Elevate Your Breakfast Muffins With An Oat Flour Swap

Muffins are popular baked treats thanks to their soft, spongy texture and innate versatility. It doesn't take much to make muffins come to life, but the base of any great batch is usually quality flour. This essential ingredient provides structure and rise to baked confections, so it's important to be selective with the varieties you choose. 

If you want your next batch of muffins to really shine, try using oat flour in your recipe instead. This flour variety is similar to others commonly used in baking, like wheat, in that it's mild enough to highlight other ingredients while providing a fluffy texture to support those additions. It sets itself apart from cake flour, however, in that it's much lighter, which makes for extra pillowy batches of muffins. Oat four is often better for you nutritionally too, coming packed full of energy-boosting protein, fiber, and potassium. 

This flour has an innately sweet taste, so it elevates the flavors that you already love in your muffins, and it also soaks up liquids well, keeping those goods extra moist. Compared to other flour alternatives like almond or coconut, oat flour is generally more affordable, so you won't have to break the bank to get better muffins. This ingredient is also a great choice for gluten-free bakers; if this is an important factor for you, make sure to choose an oat flour with the gluten-free certification stamped on the package.

If you're following a recipe where you need to swap out the original flour for oat, remember that you can't usually substitute these flours at a 1:1 ratio because oat flour is much lighter than many other flours. Instead, check the weight of the original flour and add an equal weight of oat flour. You might still need to adjust your recipe slightly from there to ensure your muffins stay moist, so pay attention to how your muffin batter looks before sticking it in the oven to bake. 

Because there's no gluten in oat flour, you'll need to have a strong binder in your recipe to keep the structure of your muffins intact. Eggs work especially well in this role, as does ground flax. To ensure you have a cohesive batch of muffins, make sure to focus on these binders, and add more if it's necessary. From there, you can make your muffins truly irresistible with even more creative additions. 

Mixing whole oats into your muffin batter makes for a more natural sweetness and crunch. And other textured additions like walnuts or melted chocolate chips also do well to elevate the structure of these treats. 

To support the light and fluffy effects of your oat four, remember not to over-mix the batter before you bake. This is one of the many muffin-making mistakes novice bakers make. You should only mix your muffin mix until it's combined to ensure the batter has some air pockets left while it bakes, which helps it rise higher.

Opting for refined flour instead of oat flour means relying on an unsustainable source of energy, and often results in a crash very early on in the day. So if you haven't already, start looking for muffin recipes that call for oat flour instead. It doesn't take but one simple switch to get the perfect batch of breakfast treats, so don't knock this hack until you try it for yourself.