100% Whole Grain Apple Muffins

I’m always straddling the line between health food and healthy food, and these apple muffins are delightfully caught in the middle. To me, health food is the food you find at stores that smell like Patchouli. If you’ve ever stepped foot inside a Whole Foods, you know exactly the smell I’m talking about. It smells earthy and you don’t know if it’s in the good way or the bad way…

These stores are often chock full of the trendiest foods and the foods empty of something or other–gluten, meat, lactose. They were early adopters of things like kefir and nutritional yeast, seaweed and teff flour. Don’t get me wrong, I love exploring the aisles of my neighborhood Whole Paycheck. But just because it sells health foods doesn’t mean everything there is good for us.

Now, drumroll please for our other contestant: healthy food. You can find this anywhere: in your mom’s salad recipe, in a restaurant crostini slathered in tomatoes, in the weeds growing in your own backyard. In my humble opinion, healthy food is something that sustains us without bombing our gut biomes and trashing our metabolisms. For each person, healthy could mean something different.

The muffin

These apple muffins are FULL of health foods: hemp hearts, wheat germ, sesame seeds, and whole wheat bulgur. But do these ingredients make this muffin healthy? Given the amount of butter and sweetness added, not really. Still, there’s never been a tastier way to get in all that fiber.

This recipe is actually my new favorite (I really mean it this time!). It’s moist and, unlike other gummy whole wheat desserts, it’s crumbly and melts in your mouth. The whole wheat flour isn’t just there in the absence of regular flour: it actually adds another nutty dimension to the treat, making it closer to the flavor of a graham cracker than a regular old cake muffin would be.

The fact that my brother–the most carbohydrate-loving person I know–went back for thirds should be proof enough this muffin is a winner.

The inspiration

That same carbohydrate connoisseur gave me the book that inspired this recipe. Huckleberry is written by recipe designer and restauranteur Zoe Nathan, where she shares some of the magic of one of Santa Monica’s most coveted brunch spots. The recipes are Californiafied: always experimenting, committed to quality ingredients, and the kind of comfort food you’d find in a hippie grandma’s kitchen.

Unfortunately, I never was able to eat there, since the lines were always out the door! But making the recipes from this book comes close enough to the real deal, and they’re delicious. You can tell that Nathan put so much effort into perfecting each one. A dash of this specialty item here, a tablespoon of that hard-to-find ingredient there, most recipes are not something a home cook can accomplish with a capsule pantry. But the rewards are worth it, since they make for an unforgettable bite.

The one downside of this cookbook I’ve found is that some of the recipes have far too much fat. I’m not just talking from a health perspective but from a recipe one. Many recipes I’ve made, especially the recipe for easy flaky dough, seemed to get greasy but not flaky. I’ve made pastry dough successfully with a volumetric flour to butter ratio of 3:1, but this recipe used a ratio of 2:1. My guess would be that the issue comes from translating the recipes from bakery oven to home oven.

Adaptations

I made this recipe for apple muffins with the foods I had on hand. I substituted out items I didn’t have Also, I reduced the canola oil in favor of more butter (yum!), while decreasing the total fat. The second apple makes it possible to do so without drying out the crumb.

The recipe

Step 1: Grease 12 muffin tins and preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Step 2: Mix together the ingredients for the crumb topping: whole wheat bulgur, hemp hearts, oats, whole wheat flour, honey, brown sugar, sesame seeds, salt, and softened butter.

Step 3: Toast the wheat germ in a small skillet over medium low heat. Mix together the dry ingredients for the muffins. That is, the whole wheat flour, almond flour, toasted wheat germ, sesame seeds, whole wheat bulgur, hemp hearts, rolled oats, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, brown sugar, turbinado sugar, and salt.

Step 4: Mix together the wet ingredients in a separate bowl: maple syrup, buttermilk, canola oil, melted butter, egg white, and vanilla. 

Step 5: Using a box grater, grate two peeled apples.

Step 6: Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Then, fold in the apples.

Step 7: Divide the muffin batter among the 12 greased muffin tins. Sprinkle the crumble mixture on top of each muffin.

Step 8: Bake the muffins for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Are these apple muffins still too healthy for you? Check out this recipe for beignets or this one for butter pecan ice cream. 😋 Not healthy enough? Try this lighter recipe for baked apples.

Enjoy, and leave me a comment to let me know how it goes!

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