Smoked Muffins

On Making Friends with Ingredients, Improvisation & Serendipity

Did I set out to make smoked muffins? No. I was going for Irish Soda Bread Scones. Are these gluten- and sugar-free wonders some of the best-tasting and most nutritious breakfast treats I’ve ever had? Yep! Could I do it again? Maybe… the recipe I made up, on-the-fly, to accommodate things on hand, follows below, and I hope you’ll try it and report back. Even better, improvise your way through it to the next generation muffin-scone!

In this age of faster, better delivery and drive-thru, most people in the United States don’t cook. At best, we prepare food. At worst, we consume food-like stuff. All kinds of superficial good reasons exist for this—time, cost, and know-how top the list. But trust me¹, illness and disease are a lot more costly, time-consuming, and disempowering than cooking. And really, cooking is not that hard. A four year-old can do it, with minimal downside. At least, that’s what my grandmother helped prove.

The key to good cooking and good eating, and by extension, better health, is intrepidly making friends with whole foods—primary source ingredients, not Bezos empire—followed by embracing improvisation and serendipity. The latter two especially, require relinquishing control; so, if it helps, consider cooking a meditative practice, which is also good medicine.

For the naysayers already looking for a reason to buy pre-made, yes, baking involves chemistry, but providing you follow basic chemical principles, essentially about leavening and texture, improvisation works just fine, even for baking. That is, providing you’re cool with the equivalent of a smoked muffin when you had soda bread scones in mind. And yes, I’ll readily admit that serendipity doesn’t always deliver delights such as these muffins, but good food is never bad food from a body’s perspective, and I just suck it up and eat the failures, too.

Smoked Muffins

AKA Gluten- & Sugar-free Irish Soda Bread Scones

First up, make sure you have on-hand some kind of flour, butter (or oil), eggs (or egg-substitutes), honey (or syrups or okay, sugar), and milk (or cider or nuts and seeds to make milk-like liquid or heck, water) plus baking powder, baking soda, salt, and vinegar.

If you don’t have these basics, it’s time to go to the store. To cook pretty much anything, you need these basics. (More to come, in some subsequent post, TBD, about how to provision so that you can always eat good food even if the car breaks, or you break, or the heavens open to deluge you and yours with some catastrophic weather event or other Anthropocene catastrophe.)

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup currants, raisins, or other small dried fruit (organic is worth it, and if you find a co-op, a sale, the least bougie health food store in town, or you’re lucky enough to grow/glean and dry DIY-style, then it’s even cheap; but remember, your accounting must include the cost of personal and planetary illness, and organic is always cheaper)

• 2 tablespoons Irish whisky or rum or fortified liquor or anything tasty and thick-like—an herbal infusion, elixir, or even coffee, for example

• 2 cups flour—I used 1 cup of sorghum and 1 cup of rye, the latter of which is technically not gluten-free, but I could have easily used buckwheat or teff or a gazillion other gluten-free options (see fruit above re organic)

• 1/3-ish cup of honey or some other tasty sweet (I use local honey because I’m all-out allergic to the environment, and honey made from the allergens helps)

• 3 teaspoons baking powder

• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 6 tablespoons chilled butter or butter-like stuff or an oil equivalent

• 1 tablespoon fennel seeds (you can use caraway, which would probably be especially good with rye, but I didn’t have any, and I’d even use cumin seeds in a pinch, but fennel are fun, surprising, and good for digestion)

• 1/2 heaping cup of nuts and don’t bother to chop them; that takes time and makes a mess (I use pecans because they are local and yummy, but any nuts or seeds will do, and you can experiment with lots of combinations)

• 1-2 cold eggs or egg alternative (honestly, I can’t remember how many I used, but it won’t hurt either way, and maybe I used two, which accounts for why these scones became muffins?!?)

• 1/2 cup sour milk or liquid (this means buttermilk, but who has buttermilk on-hand; luckily, it’s easy to sour milk with vinegar or lemon juice—just add some to the milk—or use cider or, you get the picture: liquid + souring agent)

Process

1. Position racks in the lower and upper thirds of the oven and preheat to 425 degrees. (I hate to waste fuel; so I never preheat as step 1, but a hot oven is key, and if you don’t do it first, you have to remember do it in the middle of putting things together, or just wait once everything’s ready to pop in the oven.)

2. Cut parchment paper into rough square-like shapes that will roughly cover the muffin tin cups, and line the cups with the paper. (It doesn’t have to be beautiful or perfect, just functional, but it does help to create basically smooth surfaces for the dough. Honestly, this is a great job for a kid or a bored guest. The stakes are very low, and it keeps them occupied. I wish I could teach my dog, Saku, to do it.)

3. Place the dried fruit in a very small bowl or a cup and pour the liquor over it to soak. Toss it throughout your process to encourage maximum soaking up. (Another good job for your sidekick.)

4. Combine all dry ingredients in a large bowl. (Add your sweetener here, if using dry versions.)

5. Cut in butter. (I use an old fork, inadvertently filched when I was in Cambridge for high school from the now-defunct Episcopal Divinity School refectory, because it has tines I like for the purpose, but you can use your fingers, one of those pastry cutting-in tools, or a couple knives. Your sidekick can do this, too, but it requires some dexterity and an eye for texture.) You’re working for a course, dry meal-like affair and not a smooth dough. Small hunks of flour-coated butter throughout will make for great end-texture.

6. Now’s a good time to turn on the oven.

7. Drain the fruit. (I inherited my grandmother’s frugal nature, and I hate to waste anything; so, I saved the liquid for my coffee next day, but you could toss it or toss it into some sauce for dinner or make salad dressing.)

8. Stir fruit, nuts, and seeds into the flour mixture. Lightly. (I use the same fork I used to cut in the butter.)

9. Whisk together eggs and milk and drizzle over main mixture; then, work it all together until just mixed. (That same fork is perfect. & add your sweetener here, if using liquid versions.)

10. Depending upon your flour choices, whether you used 1 or 2 eggs and hard or liquid oil/fat, the texture of your dough is now either scone-ready or muffin-ready. If you’re lucky—though your side-kick may disagree—it’s muffin-ready (because scone-ready means more time and more mess). If it’s muffin-ready, use the fork, or a fairly flat spoon to scoop dough into your lined-muffin cups. (It makes about 10, not 12, muffins; so I left the center cups open.)

    If it’s scone-ready, un-line your muffin tin and repurpose the parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Then, form the dough on a floured surface into a thick roundish pancake, cut it into pie-slice shapes, and space them on the cookie sheet.

11. Bake for 15-20 minutes, on the top shelf for the first 10 minutes, then rotate tin, and place on the bottom shelf for the remainder. Your parchment paper above the dough line is likely to burn up on the top shelf, and voila! that’s how you smoke the muffins—or at least that’s how I did it. When tops are browned and a toothpick comes out clean from the center, your treats are done.

12. I put them in the fridge and re-warm singly at 350 degrees, starting with a cold oven and taking them out just after the oven comes to temp, by slicing into cross-sectional thirds (cut top to bottom, not side to side), and then, laying pieces on their cut sides in a cast iron skillet with a little butter on top. (One muffin is perfect for breakfast or afternoon tea.) I suppose you could freeze them, too, but I haven’t tried.

P.S. Since first publishing this recipe, I’ve tested it several times, and it’s pretty much fool-proof. I’ve subbed chilled coconut oil for butter, agave and other syrups for honey, yogurt + water + balsamic vinegar for milk, and frozen blueberries sans liquor/elixir for the dried fruit. It’s safe to say that you can consider this a go-to base recipe for breakfast and tea muffins. (I’ve yet to make this recipe as scones, but I’m cool with that because it’s so much easier to make muffins!)

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1. Yeah, cancer got me, but it was a vax-preventable and virus-driven cancer and not the result of bad food, unlike the epidemic stats for diabetes, heart disease, and many common cancers. Further, doctors and providers in three states marveled at how, relative to the throat cancer population—which is a truly grim bunch—I was hardly sickened by Stage III cancer mixed with hardcore chemo-radiation. According to me and my normal, I was and am definitely down-and-out, but according to everyone who had something to say about it—comments spewed like a cancer-parallel for the general population’s absurd practice of touching (strange) pregnant women’s bodies at-will—I am the poster-child for how to do cancer. I looked so “great” at one point, and 91 lbs, that no fewer than a dozen people literally followed me around a public event to stop me and tell me how great I looked in my vintage dress. It’s a spectacular dress, but in the decades of wearing it, it never looked so great as when I was a human coat-hanger. Doctors and I attribute this success to good food, even though I could barely choke it down. This rant is intended to illustrate that good food made me the equivalent of a model, even with Stage III cancer, so that you can go to fewer extremes to motivate yourself to cook and eat good food. oxoxA