Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Muffin Mania


Nothing beats a delicious muffin and a hot cup of coffee for a light, satisfying breakfast! Muffins are basically individual quick breads. They are called quick breads simply because they are quickly mixed and because they don’t contain yeast, they don’t require the lengthy rising time before baking. They are extremely easy to make — just mix the dry ingredients, mix the wet ingredients and then combine the two! Gluten-free muffins can be wonderful and with a few simple tricks they can be equally as good, if not better, than the gluten-variety!

Trick 1:
We have had tremendous success with The Gluten Free Pantry’s Country French Bread flour mix for the gf flour in all of our muffin recipes. The blend of flour and binders within their flour mix work wonderfully for nearly all quickbreads and muffins. To order The Gluten Free Pantry’s Country French Bread mix click here:

Trick 2: Make sure that your recipe has enough oil. We usually make sure that there is about 1/4 - 1/2 cup of oil in the recipe. This helps add moisture to the muffins and counteracts the dryness caused by the rice flour in the flour mix.

Trick 3: Sometimes the additional oil on its own is not enough to add the right amount of moisture to quickbreads or muffins. To make sure that the end result is moist and some-what cake like make sure that your recipe has something like crème fraiche, sour cream, yogurt, or a fruit puree (applesauce, pear puree, etc.).

Trick 4: Add another egg. Because we are not using wheat flour containing gluten which gives elasticity and helps the muffin rise during the baking process we need to add something to the batter to compensate for this weakness in gluten-free flour. Adding an additional egg will help this deficiency.

Trick 5: Our final trick also helps compensate for the lack of leavening inherent in gluten-free flour. Add about 1/2 teaspoon extra baking powder or baking soda to your recipe.

One final note: If you happen to be on a casein-free, gluten-free diet substitute soy milk, soy yogurt, or soy sour cream (try Tofutti sour cream — it’s great!). The results are perfect!!

Here are some of our favorite muffin recipes we’ve discovered over the years:

Lemon Raspberry Muffins

Blueberry Muffins

Carrot Spice Muffins

Chocolate Cherry Glazed Muffins

Cranberry Muffins with Blueberries

GFCF Blueberry Muffins

Peach Macadamia Muffins

Sour Cream Peach Muffins

Banana Pecan Muffins

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