I'm starting a new project, one I'm calling The Great Muffin Experiment. I'm going to document some of it here — and perhaps eventually it will become a standalone website (or subdomain).

The project grows out of my 2021 turn towards a more healthy lifestyle: I've quit drinking, for starters. Fewer calories from booze has helped me to lose about forty pounds. But I also exercise a lot — yoga and recently powerlifting. The latter has made me particularly keen on monitoring how much protein I'm eating — all the better to make muscles. I make a smoothie with protein powder after our morning walk; I also eat a protein bar either before or after working out. All this — not just the increased protein intake — no surprise, has shifted the kinds of ads I get on Instagram (the only social media I'm really on these days). That is to say, I get a lot of ads for "healthy" snacks, particularly protein bars as, like a dummy, I've actually clicked through and purchased a couple different types.

I've also searched online for recipes that will fulfill my pre- and post-workout needs. In addition to the smoothie and the protein bar, I also eat some Greek yogurt (high in protein!) and a carb or some sort in the mornings. I love the "Friends and Family Granola" Recipe in Roxana Jullapat's Mother Grains cookbook, for example, although it's 1) rather expensive to make and 2) rather high in calories; I've bought some protein cereal online — low in calories, but pretty damn flavorless. Most days, however, I like to blend a muffin in with the yogurt. The muffin gives the yogurt some texture; the yogurt gives the muffin some moisture and creaminess. Plus, I love to bake — and while dieting have rarely indulged in my creations, for some reason I've convinced myself that muffins are "healthy" — more on that later.

But in searching for "healthy" recipes — muffins or otherwise — one must wade through a real SEO swamp. I understand that food bloggers have to play the game that Google has set forth in order to appear in search results. Part of this project will be to mark up my data, my blog posts with the appropriate schema so that my stuff too can be found. I won't be making money through ads or sponsorships, and as such, I won't try to lure people to click on this site. (Indeed, I hope it's not discovered for a good long while as this is a nice quiet place to write without being found or followed.)

More than clicks, I'm interested in the science of making a healthy muffin, and more generally in the science of muffin-making. What even is a muffin? How can you alter a basic muffin recipe and increase the protein or the fiber or decrease the sugar and fat (without turning to protein powder and sugar substitutes)? When do you use baking soda versus baking powder? How does banana or pumpkin puree or flax seed or coconut flour work as a substitute? That sort of thing...

For now, I plan to write an essay that will accompany a recipe — each pair will examine one concept in muffin-making. Some of these recipes will be mine; some will be others'. I'll start with an explanation of "what is a muffin." I'll write another one about "what is healthy" — for me, that is. What are my goals in making this baked good? The experiment will proceed from there.