Problematic muffins

[chromedome]

Hello again, all. Continuing to go to school on the cumulative expertise of everyone here, I'm bringing an irritation from my workplace.

We bake our own muffins from scratch, and I'm slowly trying to sort the recipes into some sort of coherent order. Overall they're pretty decent muffins, but there are two that I'm not especially happy with. One is the low-fat oat bran, the other is the carrot-raisin. We make big batches of these puppies, about 30kg at a whack (60lbs or so).

The oat bran has been pretty crappy. They've been loading it with applesauce and fruit to give it some flavour, but it tends to be gummy and unappealing. The flavour is bland, the colour is blah, and it goes from underbaked/sticky to overbaked/hard & dry in a very short time. The recipe in its current form is as follows:

16 cups oatbran

16 cups whole wheat

32 cups oatmeal

7 quarts buttermilk

1 can (100oz) applesauce

32 eggs

24 cups brown sugar

38 cups ap flour

12 tbsp baking soda

12 tbsp baking powder

2 tbsp salt

6 tbsp cinnamon

approximately 6 quarts fruit (ie 2 X 100oz cans of fruit, and the balance fresh or IQF fruit according to what's available)

Method: mix oatbran, ww flour, and oatmeal with buttermilk; then add remaining ingredients except fruit.  Mix, scrape down bowl, add fruit.  Mix again until fruit is just incorporated.  Mix by hand if fruit may bleed (ie raspberries, blueberries).

I viewed and printed several low-fat muffin recipes from the internet, by way of comparison, since I'm not by nature a low-anything kind of cook or baker. While there were various approaches, most of them incorporated plain yogurt and/or egg whites. In the most recent batch, I had my night baker add 2 quarts of plain yogurt to the mix. This gave us a much better colour and texture. It was still not what I was looking for (I think it was both overmixed and overbaked, but I'll find out for sure as I work with the night bakers); but it was a big improvement. The muffins browned nicely and had a better flavour and mouthfeel. I'm thinking I'll step up the yogurt to 4 quarts next time and see how we fare.

Any further suggestions? Ideally I'd like a muffin that's almost indistinguishable from the regular ones, but that may be unattainable.

The carrot-raisin is a somewhat different situation. The basic flavour of the muffin is fine, but I've got concerns about the proportions and methodology (which strikes me as a bit odd, but I've never done muffins in big-batch format before). The muffin tastes good and sells well, but generally comes out feeling tough and overmixed. I know overmixing is not the problem (or not the whole problem), because I've made a batch myself to show the night baker how little mixing a muffin batter takes; those were better but still not ideal.

This is the recipe:

72 cups carrots

12 cups raisins

10 cups oil

72 eggs

1 can applesauce (100 oz)

1 can crushed pineapple (100 oz)

36 cups brown sugar

4 tbsp nutmeg

8 tbsp cloves

4 tbsp salt

1 cup cinnamon

4 oz baking soda

8 oz baking powder

72 cups ap flour

method:  add your carrots, raisins, oil, eggs to bowl; mix.  Add applesauce, pineapple, brown sugar; scrape down bowl once incorporated.  Add dry ingredients except flour; add flour in small portions while mixer is running.

This muffin tends to have a tough, chewy cap; it usually has that smooth, stretched look that indicates overmixing. As I said above, it comes out looking/feeling overmixed even when it is not. Any suggestions?

[Carrot Top]

I remember reading that you are currently in charge of putting these products into standardized recipe forms...the first question I have is, are you intending to translate this recipe into either weight definitions or larger measure definitions i.e. quarts, etc. instead of cups...?

Those are some heavy duty production quantities. Do you refrigerate the batter after mixing and scoop as needed for daily production...or scoop and freeze...or is that actually the daily production level?

My first instinct is to aim for checking the levels of leavening. The more you batch it, the more this needs adjustment.

But it has been a long time since I've done even close to that level of production of a muffin, so maybe I can give you a reference that could save you some time. (Unless, of course, the right person happens to log onto eGullet and sort it all out, which is entirely possible! )

The Culinary Institute of America has a website which not only has links to a free online standardized recipe costing program that can be downloaded which may include similar recipes in bulk quantities, but also a catalog of the professional courses they offer, which include baking.

The instructors are quite interested and helpful, I've found, in this program...if you are motivated enough to call and ask the administrator who the 'right person to ask' would be, you likely could get a good answer from that instructor.

The website is ciaprochef.com

Good luck!

[McDuff]

I would say that you really need to spend some time getting these recipes turned into formulas. That is, measure out the ingredients onto a scale several times each to see what the variation is, which I can guarantee is going to be there for 72 cups of flour, and average them out. Then, you need to compare the weights with similar formulas to see if your percentages are close to something that has been proven to work. For instance is your baking powder 8% or 5%? Is your salt 4% or 2%? A quick look at something like Wayne Gisslen's baking book ought to give you an idea of what percentages you're aiming for.

In that second recipe, why are you not mixing the eggs and sugar, then the oil? Whip the eggs and sugar till thick, then drizzle in the oil. This gives a nice base for folding everything else in. Add 1/3 of the dry, then 1/2 the wet, and so on till it's done.

I would do the same thing with the first recipe, only after whipping the eggs and sugar, stir in the applesauce. Then fold in the dry alternately with the wet.

And how long does it take said night baker to measure out 72 cups of carrots?

[chromedome]

Thanks for your interest, Red! You're right, those are some big-ass recipes. What's really frightening is that the night bakers are making up batch-and-a-half quantities, rather than what's shown there. We refrigerate the muffin mix in 5-gallon buckets, and scoop as needed.

We are a busy downtown office/mall location and the muffins are a constant seller for us. We make up to a dozen kinds of muffins per day, and in quantities of up to 4 dozen each, which amounts to 500-600 muffins per day. This, I'll point out, is during our slow period! We'll do a lot more through the fall when we're busier. The muffins are portioned with a #6 scoop (5.5 oz), so we burn through a bucket of mix pretty quickly (the 5 gal. buckets are not filled all the way, as they'd be unwieldy owing to weight).

Currently my night bakers are both rather inexperienced (they came to us from Tim Horton's, where it's just scoop-and-bake). Starting tomorrow I'll be working my Monday shifts with the bakers from afternoon until midnight, so that will give me an opportunity to a) learn their routines, so I can cover when they're sick; b) observe their work patterns to find improvements; and c) find areas where their methodology may be open to improvement. Also some day soon I'll be training additional night bakers, and it would help if I knew what to do!

We do currently have "standardized" recipes, but they're a ghastly mess (the phrase "dog's breakfast" springs to mind). I'm going to be porting them over the next few months to weight measures, and generating more-accurate costing from that. Along the way, I also intend to improve the recipes themselves to the extent that I can. Of course, in the quantities we make, I also have to keep an eye on the bottom line; but having more-accurate costs is the first step in that direction.

After doing that, I'll be converting the newly-revised recipes into % formulas for my own reference, which will make life much simpler when I want to compare recipes from elsewhere to what I'm using.

As for the leavening thing: I'd given that some thought, but the muffins at the end of the batch usually spring just as well as the ones at the beginning of the batch. I'd assumed that this means the leavening is still doing its job. I'm thinking that perhaps these recipes need more in the line of "softening" ingredients; perhaps some additional egg or a titch more oil in the case of the carrot, and suitable substitutes in the oat bran.

McDuff: 72 cups is a 5 gal/20 litre bucket almost full. The guys over on the hot side shred one of those for her every day when they're prepping their own veg. And thanks for the methodological suggestions; I use an unconventional recipe at home for small-batch muffins so I'm somewhat deprived of context.

[Wendy DeBord]

I know this might sound strange but off the top of my head I'm wondering if theres too much liquid in your carrot recipe. I seem to recall getting similar results with a recipe that was too wet. The liquid really buildt gluten (of course I can't prove that-it just seemed that way). Are you draining the pineapple-typically you would?

[KarenS]

What size of mixer are you using? With your quantity of ingredients- it is very easy to overmix. I believe that your muffins are bland because they have such a small amount of salt in them.To the oat bran recipe you could multiply the salt by four to six times easily. I use ricotta in my low fat muffins (helps keep them moist). For the carrot muffin, I would whip the eggs, sugar, and oil and add the carrot and flour at the end (pulse on and off, do not leave the mixer running- it is really very easy to overmix muffins).

[KarenS]

Also, for the oatbran- mix the eggs and the sugar, the the buttermilk, applesauce.

Add the dry last (then fold in the fruit). As soon as you add the flour is when you want to be careful with mixing. Don't add it in the beginning.

[dejaq]

This may address the shelf life and eating qualities of the final product, just as the other posters have noted I recommend you break the formula down into a true percentage based on the weight of flour. Try adding some corn syrup and sour cream, finally give the muffins a quick shot of steam mid way thru the baking process, make sure the formula is in balance and go easy on the corn syrup

[chromedome]

A quick word or two of followup, in recognition of everybody's assistance.

The carrot-raisin muffin is still not ideal (I'll tweak it a little more over the coming months) but it's much better. I've reduced the cloves (they were pretty dominant) and corrected the methodology as per McDuff's advice. I'd known there was something screwy about the recipes as written, but was too tired to think it through.

Today I finally arrived at a version of the oat bran muffin that I'm happy with. I've augmented the buttermilk with some plain yogurt, increased the salt, subbed a few litres of pastry flour for part of the AP flour, and added a litre of honey for a bit of sweetness, tenderness, and moisture retention. Now I have something that tastes and feels like a muffin, and I'm pretty pleased with myself.

I've finally got all of my ingredients weighed, as well, and constructed an Excel spreadsheet to calculate percentages for me and scale my recipes. Now I just have the grunt work of entering everything in!

We have a new guy at head office whose job is to get everybody on the same page, recipe-wise, and to standardise all of our recipes across the board. He's completely onside with what I'm doing, and my work will probably form the basis for a re-tooling of the bakery department company-wide. Should look well in my portfolio, I'm thinking...

[Wendy DeBord]

Thanks for sharing the results of your work! Its nice to see a follow up and see what worked.