This is going to seem trivial to some bakers I know... but it was a revelation to me, so I'm going to share it, because you never know; there might be others who can benefit from my experience!
After umpteen years of making muffins periodically throughout the seasons, it would seem there'd be nothing new to learn there, right?
Wrong!
This morning, I saw we had nothing sweet to go with our coffee, so I decided to whip up some muffins. They're so easy to make, only need a few ingredients, the minimum of time and effort to stir everything together and if you have those silicon muffin holders for the oven, you're on Easy Street when it comes time to free them from their molds, as well as in the cleaning up department.
Now I have a multitude of muffin recipes. It's a curious thing, but all of them stipulate oil; not butter, but oil. I've always made mine that way too - with oil. I remember one year, my sister and I held a bake-off at my parents' house. We each made our own special recipe of muffins. I saw how she used butter and how she claimed it was much better than oil. Well, I also saw all the prep she had to do, what with melting the butter and blending it more carefully with the egg, etc. I scoffed at all the extra work. I had the idea that muffins taste exactly the same whether you use oil or butter. (My grandmother once told me that, and all her recipes stipulate oil; of course she baked a lot during the great depression and maybe then butter was hard to come by).
In the end, of course my sister won the bake-off. I didn't attribute the finer flavor to the butter however, but rather to the delicious things she put into her muffins, while mine were more of the heavy but nutritious quality. They tasted good but hers certainly looked a lot better!
Anyway today for some reason I decided to make mine with butter. Recently I've been making lots of cookies and other pastries and I've gotten good at melting butter without burning it. So I made the muffins with butter and no extras, save some chocolate chips I had on hand. The first thing I noticed was that the batter was lighter than usual. I was making these heavy motions with my arm to stir what is usually a heavy mass, and it simply wasn't necessary! The spoon glided around the bowl in a delightfully playful manner. Then, as they were baking, I noticed they fluffed up nicely in their cups, which doesn't always happen to my muffins. When the time came to take them out of the oven and get them out of their molds, they popped out cheerily before I finished doing the twirl-around with a butter knife.
And then I tasted one.
Unbelievable! Fabulous texture! So fluffy and springy with a soft but crunchy top. And absolutely delicious! A mouthwatering delight! It must be the butter. No, no doubt about it - it was the butter. The evidence was undeniable. The fact that they needed no butter to make them tasty (I usually put butter or cream cheese on my muffins when I eat them). The fact that the inside of the muffin was so light and fluffy, yet did not crumble all over the place. The way the crust had a sweet satisfying crunch in my mouth as it blended with the rest of the bite. In short, I was flabbergasted that butter could turn a mere muffin into such a delicacy!
I can't believe I never found this out before, considering the fact that I make muffins so often and have been making them for so many years! Now I know that as long as there is a bar of butter in my fridge when I start to make a batch of muffins - and, believe me, I'll make sure there always is - I'll never go back to using oil again!
Rule of thumb: Between oil and butter - better, butter!
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