Baking soda and baking powder are not interchangeable in quickbreads, especially if your recipe calls for an acid (like lemon juice or yogurt), and if you’ve used the wrong leavener OR too much of one, you could be triggering the chemical reaction that causes the batter to rise/lift before the gluten gets hot enough to set and hold it - causing massive messy spillovers. Another possibility: your oven is too cold. You want your oven to be hot enough to set the batter that’s touching the sides of the muffin cup very quickly - this gives the baking muffin structure, so that when the well of batter in the center gets warm enough to rise and set, it has sturdy sides to hold it up. You should be baking your muffins at about 425F (mini-muffins at 375F) - and checking your oven temp with a thermometer, because many run cool. (Silicone muffin cups or pans can cause this problem, as well, because silicone is such a poor conductor of heat - it is insulating the muffin batter, rather than quick-cooking the sides.) If you’re using a stand mixer, that could also be causing your troubles: they need to be calibrated to ensure that they’re blending everything thoroughly. And even if your machine is calibrated, you still want to be pausing the mixer to scrape the bowl once or twice per step as you execute your recipe: areas of un-mixed egg, sugar, leavener, and/or butter can all cause messy blowouts in baked goods. And lastly, if none of the above are solving your probs, you can try using bread flour: the higher gluten content gives the dough or batter more strength, which will result in stability as it rises during baking.
Links
I love muffins: they’re easy, they’re crowd-pleasing, they freeze well, they toast well, you can put whatever the hell you want in them, they often feel like a decadent indulgence even when they’re quite wholesome, they warmly welcome a pat of cold butter with open arms. While there are sad specimens, surely, the category as a whole is one I adore. I cannot choose a favorite, where recipes are concerned, so here’s a slew of tried and trues.
This recipe is not actually for muffins, but it makes excellent ones if you crank the temperature up to 425F. The base recipe here is really perfect, and it receives swaps very well: as long as the amount and the consistency of the puree stays the same, you can sub in winter squash, apples, bananas, sweet potatoes, whatever you want. (A thing worth noting: Deb does mention that you can make muffins instead of a loaf if you want to, and says that they should take about 25 minutes to bake - but she does NOT suggest increasing the oven temperature. I DO raise it to 425F, and they still take 25 minutes to bake.)
These are, currently, my favorite blueberry muffins. The original full-batch recipe is in Michelle’s book (which is excellent) but I love that Erin scaled it down to make a smaller batch; there are four people in my house, but even we don’t always need a dozen-plus muffins at once. That said, I find her yield a little off: I get six muffins that don’t feel in any way skimpy, when she expects four. And if you’d like a yield that’s a little in-between, you can 1.5x this recipe well: nine perfect muffins, every time.
These are my formerly favorite blueberry muffins, and despite being recently unseated by the ones above, they’re still really really great. If you like big, fluffy, carb-coma muffins that have the plush interior of a biscuit or scone rather than the more chewy-tender texture of a quickbread, this is The One.
Cornbread muffins are so underrated and far too often left out of the Best Muffins discussion.
Speaking of “underrated,” spinach muffins are probably a hard sell, but my friend HeeJee’s recipe can not be bested. (I work for a spinach company, so trust me: I have tried. These reign supreme.) They are super plush and tender, and an especially big hit with kids. She includes notes for minis and for full-sized muffins, and FWIW, I think they bake up just fine without the coconut flakes OR almond flour, so feel free to omit.
Butterpat.
A little something extra.
Blueberry muffin recipes are often really finicky and fussy about what kind of blueberries to use, or when to add them. Store-bought frozen blueberries are subject to processes during packaging that can damage their cell walls, causing them to leak lots of (flavorful, beautifully purple, but still problematic) liquid during thawing - which can lead to soggy, gummy muffins. What’s more, the anthocyanins that give the berry juice its gorgeous color can react with alkaline leaveners, staining your muffins an unappetizing bluish-green. And while frozen produce is often just as nutritionally valuable as its fresh counterparts, it’s also often packaged from the produce that wasn’t up to fresh-grocery snuff: over- or under-ripe, or somewhat damaged.
Fresh blueberries, on the other hand, are often larger than their packaged frozen counterparts, and this excess weight can cause them to sink in the warm batter or dough before it sets - some recipes even have you par-bake a tiny portion of plain batter in each cup to support the berries, before mixing them into the remaining batter and quickly portioning it into the hot cups. (That, truly, is a mania.) The tenderness of fresh berries, too, can be especially problematic in the assembly stage, when folding them into a thick batter or dough can cause them to smash and rupture.
So, this week’s Butterpat, my gift to you: buy fresh blueberries and freeze them yourself, and use them in every blueberry muffin recipe you ever try, forever and ever.
Here’s why:
You get the quality of fresh with the convenience of frozen - without any commercial processing to damage the plant cells.
Because the berries will freeze so quickly and with such little structural damage, you can even thaw them without worry - they won’t weep juice everywhere.
Clean, dry, unprocessed berries will freeze rock solid - even the paddle attachment of a stand mixer can’t damage them while folding them into a stiff dough. Your dough (or batter) remains pristine - and that’s really hard to achieve with both fresh and commercially frozen berries.
The best part: these big, frozen berries with perfectly intact skins don’t need to be rushed right into the oven. They’ll take a long time to thaw, and even if they do, they’re not weeping juice. Which means that it’s OK to rest your batter or dough once the berries have been added.
And here’s why THAT’S great:
Rested dough is hydrated dough, and that means more tender muffins.
The frozen berries will chill and stiffen the dough or batter very quickly, making it easier to portion and scoop.
The stiffer batter can support more weight - meaning that you can pack more berries into your muffins. By swapping in fresh-frozen and letting the dough rest for just 5-7 minutes before portioning, you can increase the volume of berries by 50%.
The stiffer batter will also keep the berries from sinking quite as much; you can see in the photos above that a few berries settle into jammy pockets at the bottom, but it doesn’t overwhelm the base, and there’s still plenty floating throughout the muffins and remaining at the tops and sides.
The colder batter will warm more slowly in the oven - meaning that the edges will set faster than the center, and as explained in the Reader Q’s above, that girds against blowouts and spillovers, AND results in the loftiest, fluffiest muffins with tall, peaky domes.
See? Science: freeze your own berries, have better, fluffier, taller, tenderer, jammier, berry-er muffins. Rinse and dry the berries and freeze them on a sheet pan, in a bag, or right in the clamshell you bought them in; as long as they’re dry, they won’t clump or stick, and you can take what you need as you go. A handy hack for the too-many quarts that will be coming home from U-Pick farms in a few short months.
If this snow ever melts, that is. xo.