Well, any number other than zero is infinitelly greater than zero.
You should see some of the "blueberry" muffins they sell at the store nowadays. It's not even blueberry let alone fruit. Some are so bad and cheap it's just fruit flavored pellets with the packaging saying "Blueberry flavored" muffins.
My wife's family is extremely health conscious and typically eats like rabbits. There's not a dish they have encountered that couldn't be "improved" with a metric fuck ton of broccoli, kale, onions, zucchini, etc. But they also love brownies. It is typically their only indulgence at family get togethers.
But instead of using eggs and oil in the mix like it calls for, they substitute those evil fats with applesauce instead. It kind of sort of works from a textural standpoint, but it definitely still tastes vaguely of applesauce which is not super desirable in a chocolate brownie. Ostensibly the idea is to make it "healthier" and lower calorie. But given all the sugar and other carbs in the batter (including the added sugar from the apples) the calorie difference is negligible but the end result is not the same at all. It feels like they missed the point and messed up the brownies for no reason at all. Doesn't stop them from calling them "healthy brownies" though. Stretching the definition of "healthy" reeeeaaaal far.
To quote The Good Place:
There's something so human about taking something great and ruining it a little so you can have more of it.
Suggest to them to use pureed pumpkin instead. My wife does that and I can barely tell.
My father used to make delicious pumpkin Marmelade. I couldn't get enough of that stuff.
and typically eats like rabbits
They eat their own poop?
I doubt OPs friends are Ethan's Kliens family.
In the 1990s when muffins were a craze in the USA my neighbor, a vegan food scientist, kept wondering how anyone thought cake was acceptable for breakfast. I never thought of it as cake until I made a batch and then made a cake and realized they were essentially identical processes.
How is cake unacceptable for breakfast?
I mean, even a vegan has to appreciate the power of cake.
Deep fried cake covered in sugar is the quintessential American breakfast food.
muffins are deep fried?
I'm talking about doughnuts.
Pancakes with syrup
It’s a ton of fat and sugars with no added nutritional benefit.
Have you tried adding blueberries to it, they are an anti oxident
But we need oxygen
But what if we flatten the cake and fry it in butter instead of baking it? Surely that would be healthy, right?
Hang on. It's a little bland. I'd better pile more butter and liquified sugar on top.
It's perfect. Sweet, savory, pan fried cake.
Panfriedcake. That's what we'll call it
Those are called pancrepes I think
If you can digest it then it's food, the chemical furnace demands more fuel.
Devoured MRE wrapper included
I consider all junkfood a type of cake, so I only eat junkfood as often as I would eat cake, which is sadly too often.
Pro tip for baking modern American recipes is you can cut about 1/3 of the sugar no problem, up to 1/2 on some recipes. Bran goes really well with blueberries. The blueberry muffins I make are basically lightly sweetened wheat bread and they slap. Muffins are a quick bread but somewhere along the line people wanted to lie to themselves and eat cupcakes while pretending they're still muffins
That's not as much a difference as one might think because the flour too is mainly "sugar", specifically it's starch which gets turned into glucose same as the sweet tasting sugars (side note: it's quite an interesting process since saliva itself containes enzymes that break the starch into glucose and you can actually test this yourself using iodine solutions - which you should be able to get from a pharmacy - which turns starch purple).
Ultimatelly when it comes to nutrition, you should care mainly about carbohydrates in general (which includes all the stuff that is not sweet tasting but gets turned into glucose by the human body) rather than sugars specifically.
Once you look at it this way you'll find out that a ton of stuff which is not sweet is none the less rich in "sugars", namelly things like bread, pasta, polished rice and so on.
muffins are essentially cake in most formations. Cake, unlike many baked goods, is one where making massive changes is often ill advised as the chemistry of cakes is a lot more delicate than say bread or cookies. Removing 1/3 of the sugar in a cake/muffin recipe will lead to a tougher and drier muffin than one that has the recommended sugar amount.
Rather than remove large amounts of sugars it is better to find one that was created to not need the sugar to begin with
It may be semantics but I do not consider muffins to be cake, that would make it a cupcake. Muffins are closer to quick bread to the point where any quick bread recipes I have tried work as muffins with no changes to ingredients only cooking time. For sure if you cut too much sugar out of something you lose structure but that's why I specified American recipes. They generally have way more sugar than what's necessary for structure and there's a lot of wiggle room with how much you can take out
Cake is made from a sweetened batter. Muffins are made from a sweetened batter. Bread is made from dough. Dough has a lower fat/moisture content to it than batter.
Your quick bread substitutions are making something closer to rolls than muffins. Im sure your wheat roll equivalent to blueberry muffins are tasty but they are going to have a radically consistency than a traditional batter based muffin. Muffins are not quick breads.
Out of curiosity are you vegan?
Quick bread isn't the same as bread... Although I am seeing that cakes can be considered a type of quick bread so again I think this might largely be related to semantics. Things like banana bread, corn bread, biscuits, zucchini bread, are all quick breads that work as muffins and can have greatly reduced sugar without damaging their structure. The wheat and bran blueberry muffins I make are similar to sweetened wheat bread in flavor but texturally they're like a dense muffin. I'm not using gluten and yeast for the structure they use other leavening agents which is why they're a quick bread. My substitutions are: Less sugar, use whole wheat flour, sub some flour with bran and wheat germ. No I don't have any dietary restrictions
Edit to add: Also muffins don't have to be sweet like at all. There are plenty of savory muffin recipes that have little to no sugar, because they're a type of quick bread not specifically cake
This isn’t semantics. If you remove sugar you chemically alter the structure of the good. They will be tougher as a result.
The “quickbreads” you list are all batters. Try finding a dough based bread that becomes a muffin.
Again, I ask if you are vegan/plant based diet. Im not looking to engage with you on the morality. I have just noticed over the course if my time baking many vegans maintain their changes would make a similar product or an identical one when the science does not back that claim.
I already said that I don't have dietary restrictions also biscuits are typically referred to as being made with biscuit dough, not biscuit batter (at least where I'm from). I think discussing the differences between a dough and a batter in this context though is straying too far from what we're actually talking about so I don't particularly want to get into that.
I don't understand why you're putting quick bread in quotes so I'm asking sincerely do you not know what I mean when I say quick bread? As in something that's "leavened with a chemical agent rather than a biological one" such as baking soda/powder instead of yeast? Because this includes cake (and brownies and cookies even), I will change my case to be more like: Most people I've met in the US aren't wrong when they say they like muffins but it would be more specific to say they want cupcakes. In my opinion, we often put enough sugar into the muffins to cross the line into cupcake territory. Since they're both quick breads I'd argue cupcakes are muffins but not all muffins are cupcakes.
It's like my roommate kept telling me they like pancakes and so I'd make pancakes and they didn't like them because they were too thick. By the time I had thinned the recipe down enough for their liking I was actually making crepes, which are a type of pancake. They weren't wrong by saying they like pancakes but they would have been better off just admitting they actually like crepes and not what is generally thought of when someone says pancake.
I'm not trying to say that if you reduce sugar it is unchanged. I am saying that quick breads are very lenient with how much sugar can go in them while still maintaining good mouth feel, especially when the recipe already has a considerable amount of sugar as do many recipes that cater to modern US sugar addiction.
Im sorry I missed the bit about dietary restrictions.
cupcakes and muffins have similar sugar contents, are both made with identical procedures and ratios of ingredients. That is why they are the same. Cupcakes are cake batter poured into a different sized baking tin.
And Im saying by removing sugar you are going to change the consistency of the product significantly. All that sugar isn’t there just for taste as sugar also retains moisture in baked goods. There are always negative consequences to “just removing sugar” and you will be better off finding a recipe that was formulated to have less sugar.
My wife .... a salad is healthy
Goes on to make a salad fit for a serving of four people filled with ranch dressing, cheese, bacon and nuts.
I love her dearly but she absolutely refuses to admit to a smaller salad.
The lady over here: I must buy the thinnest sliced cheese permissible by physics. Also my tea shall be served in a bucket with 3 cups of honey stirred in.
We have all been damaged by the world in some way.
lol .... I was visiting a friend who was in the hospital over a period of about a month .. all of us had to go stay with him to help the family.
At one point, I got to know the nurses on the floor and I started offering to buy people coffee just to be nice. I thought if I were nice to them, they would be extra nice to my friend getting treatment.
Everyone was pretty average with their orders but some of the nurses were pretty strange. One overweight nurse asked for large triple triple (triple cream, triple sugar) ... but the best one was a short petite lady that weighed about 80lbs but tough as nails ... she asked for extra large 7 cream, 8 sugar (nicest lady ever but I just could not believe the kind of coffee she drank, it was basically a milk shake with a shot of coffee)
I also make fat girl on a diet salads, but I am aware of what I am doing with no illusions about how healthy it is.
It's ok, I believe chocolate also has antioxidants so it's healthy too!
Especially if paired with red wine
Muffins are cake. I don't eat cake except on special occasions. I think this is a pretty good rule.
Breakfast is a special occasion though.
Especially second breakfast
If you're doing it daily, it's not really special IMHO.
I want you to put the same number of blueberries into each muffin.
Do you know how long that will take?
I don't care, just do it.
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