Muffin tricks

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Pastry chefs have a lot of very cool tricks, and sometimes it’s comforting to learn the little ones, the simpler techniques that don’t require professional kitchens and obscure cooking tools. Thanks to former Campanile pastry chef Kim Boyce, I’ve been baking a lot of muffins lately -- and thinking about how Boyce uses whole grains to improve both their flavors and health benefits. So this morning I made the raspberry-chocolate muffins from Alice Medrich’s new cookbook, a book I brought home after Betty Hallock gave it great reviews. Whole wheat flour, fresh fruit -- and chocolate’s healthy, right? (Especially chunks of 70% Valrhona.) But I’d run out of whole wheat flour. So instead I used unbleached white flour and added a generous dose of wheat germ -- a trick I’d learned from Nancy Silverton, Boyce’s former boss. Medrich’s muffin recipe is a pretty simple one, but her suggestion for the raspberries was one I’d never tried. Instead of folding fresh raspberries into the batter, which is what you’d expect, she has you freeze the berries first. This incredibly simple trick solves two problems simultaneously: It keeps the juice of the berries from bleeding into the batter, and it also prevents the muffins from getting too mushy when you bake them. So when you add the numbers, the muffins took 5 minutes to mix, 15 minutes to bake, and three pastry chefs to bring them together. Oh, and two people ate six of them in under 10 minutes.

‘Pure Dessert’ by Alice Medrich (Artisan).

-- Amy Scattergood