Don't let your vessel constrict you
this is about muffins
Much like many other people, I keep a folder of recipes that I have come across on Instagram that functions partially as a to-do list and partially as cooking inspiration. Some of these posts or reels are from people who I trust (shoutout to Deb Pearlman) and others are from people who I have never heard of before, but who pop up in my algorithm because I am the type of person who likes and saves food and recipe content. The Al Gore Rythmn has my number as it were. But one thing that irks me is that a lot of these randos I am being served are not necessarily sharing recipes that pass the smell (or taste) test. Recipe writing and developing is hard work and requires a lot of knowledge and experience and in a world where everyone wants to be an influencer RIGHT FUCKING NOW it seems like a lot of people are skipping the knowledge and experience part and are either making stuff up or using other recipes as a base without really understanding them or are just straight up not good at explaining themselves.
I watch a good amount of YouTube (omg she’s so YOUTHFUL) and one of the cutie lil gen z gals I watch (Gabi Belle) made a video recently where she baked a bunch of stuff from her saved recipes over the course of a week. Her regular content is not usually food related, and although she does occasionally bake or cook on the channel, she mostly does pop culture commentary (I follow several smart gen z women who keep me up to date on things I otherwise would not encounter, like random tik tok trends). All this is to say that I have watched her bake before and she is a very competant at home baker. Anways, all of the recipes she chose were all like “so easy”, “insanely easy”, “even a small child with no motor skills could do this”, etc, and for the most part they were ok, but there was a bread recipe that she followed that was truly egrigious. It was basically for an enriched type bread (eggs, butter, and/or milk are in there) where they never said to use a mixer and never mentioned anything about taking the dough to the window pane stage and it was all very frustrating to watch. I would never make a bread dough that needed that much kneading (HA) by hand because I have made all sorts of enriched breads where the mixing time in the mixer is minimum 15 minutes, which would take even longer by hand. So she was just working with a crazy looking dough and while the buns turned out edible I know that given proper instructions she could have actually made something quite lovely.
There is a reason I have provided you with so much context around my YouTube habits and that is because all of this made me look very fondly at my collection of cookbooks.
She is small but mighty, and I have made many delicious things with the help of all these great cooks and bakers. This is because cookbooks have professional editors, and recipe testers, and photographers, all of which work together to make a recipe that someone without training can follow and end up with a successful outcome. Now, that does not make all cookbooks perfect and all recipes from online bad. Just yesterday I utilized both! Internet recipe for dinner and cookbook recipe for muffins. The online recipe was great, but it was also from a source that I trust (Food52 is a great resource) and so I think like all things, media literacy and an ability to read critically can make or break your dinner. There were still things in that recipe that I would adjust (longer cooking time for a thicker and more velvety sauce) but this is something a lot of recipes get wrong because they don’t want to scare you with multiple hours of cooking time (I think). The cookbook recipe I used was also great, and this is the one I want to dig into a bit more, because I am giving more weight to the medium, and I want to illustrate that using a trusted and well-researched source, written by a professional who was appropriately compensated for their work, can be a better jumping off point, especially for someone new to cooking or baking.
You know the story, I had four brown bananas on my counter and my goal was to not have them end up in my freezer for an extended period of time so banana bread it is. Except I didn’t want a loaf, I wanted muffins. This is no big deal, any banana bread recipe can be a banana muffin recipe, don’t let your vessel constrict you. So, I looked through my cookbooks and decided I would use the banana bread recipe from Sohla El-Waylly’s 2023 cookbook called Start Here (A Very Banana-y Banana Bread, pg 310). This is a great cookbook if your collection is a bit sparse and you are looking to beef it up with something that covers both cooking and baking. This is a tome but it is full of incredibly useful information (she presents it as an alternative to culinary school) and I personally love the very last section of the book titled “Putting It All Together” where she uses recipes from the book to create a themed menu. Some examples of the themes are: Comfort food you can cry into, Cocktail party for friends you want to impress, and For steamy summer nights. It is really so thoughtful and warm and fun - I highly suggest adding a copy to your shelf. Sohla is also an example of someone who puts fire recipes on her IG, she is worth a follow (not sure this is news to anyone here, but perhaps some of you are unfamiliar with her game!) Sohla writes very detailed recipes full of hot tips, she helpfully provides volume and weight measurements, lets you know what equipment you need, and also has several troubleshooting sections throughout the book, as well as a sidebar called “get loose” where she gives ideas for playing on the initial recipe with different flavours or techniques. This is why I know she wouldn’t mind me making muffins instead of bread - I let loose like Loosey Leduca.
Her banana bread recipe is pretty normal but there were a couple of cool things about it. First of all, it uses brown butter, but you don’t add it in in its liquid state, you let it cool and then you cream your butter and sugar as you normally would. We used this same method at my last job for the chocolate chip cookies, and it was helpful because you could make a big batch of brown butter and then keep it in the fridge until needed. Sohla makes sure to tell you why you are utilizing the creaming method - air is an ingredient and creaming butter and sugar adds a ton of air which gives you that fluffy texture - letting you know where in the recipe you can and can’t overmix.
I did learn something super cool from this recipe that I didn’t previously know about bananas. Now what I did already know is that bananas are mostly starch, and that after picking, that starch converts into sugar via the enzymes formed from the ethylene gas that releases as they ripen. What I did not know, is that you can use this information to ripen your banana’s much quicker than letting them sit on your counter for a week. I always thought that putting your bananas in the freezer speeds up this process, but apparently all that does is make the peel black and the flesh of the fruit softer, but does not actually convert the starches to sugars - I feel tricked!! What does work though, is, oddly, eggs. Here I will let Sohla explain: “One hack that actually works makes use of amylase. Amylase is the enzyme produced by the banana’s ethylene gas, which is responsible for converting its starches to sugars, and just happens to also be kickin around in egg yolks…If you need banana bread immediately…but only have underripe specimens around, mash the bananas along with the eggs from the recipe and let them hang out.” (El Waylly, pg 313) If you let the banana/egg mixture sit for 30 minutes, you will have beautiful perfect sweet banana mush. Science! She has given us so much.
Now, there is only one thing about this recipe that I changed, and to me, it made no difference in the end product and that change had to do with the eggs. This recipe called for one egg and one egg yolk, and that shit just pisses me off (no shade to my queen Sohla). Now, re: my previous paragraph, I can see why she would put the extra yolk in there, but I think probably one yolk worth of amylese would have a similar effect, although I see the vision. But, I really and truly hate home recipes that leave me with egg whites. Especially one egg white. It’s fine at a bakery where you have lots of uses for egg whites, but for me? I am not making meringue enough for this to be something I want in my fridge. Like yah, I can save it and add it to an omelette, but WHY?? I usually just put it in a conatiner and then forget about it until I am cleaning my fridge and then am mad all over again. Now there are all sorts of recipes where you need that extra yolk but I just truly feel like banana bread is not one of those and so I just added one egg and everything worked out fine. In the grand scheme of things, an egg yolk from a large egg is only 20 grams and you can live without it. Or at least I can.
In the end, my muffins are delicious and serve the purpose for which I made them - acting as a vehicle for the Irish butter that James and David brough me back from Cork. Shoutout to James and David.
Okay, once again, thank you for tuning in, see you next week!!
Suddenly need muffin