Summer Squash and Lemon Muffins

I make a lot of lower-fat, oil-free, whole-grain, or otherwise "healthy" muffins. Mostly, I eat them when I need a snack for before or after training, as a way to quickly get calories that I know are good for me and fall close to that 25-60-15% breakup of macronutrients that I want my overall diet to follow. Its my compromise between spending a lot of time prepping my post-workout food to eat in the car and stopping at a gas station and eating ice cream. Which is a fantastic recovery food, but maybe not for every day... Anyway, I know that muffins without oil don't freeze as well as the ones with it, and some people claim that low-fat muffins are gummy-tasting, but I've never noticed that. Particularly in my carrot-spice muffin, I find the texture to be really cake-like and moist. So I decided to do a test, with one of my favorites--the zucchini lemon muffins from the King Arthur Flour Book. (The recipe is also available online, hence the link).

I didn't have any green zucchini on hand, but I did have yellow squash, and since zucchini and squash are basically the same thing, I figured I'd use that. And I have to say, using yellow squash, you can't even tell that there is squash in the muffin when you look at it! Normally the zucchini makes things more moist anyway, without imparting any scary zucchini flavor, but now its like its hidden. Unfortunately, I told Ed that they were zucchini muffins before I thought about not telling him and seeing if he would like them, so he didn't even try one. So, after mixing the dry goods, I split them in half, and to half the batter added my "low-fat" wet goods, to the other half added the "full-fat" wet goods. In this case I replaced oil with yogurt, although I'd like to do it again trying applesauce, my other standby. Here is the recipe, in case you need things written out instead of just adjusting the King Arthur recipe:

Dry Goods:

2C flour
1C grated zucchini or yellow squash
1 tbs baking powder
1/2C sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2C walnuts
1/2C raisins (golden raisins would be perfect)
1 lemon's worth of zest (KA flour uses half a lemon, I use the whole one, because what else are you going to do with half a lemon??)

Mix together the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. Stir in the rest of the add-ins. Divide this into two equal portions (or not, you could just put everything into one bowl and forget the experiment).

Regular Wet Stuff:
1/4C milk (I used skim)
1 egg
2.5 tbs oil

Low-Fat Wet Stuff:
1/4C milk (skim)
1 egg
2.5 tbs yogurt (or you could try applesauce)

Mix together your wet stuff (independently of each other) and dump it into the dry--fold just to combine. Fill the greased muffin tins, each batter makes 6 muffins. Bake at 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes, until the muffins are golden brown on top.

So: how did they compare? Visually, they looked the same, within the normal variation of 6 versus 6.

The lower fat muffin (is not no fat because of the walnuts and the egg) is on the left, the regular one is on the right. The lumpy things are either walnuts or raisins. No major differences. So I cut them in half. The immediate difference is the size of the crumb. The muffin made with oil has a much more consistent, small, cake-like crumb:

As an aside, you can see how the squash pretty much disappears into the muffin--all that is left are little yellow flakes, which could also be lemon zest.

The yogurt-muffin has stickier-looking insides, for lack of a better word. It is definitely not as pretty-looking, but also this particular muffin has lots of stuff in the middle, making the comparison a little trickier. But you can see that there are bigger holes in there than in the oil muffin:

If we were going on muffin looks alone, the oil one would be all I ever made. Luckily, taste comes into play. I took a bite of the oil muffin. Tastes good, moist, lemony, light, crunchy where there are walnuts and chewy on the raisins. As far as muffins go, this ranks pretty high up there. I took a bite of the yogurt-muffin. While hot from the oven, it tasted almost exactly the same as the oil-muffin. Lemony, light, moist. I finished up the muffins because you can't let things like that go to waste, and fresh-baked goods are some of my favorite things.

Once they'd cooled down, I tasted them again. The oil muffin is about the same as the first time, if a little drier-tasting. I imagine this is because of the close-knit crumb. The yogurt muffin tasted moister than before, but definitely not gummy. It was a little bit chewier, as opposed to the crumble of the oil one, but not overly much, in fact I liked the chewiness of the dough. But then again, I'm probably used to it. So how different are they? Its obvious that the oil muffin is how muffins were meant to be. The PDQ (Pretty Darn Quick) muffins from King Arthur Flour do say that if you are going to eat a muffin soon after it is baked, you can leave out the oil, and I would be inclined to agree with them. I couldn't taste a difference between the warm muffins (does that mean if I warm them up, it'll be the same? Doubtful...), but the cold yogurt muffins definitely had more bite. Of course, this could be due to the yogurt, not the fact that I left out the oil, so really I should have tried a batch that had nothing replacing the oil. Of course that might be too dry a batter... oh the options!

Conclusion: I am going to continue to make oil-starved muffins to use as training food, and save my oil-filled muffins for when the muffin isn't going to be eaten immediately and its someone other than me eating it.

While I was at it, I calculated the nutrition information for these muffins.
Regular zucchini-lemon muffin (per muffin): 227 calories, 10g fat, 30g carbs, 5g protein (39%, 52%, 9%)
Low-fat zucchini-lemon muffin (per muffin): 181 calories, 4.5g fat, 30g carbs, 5.5g protein (22%, 67%, 12%)