Alton Brown's Over the Top Muffins

Taking a quick break from restaurant blogging.  And when I mean quick break, I mean after I'm done with this blog, I'm back to catching up on my restaurant posts.  I love Alton Brown's recipes.  When I'm cooking or baking, Alton Brown is one of my go to's.  The other being the Joy of Cooking.  These recipes never fail, they're perfect, unless you start making modifications which I do sometimes when I realize that I have run out of certain ingredients in midst of mixing ingredients together.  They still taste good, just that sometimes they may not rise as much....or it may be lacking a bit of flavour.  But it's my own fault.

I needed to test out my oven to make sure it's functional.  We tried to use the self clean function to clean the oven, and part way through the clean, it errored out.  So I was worried that the oven was dead.  Turns out, it works, just won't work long enough at a high enough temp to do self clean.  Just means that I have to use chemicals to do a deep clean in the future.

So when I said, don't mess with Alton Brown's recipe, I totally did again this time around.  I was craving chocolate chip muffins, so I subbed chocolate chips for the blueberries.  And I didn't have regular yogurt, so I used greek yogurt.  Which I'm guessing as to why the muffins turned out a bit dry.  There's less liquid in greek yogurt, because greek yogurt is essentially regular yogurt with the liquids strained out.  Other than that, these were the best muffins I have EVER made.  I have never had muffins with such ginormous muffin tops.  This is the only time when huge muffin tops are wanted. So moral of the story.  Don't mess with Alton Brown's recipes!!!!

Note:  To best follow or use Alton Brown's recipes, have a scale handy.

Chocolate Chip Muffins

Look at the Muffin Top!

Top Heavy Blueberry Muffins (Yields 13)

Ingredients

1. 22 ounces all-purpose flour

1. 4 teaspoons baking powder

1. 2 teaspoons baking soda

1. 1 teaspoon kosher salt

1. 8 ounces sugar

1. 1 cup vegetable oil

1. 2 large eggs

1. 2 large egg yolks

1. 16 ounces plain whole fat yogurt

1. 1 tablespoon orange zest

1. 12 ounces fresh blueberries

1. 2 tablespoons demerera sugar
2. 
   

Instructions

1. Heat the oven to 375 degrees F and coat a standard 12-cup muffin pan (and one small oven safe ramekin) with non-stick spray.
2. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large mixing bowl. In second bowl whisk together the sugar, oil, eggs, yolks, yogurt and orange zest until smooth.
3. Make a crater in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour the wet ingredients into it. Stir with a rubber spatula until just barely combined. Resist the urge to over-mix – there should be a some lumps of flour in the batter
4. Fold in the blueberries, mixing just to combine.
5. Drop about a cup of batter in each of the muffin tin's wells. Whatever's left over can be dropped into the prepared ramekin. The cups should be quite full.
6. Sprinkle the muffins with the demerera sugar and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the bottom of a muffin comes out clean.
7. Remove from oven and turn out, upside down, onto a clean tea towel to cool completely. This step is key in preventing mushy muffin bottoms, which nobody and I do mean nobody likes.
8. Serve immediately or store in an airtight container for up to a week (or until they taste gross, smell bad, or grow fur).