April's CR Diary

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April 17, 2005

At What Point Do We Declare This A Disaster?

That's what my mother said to me as we watched yellow goo flecked with green ooze down my kitchen wall. No, this is not an episode of Ghostbusters. This is what happened when I tried to make those famous treats, Sherm's Megamuffins.

The megamuffins are delicious treats that are engineered to have extremely good nutrition at a low calorie level. And did I mention that they're delicious? I was excited about making a batch, but also afraid. They have a whole lot of ingredients. I tend to cook with easy, simple ingredients, and I don't like to spend much time cooking. Still, I could make a batch of megamuffins and freeze enough for forty days! That's a long time, and worth the investment of an afternoon.

The problems began almost immediately. I hadn't been able to find guava, so MR had said to substitute papaya. But I couldn't get enough papaya out of the fruit (they're really hard, covered with inedible skin, and filled with seeds.) So I asked MR what to do, and he made some suggestions, all of which would require me to go back to the store, an activity for which I had neither time nor patience. But he said I could use limes... whole limes. So I chopped them up and put them in the food processor, along with the other blender ingredients, including a giant amount of endive.

Blend blend blend. First, the entire thing starts to overflow out the top of the food processor, leaving a giant mess on my kitchen cabinet. So I stopped blending, poured the messy mixture into a large bowl, and cleaned up the mess. Then I decided to blend it more slowly, with less liquid.

It was all going well, and I added the endive. Blend blend blend.

Then all of a sudden a horrible noise emanates from my food processor. Before I could hit stop, it had flung megamuffin wet ingredient mixture all over my kitchen. Oooze oooze oooze.

"At what point do we declare this a disaster?"

In the meantime, I ate an entire carton of "Just Strawberries," dried strawberries with no sugar added. There's some fruit. That was 225 calories.

I decided to refrigerate the mixture and return to the process tomorrow. It seemed that both me and the food processor needed a cooling off period.

Here's the recipe. It's Sherm's recipe engineered with lots of tweaks from MR, which is why it's called M Squared megamuffins.

Lots of people have safely made megamuffins. My results are not typical.

M2 Megamuffins

Large dry ingredients
2 boxes (454 g/1 lb) Ener-G rice bran
1 C dark rye flour
2 2/3 cup psyllium husk
1 cup wheat bran
3 T calcium-carbonate based “baking powder”
6 x 20 g scoops Jarrow whey protein powder
2/3 cup brewer's yeast
100 g raw almonds
89 g almond meal

Blender ingredients
3 T powdered cinnamon
1 T ginger
1 T nutmeg
1 T PURE sucralose
10 g NAC (N-acetylcysteine) powder
3 whole fresh eggs (flax-fed omega-3 preferred)

3 cups skim milk
300 g endive
340 g guava
240 g canned unsalted pumpkin
200 g whole orange

Large Pot or Bowl Wet ingredients
24 egg whites (3 x 250 mL cartons)
3 T olive oil or HOSO
3 T Reconstituted Z-Trim
800 Calories’ dried fruit (cranberries)

Sprinkle On Top
3/8 T K metabisulfite

Bake at 325F.

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Mix together the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Set aside.

2. Put cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, sucralose, NAC, and whole eggs in blender. Cram as much of the endive, guava, and pumpkin into the thing as you can at a time and blend until very smooth. Sequentially dump into the separate large pot or bowl (NOT the one containing the dry ingredients!).

3. Throw the remaining Large Pot or Bowl Wet ingredients (OJ Concentrate, egg whites, olive oil or HOSO, Reconstituted Z-Trim, and dried cranberries) into the wet-ingredient Large Pot or Bowl. Mix thoroughly.

4. Pour wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Mix thoroughly until you have a uniform mixture. This is hard work for about 5 minutes. Make sure there are no dry spots left.

5. Bake in preheated oven 325F.

6. Quickly distribute the now-rising dough evenly into two 10” x 14” baking pans. For maximal efficiency and minimal hassle, use baker’s parchment.

7. Sprinkle metabisulfite onto the surface of the muffins.

8. “Tent” the muffins: use enough tin foil to cover the sides of the pans, cutting a rectangular hole in the center of the foil to expose all but ~1-2” of the top surface. This minimizes excess browning while allowing for the cooking of the centers.

9. Cook in preheated oven for 110 minutes. If they don’t both fit on one level, swap them top-to-bottom in the oven after 50 minutes since it is always hotter at the top and you want both batches to get the same amount of heat.

12. Remove from oven, invert carefully out of the pan, and let stand until cool enough to touch (5-10 minutes) while covered with parchment.

13. Using a tape measure, cut into an appropriate number of slices. The analysis assumes 20 muffins, so each pan is cut in half one way and 5 (2.75”) the other.

14. Pack in zip-loc freezer bags to retain moisture. Keep refrigerated or frozen. I put them straight into the freezer. IMO, they’re best when frozen and then thawed, rather than fresh.

INGREDIENTS NOTES
* You can substitute other dried fruit for the cranberries, of course. I use a mixture of the readily-available oiled, sugared dried cranberries with 'Just Cranberries,' which are available at Whole Foods and elsewhere & as the name implies are dried cranberries -- period. This REALLY brings the Cal down, and because these things are at full volume, you would likely have a really hard time if you used these exclusively for 800 Calories. I typically use 21 g (75 Cal) of these, with the remainder the regular ones.

* Spices are a matter of personal preference. Dean has proposed (wisely, IMO) using 'pumpkin pie spice' instead. I still haven’t gotten around to ordering a sugar-free pumpkin pie spice.

* Other non-caloric sweeteners could be used in place of sucralose, but sucralose APPEARS to be the most well-documentedly safe noncaloric sweetener. NB that this is PURE sucralose, not 'Splenda' (which is 'cut' with maltodextrin). Sucralose is available from Warren Taylor < warren.taylor@earthlink.net >, although he is currently cutting it with cellulose: you’ll have to adjust the volume of sucralose you use accordingly, but at least it adds no empty Calories.

* I use eggs from flax-fed hens, to lower AA, cholesterol, and SaFA relative to what the analysis says. Alas, this DOES mean some extra DHA -- my only dietary source.

* I use commercial liquid egg whites rather than hand-separated egg whites -- MUCH less hassle.

* I use Ener-G brand sodium-free baking powder, which has the advantage of being loaded with Ca: this contributes over 500 mg of Ca per serving.

* I use baking parchment, after a tip from John Roberts, which REALLY reduces the hassle of extracting the muffins and cleaning up afterward, & avoids any evil gunk you might get off of the sides of the pan. Environmentally rather a poor option, alas :( -- although it can be re-used for many batches.

* The rice bran is probably the most important ingredient for nutrition, although its phytic acid does mean that the mineral bioavailability is reduced. Buy it in sealed containers if possible, to avoid peroxidation of the fats and loss of the tocotrienols. I buy Ener-G rice bran at a local health food store. You can easily get it by mail from their web site http://www.ener-g.com or 1-800-331-5222. Look under "flours" to find the rice bran product and buy the 8 oz (227g) size which costs less than $2!

* For the protein powder, use plain, unflavored, unsweetened stuff, and (to get the best nutritional bennies) use a concentrate rather than an isolate. I use Jarrow's American Whey (Unflavored/Natural), mostly because it meets the above criteria and I get it on the cheap; other reputable brands will do as well. NB that the scoop that comes with this brand is 23 g, whereas I use a 20 g scoop.

* I use the calcium carbonate-based baking powder from Ener-G, above, which boosts the Ca content without adding Na. K-based products are a good second best. If you have to use a sodium-based baking powder, that's OK, but DO try to find aluminum-free baking powder at the very least.

* NAC (N-acetylcysteine) powder is available from VRP < http://www.vrp.com > or IIRC LEF < http://www.lef.org >. K metabisulfite is available in home wine-making hobby stores, where they commonly just know it as “sufites.” On these, see:

http://lists.calorierestriction.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0108&L=crsociety&P=R5769

* HOSO: High-oleic sunflower oil. Similar fatty acid profile to olive oil, but with a taste more compatible with a muffin. True, pure, unrefined HOS is quite tasty but I haven’t been able to find it for years: some regular grocery stores carry refined HOSO, and Omega Nutrition makes an unrefined, blended oil mixed w/sesame and coconut oil, making the taste & fatty acid profile a little poorer than the real thing.

* Z-Trim: a fat substitute. See: < http://www.ztrim.com/about.html >. Gives the mouth feel with negligible Calories. I use it in vegetarian “gravy,” stews, and mixed spiced steamed vegetables.

Nutrient info isn't ready yet... the crunch I have is based on the older version. Will post when correct.

Posted by april at April 17, 2005 9:08 AM

Comments

Posted by: Kevin Perrott at April 17, 2005 11:19 AM

Posted by: Em at April 17, 2005 1:31 PM

Posted by: fruitgirl at April 18, 2005 12:13 PM

Posted by: roofing at May 4, 2005 11:29 AM

Posted by: Malcolm at August 20, 2006 8:14 AM

Posted by: maureen at November 30, 2006 9:44 AM

Posted by: Chris at January 6, 2007 11:53 AM

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