What is a muffin?

06/25/08

What is a muffin?

Filed under: Blog— by joe @ 11:06:29 am Permalink

The Dictionary of American Regional English defines a muffin this way: "A small cake; a cupcake." And indeed most people, if asked on the street what a muffin most closely resembles, would probably say the same thing. Certainly there are a lot of cakey muffins out there (especially these days), but how accurate is that? Let's take the base components of this blueberry muffin recipe:

15 ounces flour
5 ounces butter
7 ounces sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups yogurt

...and compare them to the base components of Rose Levy Berenbaum's basic yellow butter cake (I've doubled the quantity for the purposes of comparison):

14 ounces flour
12 ounces butter
14 ounces sugar
8 eggs
1 1/3 cups sour cream

The flour weight is just about the same, but relative to that we can see that there's a whole lot of just about everything else: double or more of the butter and sugar, and quadruple the eggs.

What does it mean? Firstly, it means that a cake is a much more delicate, sweet and tender affair than a muffin. Relative to everything that a cake batter has to lift (lots of butter and sugar) it has very little flour. Cake makers compensate for the scarcity of wheat-based building material by employing a unique mixing method (the creaming method) that seeks to develop at least some of the gluten in the cake flour, then use eggs to make up the rest of the structure.

Muffins don't need all those eggs since there's plenty of flour in the mix (literally). The danger there, however, is that because of all that flour, gluten can develop and make the muffin tough. The solution to that problem, for muffin makers, is to employ a mixing method that agitates the ingredients as little as humanly possible: the muffin method. A well mixed muffin is one that's agitated only to the point that the ingredients are fully moistened. Even distribution of fat and leavening is somewhat beside the point, which is why muffins have a much more irregular crumb than a slice of cake. But more on that tomorrow.

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