Oatmeal Muffins

Hello, I'm PhysicsGal and I'm addicted to baked goods (Hello, PhysicsGal). The problem is, except in small amounts or special circumstances, I can't eat baked goods made with wheat flour. Which for this western-European-descended blogger, is basically all of them. Sorely missed for me at the moment, having found sufficiently low carb deserts, are muffins. Not English muffins, which are good and they already have low carb versions in my grocery store, but American-style muffins, which are basically icingless cupcakes by a different method.  If anyone has found a better way to start the day (pace bacon and eggs) than a homemade blueberry muffin out of the oven, I haven't been informed of it.

So for a while now I have been tinkering with making an oat-based muffin. Oats are afterall the breakfast grain of choice. Nutritious, full of fiber, nutty and cheap. Too bad I can't really stand oatmeal without a lot of brown sugar. Granola is ok, but you can only eat it so long before it loses its appeal. I had seen a couple dozen recipes for oatmeal muffins, but none of them really suited my needs.

So I tried making my own from scratch. The first couple were...interesting failures. The first was like a lumpy soft granola bar. The second had WAY too much salt and the consistency of stale cornbread.

This latest batch is I think a winner. They don't rise very much, but they have a nice, silky texture with a slight grittiness from almond flour, like a store bought cornmeal muffin. I make mine just barely sweet so I can have it for breakfast, but additional sugar could be added to taste. This batch was plain for testing purposes, but any number of additions could be made. I think mixed berries would be wonderful.

The trick as it turns out is to give the oat flour lots of time to hydrate. I made my oat flour from 'old fashioned' oats that I pulsed as fine as I could get in my food processor, so its a little on the coarse side, and it turns out that oats just don't absorb liquid all that quickly. Starch type? All that fiber? I have no idea, but I know that its true. But it does absorb a lot of liquid. When you mix up the dry ingredients for this, it will be genuinely soupy. Potato leek soup soupy. After about 4 hours its the consistency of cake batter. By the next morning it's the consistency of a muffin batter. Mix in your leavening,  and bake as you please. So long as you let the oats soak in all your liquid, and have a roughly 1:1 oat to liquid ratio, you can be pretty adventurous in other aspects I think.

Enjoy!

PhysicsGal's Oatmeal Muffins

The night before, combine:
2.5 cups oatmeal flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
[Opt: additional sugar to taste]

Stir in:
2 egg yolks, beaten with
1/3 cup oil or melted butter
1/4 cup honey
2 cups milk

Mixture will be very thin. Cover, and let rest in a refridgerator a minimum of 4 hours and preferably overnight.

When ready to bake, heat oven to 350 degrees.

In a very clean bowl, start beating the reserved egg whites to stiff peaks.

In a small bowl, combine 1/2 cup nut flour or oat flour with 1 tablespoon baking powder. Sprinkle mixture over the top of the refrigerated batter, and stir to combine.

When egg whites are glossy and peaks no longer collapse, stir in one third of the foam to the batter. Gently folding in the remaining whites.

Spoon into greased or lined baking cups. NB: since these don't rise very much, you can fill the cups almost to the top without the muffins baking into each other.

Bake 20-25 minutes, until tops are getting speckled with brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

Edit: These stay very moist for several days, and freeze beautifully. Allow extra time for thawing, since they have twice the moisture content of normal muffins.

Enjoy!

~PhysicsGal