In Search of An Amazing Protein Muffin

Because fat and sugar in muffins prevent gluten formation, the price you can pay for lowering the fat and sugar content is a dry and tough muffin. We want to avoid that – because let’s face it – if you have to slabber your muffin with butter to make it edible, you’ve just lost the benefit of lowering the fat.

Of course, we will need a leavening agent for out muffins. We’ll be using baking powder in our muffins. (You can use baking soda if you are adding acidic ingredients like buttermilk or lemon to you muffins.) Keep in mind that if any of the changes we make lead to a heavier muffin we might want to increase the leavening a bit to make sure we get a good rise. But too much leavening and you get an overly exuberant but unstable rise that is destined to fall once it leaves the oven. 1-2 tsp baking powder per cup of flour is about right.

Finally, there’s temperature. It seems to range from 350-425 degrees fahrenheit, with most recipes using 350 degrees. Higher temperaturs lead to a quicker rise, but risk overcooking the outside and undercooking the inside.

Now that we are experts in the chemistry of muffin making, it’s time to see if it’s really possible to make a healthier muffin that is actually edible. But first, a little muffin video break –

Making a Healthier Muffin

Okay, let’s see what we can do to the original recipe to make it better for us.

Protein

We clearly have to have a higher protein content for our healthy muffins. In this case, we will use protein powder, and add it to the milk. Be careful – some protein powders have significant fat content. I found one with no fat, and that’s what I’m using. We’ll also use egg whites instead of whole eggs, matching volume for volume, which will boost the protein content and lower the fat at the same time.

Fat

We’ve already lost fat by substituting egg whites for whole eggs. We’re also going to use skim milk and remove the butter from our original muffin recipe. This is risking a very tough final product. So we’ll try some other tricks for getting the fat back in a more healthy way. (See Flour, below.) If this does not work, in the future we can consider keeping the fat, but substituting a healthy fat like canola or olive oil for the melted butter.

Flour

Here’s where the going gets tough, and the muffins get tougher.

The first thing you think of when you think of healthy baked goods is whole wheat flour, right? That was my first thought, too, and so the first healthy muffins I tried to make used half whole wheat and half regular flour. Disaster. Why? High gluten combined with low fat = cardboard. If you’re going to use whole wheat flour, you’ll need to increase either the fat or the sugar content to limit the gluten formation. Sorry. I”m not sure. (Turns out whole wheat flour does not have higher gluten than regular flour. It is heavier, though…

Since low fat is more important to me right now, I’m going to have to sacrifice the high fiber. In the future, we could consider an alternate healthy muffin with high fiber and good fats like canola or olive oil. But for now, let’s stay on the low-fat track.

If we’re going to lower the fat, we’d better lower the gluten content of our flour. One simple way is to use cake flour (6-8% gluten forming protein) instead of regular flour (8-10% protein). We can also subtsitute rice flour for part of the flour. Rice flour is gluten-free. The problem with it is that it does not hold up as well, so you can’t use it exclusively unless you are willing to add a stabilizing agent such as guar gum to maintain the rise. Luckily, we won’t need to go that far. We’ll keep the rice flour to 50% of our flour mixture and get our gluten from cake flour.

I’m also going to add some soy flour. This will also add protein and a bit of the healthy fat I’m looking for. Joy of Cooking tells me to treat soy flour like fat and add it to the liquid ingredients, so we’ll be dissolving it in the milk along with the protein powder. We’ll also need to lower our baking temp by 25 degrees since soy flour can cause our crust to burn more easily.

Finally, in an attempt to get a little more fiber, I’m going to add some flaxmeal.

Leavening

I’m increasing the baking powder a bit to compensate for an additonal 1/4 cup flour and the slightly heavier flaxmeal.

Sugar

We can’t have none, can we? (And I refuse to use artificial sweeteners in my baking.) So we’ll just change it to brown sugar, okay? Maybe next time we can try some agave nectar instead.

Additions

I’ve added chopped apples to these muffins, but other combos I’d like to try in the near future are coconut-macadamia, banana walnut and carrot-raisin. If course, each of these additions will change the liquid content, and we’ll need to tweak the basic recipe even more. So for now, I’m staying simple additions like apples and blueberries till I get this version down pat.

So with all this in mind, let’s see what I came up with…

Drum Roll, please…

Ladies and gents, without further ado, I present my first fairly-successful attempt at a healthy muffin that ‘s worth eating. If you have one of these muffins for breakfast with 1/4 cup low fat ricotta cheese you’ll be getting about 60% carb, 11% fat and 20% protein. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. Still too heavy on the carbs, although I’ve gotten the fat content down fairly nicely.

Next time I plan to try cutting back on the rice flour (which is very high in carbs) rather than the cake flour. There’s also a little room for some fat, so I’ll try adding some canola oil. I’m going to measure my flour my weight to be sure I’m not using too much. I’ll increase the temp a tad since I didn’t even come close to burning these babies. So stay tuned – this is a work in progress. I’m open to any and all suggestions.