Panera copycat pumpkin muffins

for both of my children one of their first favorite solid foods were these delicious pumpkin quote unquote muffins I'm putting muffins in quote marks there because obviously they're cakes and they came from this uh chain restaurant carbohydrate based chain restaurant that we have here in the US called Panera uh but then Panera got bought by private equity and they reduced their menu a whole lot and so no more pumpkin muffins we're going to make pumpkin muffins at home today there's a lot of good copycat recipes on the internet already I made this one by uh Lisa Huff really came out nicely uh I think that we can make it a little bit more accurate to the original though and whenever you're trying to make a copycat recipe the first thing to consider is that food companies are well they're not required to publish their recipes but they are required to publish their ingredients in descending order by weight now of course Panera discontinued this item so the website with the ingredients is down but thanks to the good people at the internet archive uh it's still here for us to consider # not an ad the internet archive is one of the few good things left on the internet that the tech oligarchs have not yet co-opted or destroyed so let's support them if we just look at the ingredients pumpkin is number one that's awesome after that is soybean oil which is what gives it it sort of box cake like texture that I love so well and after that is what I think the secret ingredient is which is this palm oil and butter blend probably something that they use to save a little money on using Straight butter you could use straight butter but because I have it and I really like it I'm going to use uh butter flavored shortening which is probably a pretty similar product to the palm oil butter blend they're talking about there in the Panera recipe I'm going to take four tablespoons of this and melt it and again if you don't want to use the shortening you can just use real butter probably be better in in some ways there we go and we're going to use half of that in our muffin batter and half of it in the strucel the strucel is the like crumb topping and to make it crumbly and crummy we start with a third of a cup of flour 1/4 of a cup of brown sugar or in my case I'm just using the white sugar and then I'll give it a dab of molasses because that's all brown sugar is it's just white sugar with a little molasses in it and then this way I can control how much molasses I use I usually like a little bit more and also I don't have to keep two different kinds of sugar around time now for the pumpkin spice pumpkin spice so named because it uh accompanies pumpkin not because it contains pumpkin it doesn't contain pumpkin it usually consists of cinnamon Ginger cloves uh nutmeg right at most a half teaspoon of that in the streusel I would normally give it a tiny pinch of salt but I think that there is some salt already in this shortening and yeah half of this so 2 tablespoons of melted butter or butter flavored shortening in there and then you just Stir It Up and it should look kind of clumpy and crumbly it's it's a crumb normally strucel is made by cutting solid fat solid butter into the ingredients but uh I did a bunch of experiments and the ones that I did with solid butter it just didn't have the texture of the thing that I knew from the restaurant I think they're using a liquid fat in this Dr years old or they used to before private Equity there you go you're looking for that kind of wet sand texture they talk about in pastry making a lot that's done for now now it's time to make the actual batter and let's get real like we said this is not really a muffin this is a cake it's not something you ought to be eating every day you know what you could eat every day Factor sponsor of this video just because I am a famous internet cook does not mean that I want to make all of my meals myself I do not want to make all my meals myself I would really other people make some of them for me and Factor does that for me uh factor is now owned by the people who make hellofresh uh it's kind of like hellofresh except you don't have to do any cooking at all they just ship fresh never frozen meals right to your front door you heat them up in like 2 minutes and then you eat them it's as simple as that they're Chef crafted dietitian approved delicious and just away for me to sort of get my veg and protein on a regular schedule around here really really juicy salmon I don't know how they make their meat so juicy they also send you extras if you want them they got these nice juices Apple beet Ginger if you're struggling to eat what you want on a reliable schedule man factor is the way to go especially if you're just a really really busy person you just need to be able to heat things up from time to time absolute Lifesaver head to factor 75.com or click my link below and use code 50 rusia to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first Factor box that's code 50 rusia at factor75.com to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping thank you factor okay anyway muffin batter two eggs crack those in there now it's time for the uh canned pumpkin one cup of canned cooked pumpkin make sure that you get pumpkin and not pumpkin pie filling which would have a whole bunch of eggs and sugar with it already and not necessarily in the proportions that we want plop in there and then a third of a cup of any neutral tasting oil it doesn't have to be soybean oil by the way if you listen to real scientists and not just grifters who are trying to sell books um there is a legitimate Health concern with these kinds of Highly refined seed oils though it's not the oil itself it's the fact that this product is just a very very inexpensive way to add a bunch of moisture and shelf stability to junk food it's it's the chosen fat of junk food that's not because there's anything wrong with the fat it's more that there's something wrong with the food and goes the remaining butter or butter flavored shortening oh I need to melt that again there we go now I can get it in there and I'm using the shortening because it it it tastes more buttery than butter actually does and as a result it brings a lot of flavor to this particular uh muffin also some softness if you used Straight like real butter it would be uh firmer in texture by the time you baked it similarly a/4 cup of milk really softens the body of the muffin in a nice way um the ingredients on the website list water and milk flavoring so we're just going to use milk a little teaspoon of vanilla there's vanilla listed in the ingredients and then a cup and a half of plain white sugar in with the wet ingredients and you generally with this kind of baking you consider sugar to be a wet ingredient because it dissolves so easily into the liquid it also uh provides a little bit of abrasion to kind of help you break up the eggs and everything when you're stirring the wet ingredient smooth with a thing like this you really want to mix up the wet ingredients first because by the time the flour goes in you want to mix it as little as possible to try to develop the gluten and stuff as little as possible to keep it tend so now we can beat the crap out of it get it really really really smooth and then these kinds of recipes usually tell you to take your dry ingredients and mix them up in a separate bowl and then put them in uh you can just kind of do that right on top of the wet ingredients so it's a a cup and 3/4 flour two teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice or uh you know less if you don't like it quite so strong and spicy half teaspoon of coar salt and uh you the spice and the salt could have gone in with the wet ingredients the thing that you want want to sort of put in with the dry is the last thing here which is the baking powder because you uh you don't want to introduce the baking powder to the batter until you're ready to bake because it's going to start creating the the gas reaction that makes things puff up and you don't want to outrun that you have the reaction stop before you're actually baking go ahead and stir all of this up nice and smooth just until it's smooth all right then we need a muffin tin which is bigger than a cupcake tin and that matters because um if you buy cupcake papers you know the little wrappers um they're going to be too small for the muffin tin it's actually kind of hard to find muffin papers in a normal store where I live so I'm just going to bake directly in the pan um that does require you to grease the pan pretty darn thoroughly if you want to get these out all right into the cups we go and it goes up about 3/4 of the way up the sides of the cup all right tap those for a second to make sure we've got maximum room in there for the strucel which you just pile up on top of each one strucel I love streusel you know one of the ways that I was able to actually reverse engineer this recipe was by comparing um those Panera muffin ingredients lists with the ingredients lists for muffins that don't have streusel from Panera and from that you could kind of guess that some of the differences resulted from the lack of strel all right so you want to bake these at 375 fenit 190c these have been in there 25 30 minutes they're almost done you want to do the toothpick trick and uh don't let the toothpick come out too clean or dry if there's a little bit stuck to it that's awesome you want them to be moist all right and then you got to let them cool all the way down before you can take them out of the pan and I'll show you the the technique for that all right take the powdered sugar spank them like they've been bad and if you don't have the paper cups the secret for getting them to release is to grab them and then kind of twist them turn ever so slightly to make it release from the pan and then you can just pull it up twist and release so there you go there is your copy cat Panera style pumpkin muffin figured it out just in time for the kids to decide they don't like them anymore I'm sure that'll happen