The Flour Trick For Fluffing Up Dense Muffin Types

Whether you're on the go or taking your morning slowly, you can't beat a warm, freshly baked muffin to get your day started off on the right foot. With so many varieties available, from blueberry muffins to pecan pie muffins, there's a muffin for every taste preference and occasion. But muffins don't always bake up perfectly. Sometimes, especially with heavier batters like bran muffins, the batch comes out extra dense, leaving you longing for the light and fluffy texture that you expected to sink your teeth into.

Often the mistakes made when baking muffins can happen too quickly for even an experienced home cook to notice, and some of those unfortunate happenings can lead to dense and dry muffins. If your muffins have a tendency to bake up this way, a recipe adjustment might be in order. But you don't need a whole new recipe, just a simple addition to give your next batch a better chance for success: oat flour.

Oat flour is lighter than all-purpose flour

Oat flour can bring a new level of fluffiness to your muffin batter because of its light and absorbent nature. Though it sometimes serves as a gluten-free substitute for regular flour, oat flour can also work in tandem with all-purpose flour to make your muffins bake up beautifully. This simple assist from oat flour also elevates other quick breads, like banana bread, to create a more tender texture.

When adding oat flour to your batter, you should aim to replace about one-fourth of the flour in your recipe with the same amount of oat flour. This will help to create a balance between the two flours and help make sure your treats bake up just right.

And if you don't have any store-bought oat flour on hand, that's not a problem at all. With the help of a blender or food processor, you can transform rolled oats into the fine powder that you need in just minutes. This DIY oat flour is perfect for everything from your flax muffins to your cinnamon oatmeal pancakes.

So whether you're trying to lighten up a traditionally dense batter or aiming to add extra fluff to your baked goods, oat flour can be a great addition to your recipe arsenal.