The Great Muffin Experiment, No. 2 (Jump to the Recipe)

I have always paid some attention to my nutrition. Growing up, my mother made sure that every dinner had a protein, a starch, and a vegetable, for example, as well as the requisite glass of milk for my brother and me. I learned about the food pyramid in school. Cartoon PSAs taught me that "You are what you eat" and that cheese and crackers were a good choice for snacking. Much to my family's chagrin, I became a vegetarian when I left home at age 16 — I'd never really liked meat — but didn't really think much about protein until I became pregnant at 20. All that is to say, I've paid some attention to my nutrition, but I've actually known very little about it, other than the received knowledge from school, family, and television.

Now that my attention has turned to my health and well-being, I'm trying to learn more. But wow, I see so much of the conflicting messaging — the "science" and the bullshit — about what we should be eating, about what I should be eating as someone who's very physically active (and trying to put on muscle through weight-training). And what makes it worse, I'd argue, is that the more you search online for answers or products, the more you get ads that try to sell you on the latest trend: keto, paleo, whatever.

When you search for healthy recipes, you also run into similar sorts of problems — both with the business of "clicks" and the business of "health." Recipe blogging is a finely-tuned SEO machine. The photos — let me tell you — are gorgeous. The prose isn't always that bad. But the recipes, particularly when you're interested in items that are "healthy" or that have more protein, are pretty hit-or-miss. Indeed, I've found that in order to boost the protein levels, many of these recipes simply include protein powder.

Take this one, for example:

Banana Buckwheat Protein Muffins

This is based on the recipe from kits.eats.

Prep time: 10 minutes  ·  Cooking time: 20 minutes  ·  Servings: 12  ·  Calories: 132

Ingredients:

• 200 g bananas (about 3 small bananas)
• 1 cup Greek yogurt
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 100 g buckwheat flour
• 60 g whey isolate protein powder
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 cup cacao nibs

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Line 12 compartments of standard muffin tin with paper (or grease tin).
2. Mash bananas in a medium bowl. Add yogurt and syrup and mix well.
3. Mix together the dry ingredients in a bowl.
4. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add the wet ingredients. Stir swiftly, until combined. The batter should be thick, but spoonable. Add milk if necessary.
5. Spoon batter into muffin tins, filling about two-thirds full.
6. Bake 15-18 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.
7. Cool for 5 minutes before taking out of the tin.

Some Baking Notes

I followed the recipe for these fairly closely, substituting Greek yogurt for the soy and whey isolate protein for the plant-based one in the original. I made 12 muffins, not 8 as the kits.eats' recipe indicated. The batter was very runny, and I was concerned the muffins wouldn't hold together. They did, although they didn't really rise much and they were a bit too chewy. (I don't think I over-mixed the batter — often the cause of a chewy muffin. I'll write more soon on how to troubleshoot things like flat muffin-tops.) The texture of the crumb was fine, but they were rather bland — they didn't taste much like banana or buckwheat (and the cacao was more of a crunch than a flavor).

Buckwheat flour, for what it's worth, does have slightly more protein than wheat flour, and I'll experiment with more protein-rich flours in my bakes in lieu of just adding a protein powder.

Some "Health" Notes

Here's what I am looking for in a healthy muffin: lots of protein and fiber and very little sugar or sodium. Or, at least 5 grams of protein; at least 2.5 grams of fiber; less than 10 grams of sugar; less than 10 grams of fat; and less than 200 milligrams of sodium. (These numbers might seem arbitrary. In many ways, they are! The main questions I'm working with in this series are: can I make a muffin that has more protein than any ol' basic muffin, and can I make a healthy muffin that tastes great?)

For comparison, the Basic Muffin has 3.5 grams of protein; .7 grams of fiber; 5.4 grams of sugar; 3.8 grams of fat; and 238.5 milligrams of sodium. This Banana Buckwheat Protein muffin has 7.6 grams of protein; 2.7 grams of fiber; 8.5 grams of sugar; 2.5 grams of fat; and 189.3 milligrams of sodium. (Yes, it has twice the protein than the basic muffin, but that comes almost entirely from adding the two scoops of protein powder.)