I spend a lot of time apologizing for the things I say when I am hungry. That's why breakfast, for me, is non-negotiable. It's an insurance policy against saying things I'll regret before my blood-sugar levels have stabilized.
When it comes to breakfast, baked goods are my weakness (besides coffee): toast, croissants, heck, even a scone on the weekend. There is one bakery item, though, that you will never see in my life, and that's a muffin.
Muffins are the opposite of that stale supermarket birthday cake that looks like a terrible idea but is still strangely delicious. Muffin recipes can look tempting, but so often manage to disappoint. Muffins pose as breakfast food yet offer all the nutritional benefit of five-day-old cake, leaving me hangrier than before.
A month ago, I must've been hungry because I hijacked a meeting by going on a particularly vitriolic muffin-trashing rant. Emily Eisen, Healthyish's visual editor, mentioned the banana quinoa muffins from The Smile, the cafe with a few locations in N.Y.C.
So I went, and it was... interesting. Vegan and gluten-free, the muffin was more like quinoa-banana-coconut oil porridge bound with flax. But there was something about it. It tasted and felt like food, not just dessert. It got me thinking: What if I could make a muffin that was as savory as it was sweet, with whole grains, healthy oils, and, frankly, as little sugar as possible? What if I could make a muffin good and healthy enough to win over my colleague Claire Saffitz?
Claire, for the record, is very good at baking. Like I'm pretty sure her hands run about five degrees cooler than everyone else's, which is why her biscuits are always just a bit flakier. Also, her muffin-hating heart is nearly as hard as mine.
"That’s why we call it a test kitchen," is what we say in those rare (really, so rare) moments when we have an epic fail in the kitchen. It’s a reminder to ourselves that, unlike during our restaurant days, a hundred hungry New Yorkers are not sitting ten feet away about to be subjected to our mistakes. What I'm saying is that my muffins sucked: little soup sandwiches of wet quinoa awfulness. However, if you could see past their amoeba-like shapes and the astonishing lack of distinction between their insides and outsides, they had promise.
I tweaked the ratio of quinoa and banana to dry ingredients. I got rid of the muffin liners so the muffins could bake against the tin and pick up some exterior color and texture. I dialed down the sweetness even more and subbed half the brown sugar for honey. I did about ten other things. (Look, braised short ribs are pretty damn good no matter what happens, but baking recipes require a lot of work to get right.) By this point, they were better, but Claire still wasn’t convinced, and I wasn’t going to consider them a success until I got her endorsement.
I realized I had made a muffin that happened to have some quinoa in it, but I hadn’t taken it far enough. I needed to stop playing it so safe. I put in more quinoa. A lot more quinoa. It went from being a banana muffin with quinoa to being a banana quinoa muffin.
Claire’s response: “I would eat this.”
I played it cool all the way to our tasting room where, unseen, I could do a silent dance-party freak-out before going back to my station, pouring myself a coffee, and sitting down to eat breakfast.
