Muffins

When developing our muffin recipe, we wanted to wind up with a muffin with a rich, full flavor and a thick, crisp crust protecting its fragile, tender crumb. We wanted our muffin recipe to produce a real beauty, sporting a perfectly round, mushroom-like cap with a pronounced and crisp overhang. We began by testing mixing techniques and chose creaming, which produced the most tender crumb. Liquids were up next, and we found that low-fat yogurt delivered the finest crumb and the most rounded and crusty top. To get that big mushroom-like cap, we increased the amount of batter by one-third.

To tame the harsh bite of the cranberries found in most cranberry-nut muffins, we chopped the cranberries in a food processor and tossed them with confectioners’ sugar and a little salt (which we often use to tame the bitterness in eggplant). As for the nuts, we took a cue from cakes made with nut flour and augmented some of the all-purpose flour with pecan flour (made by grinding pecans in a food processor). But because we were working with less flour, our muffins spread rather than baking up tall and self-contained. We fixed the problem by letting the batter rest for 30 minutes.

The problems with most real whole wheat muffins are multiple: they’re heavy, dense and even slightly bitter, unless they contain a ton of sugar. Which explains why many “whole wheat” recipes call for wheat and white flour.