Recipe: Vollkornbran Muffins

My local stone mill, Elmendorf Baking Supplies, sells both whole-grain and high-extraction freshly milled flour. In the case of the latter, they end up with a lot of sifted-away bran they don't yet have a good use for. At least in my case (YMMV, either at Elmendorf itself or your own local stone mill), they will give away sacks of the stuff for free.

The sack I brought home a few months ago has been eyeing me from across the kitchen daily, especially since it isn't the sort of thing that keeps particularly long at room temperature. (I'd have put it into the freezer to prevent rancidity, except that would mean I'd never hear from it again.) Recently, I found the time to sort out the recipe I'd been meaning to when I first collected it: ACTUALLY GOOD bran muffins. By which I mean: bran muffins containing a lot of bran that one also would enjoy eating, despite. Thankfully, it didn't take long, because the idea behind this recipe has been rattling around my head for a while before that.

As we all know well by now, bran is usually what makes flour-containing baked goods crappy, at least without a level of effort and expertise that sifted flours typically do not demand. Bran—particularly the stone-milled variety—is coarse stuff; its large, hard particles get in the way of proper gluten development and thus final product volume. Bran is also very thirsty, but it is slow to own up to this—under normal conditions it starts out dry, coarse, and hard, and remains so for a long time. Yes, it will eventually absorb moisture and soften to a more-benign state, but by the time it does so on its own accord, it will be too little, too late. And even then it will pull moisture away from the remainder of the dough, compromising volume and texture yet again.

Which is why the best way to deal with bran (aside from jettisoning it entirely) is to sift it away and process it separately, reincorporating it into a dough after all the important work is done. I use this strategy—of which I learned the ins-and-outs from John Castley of Scotland's Wild Hearth Bakery—for the Scalded-Bran Whole-Wheat Sourdough sandwich bread that is in Breaducation, which looks like this:

In that recipe, I sift out the bran using a 50-mesh sifter and scald it with twice its weight of boiling water; I then develop the dough and incorporate the scalded bran after mixing is complete. Removing the bran means the dough can gain all the structure it needs, and cooking the bran in boiling water ensures it tenderizes completely, so that it doesn't interfere with said structure or leave the loaf with a gritty, unpleasant texture.

As you might gather, my plan was to apply the same strategy to a bran muffin recipe; in that case, the bran would obviously come pre-sifted (from the supermarket or your local stone miller).

But that's not all! The other thing I had in mind for this recipe was to give the bran muffins a bit more character than the average ones have. Some get raisins, most contain a generous amount of sugar/brown sugar/molasses, and maybe a little vanilla, but not much beyond that—as if one must always remember that this is a BRAN MUFFIN, and not simply a muffin that just happens to contain bran.

To me, the unspoken vibe of a bran muffin is that of Northern European rye breads—grainy, malty, and dark brown in color. I figured, why not lean into that? Thus, for mine, I use whole-wheat and whole-rye flours in the batter to up the graininess factor, malt syrup and brown sugar for a complex sweetness and mahogany-hues, and a quartet of spices often added to Scandinavian and German ryes: coriander, anise, fennel, and caraway. (I top them with either turbinado sugar, for crunch, or a dusting of rye flour, like you might a rye bread, for contrast. I like them both myself, but most tasters preferred the turbinado, not surprisingly.)

Hence the name: Vollkornbran Muffins. Find the recipe after the fold.

—Andrew

Vollkornbran Muffins

Makes 12 muffins