Food Inc.
In the past century, the food companies (Food Inc) created and promoted recipes for their overly processed products. The touted convenience of using these factory goods overlooked the bother of buying and storing them in the family pantry. It’s likely a few of these factory recipes are in your recipe collection.
For example, our favorite bran muffin recipe used two kinds of packaged bran cereal. It also bothered me that the recipe wasn’t all that healthy—it used white flour and quite a bit of sugar.
So, a couple of weeks ago, as a recipe for the post on Natural Snacks, I decided to compose a totally healthy bran muffin recipe that tasted as good but used wholesome ingredients and minimal sugar. I thought I’d be done in a couple of days but it wasn’t that easy.
I learned a few lessons (see below), but here is the recipe that finally won the beautiful wife’s approval. (For convenience I wrote the recipe to use our cupcake pan, rather than the larger muffin tins.) The recipe uses ingredients found in most homes.
Skip’s Bran Nut Muffins (1 dozen, cupcake size)
Ingredients:
- ¾ C wheat bran
- ¼ C oatmea
- ½ C whole wheat flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp salt (¼ tsp rounded if butter is salted)
- ½ C raisins, or chopped dates
- 2/3 C walnuts, chopped
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- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 C buttermilk (or make your own by placing 1 T lemon juice or vinegar in measuring cup and add milk to make 1 C; let sit 10 minutes).
- ½ C turbinado sugar (or dark brown sugar, or honey)
- ¼ C butter, melted (1/2 cube) or organic cold-pressed canola oil.
- 1 tsp vanilla
Directions:
- Turn on oven to 350 F. Prepare buttermilk if needed.
- Combine dry ingredients.
- Combine wet ingredients. (If you plan to keep the muffins several days, double the fat to maintain moisture.)
- Stir together just enough to mix.
- Place foil muffin liners in cupcake pan. Fill cups 2/3 full. (I prefer the foil liners as the paper liners were a little oily on the bottom.) You can fill the cups fuller to get a “muffin top,” but you’ll want to oil the pan to prevent sticking.
- Bake immediately, 18-20 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
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Lessons Learned
I learned a few things in the process of developing this recipe. For example, it’s not that easy to create a recipe. My first attempts got terrible reviews from the tasting panel, including this dagger to a cook’s heart: “tastes like cardboard.”
Lesson #1 Leavening: Baking powder and baking soda both leaven quick breads (by making carbon dioxide bubbles) but I was confused which to use when. Here’s the rule: Use baking soda if other ingredients are acidic (buttermilk, yogurt, honey, lemon juice, or vinegar). The acid activates the baking soda and in turn the baking soda neutralizes the acid. (Kind of like a good marriage.) It’s important to note that baking soda starts acting when the ingredients are mixed so you need to bake right away, or include some baking powder.
Baking powder is simply baking soda mixed with an acid producer (cream of tartar), and some cornstarch (extends shelf life by absorbing moisture). Oven heat activates baking powder. Use baking powder where you don’t have acid ingredients, or when you plan to bake later. For example, if you want to refrigerate them overnight and pop them in the oven the next morning, include 1 tsp baking powder.
Lesson #2 Soggy bottoms: I used a lot of wheat bran in the recipe for the fiber, minerals and antioxidants, but my muffins kept coming out soggy on the bottom. The problem was the fiber in wheat bran is 80% insoluble. For a muffin that was moist but not soggy, I needed some soluble fiber. Oatmeal has the most soluble fiber of any grain and ¼ cup made for a nice bottom.
Lesson #3 Texture: Bran muffins shouldn’t be too crumbly, nor should they be too tough. It’s the gluten in the wheat flour that makes them stick together. In recipes that are supposed to crumble, you first combine the flour with the butter (it’s referred to as “cutting in”). The fat of the butter coats the flour and restricts the effect of the gluten.
In bran muffin recipes you mix melted butter (or oil) first with the sugar and wet ingredients, them fold it into the flour and dry ingredients with minimal stirring. This seems to give a good muffin texture. You can reduce the crumbs by adding 1 T gluten (the protein that holds bread together). I tried it both ways but got a texture the BW liked without added gluten.
Lesson #4 Spices: A few recipes include cinnamon and nutmeg. We tried it with and without and much preferred the natural bran taste with just vanilla. Some recipes include a little grated orange peel. This is easier to do if you use a lot of sugar because it offsets the tartness of the orange peel. Because we used minimal sugar, we skipped the orange peel but some may prefer it.