I’ve been seeing more and more recipes using muffin tins
on cooking shows lately, and not just for muffins or cupcakes. As Matt Kadey, author of Muffin Tin Chef, points out, muffin tins are a useful tool for
creating dishes that look great and, because they’re all the same size, make
for instant portion control. Another
advantage is that because of their shape, foods in muffin tins often cook more
quickly than they would in a baking dish.
You can make fun, portable food, which the Kady himself – a photographer
and adventurer in addition to nutrition writer and cookbook author – no doubt
had in mind as well.
Muffin Tin Chef
contains an interesting array of dishes, from breakfast through dessert. Some of the recipes, like French “Toasties”
(actually more like bread pudding baked in a muffin tin) and Pancetta Cups with
Fig Jam (slices of pancetta baked in mini-muffin tins until crispy, then filled
with fig jam) are things I’ll definitely make for guests. The recipe for lasagna rolls is intriguing
too, because it’s often a chore to lift a heavy lasagna pan out of the oven and
really tough to get picture-perfect slices.
Muffin tin portions solve these problems nicely. You’ll probably want to double the recipe and
freeze half for a quick meal.
The photos in the book show food that you’d be proud to
serve at a party, all beautifully golden brown on the outside and colorfully
garnished. And for the most part, the
recipes seem easy enough to make. Kadey
gives readers two major caveats, though, and they’re worth paying attention
to. The first is that baking times are
all approximate, and it can take much longer than the recipe suggests for a
dish to be done. A lot of that variation
depends on the materials the muffin tins are made of. Food tends to stick less to silicone muffin
cups, but will take longer to bake and, in most cases, won’t really brown. For some recipes, like those that start with
raw meat, Kadey gives an internal temperature for the finished product. It would be helpful if more of the recipes
had a finishing temperature, because it’s not always easy to tell that they’re
done.
The second is that you almost always have to grease the
muffin tins to keep the food from sticking (even the silicone ones, believe it
or not), and after Kadey says this in the book intro, he doesn’t mention it
again. If you randomly flip to a recipe
without reading the book intro, you might not grease the tins and end up with
the food permanently bonded to them.
Two other things to watch out for are recipes that use
pastry for a crust (either pie dough or puff pastry) and Kadey’s use of
whole-grain pasta in recipes. It’s a
good idea to pack as much nutrition and fiber in as you can. Whole grain pasta doesn’t cook the same way
that regular pasta does, though, and the line between not done and mush goes by
pretty quickly. This is fine if you’re
cooking pasta, putting sauce on it, and serving right away. But pre-cooking the pasta and then baking it
with other ingredients can turn whole grain pasta into a gummy mess. Regular pasta is more forgiving, so I’d use it
instead of whole grain in these recipes.
The pastry issue is more problematic. You’re taking a circle of pastry and making
it into a cup shape, and this makes pretty large folds of pastry inside the
cup. Those folds don’t bake at the same
rate as the pastry on the outside, so you often end up with swaths of
gooey, undercooked pastry on the inside.
I admit that I sometimes have food texture issues, so you may not be as
bothered by this as I am, but I think it definitely detracts from the finished
product.
In the end, while there might be some trial-and-error
getting a few of the recipes to turn out the way you’d like them to, most of
them are adaptable to different ingredients and flavors. You can take the 100+ recipes here and create
many more. So dig your muffin tins out
of the back of the cupboard and give it a try!
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