Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

Banana-nut muffins are S-tier muffins. They&#39;re one of the tried-and-true flavor combos that most anyone would welcome at breakfast, so good that even when the muffin itself is kind of dry or bland, you’re still pretty happy. If they&#39;ve got got nuts and bananas, they&#39;re fine.But we wanted an “ultimate” banana-nut muffin! And while we basically took the same tack as with our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/ultimate-blueberry-muffins">Ultimate Blueberry Muffin</a>—dial up the banana flavor, dial up the nuts—we also wanted to improve the muffin itself. Matthew turned to his grandmother’s banana bread recipe and its secret ingredient: orange juice. The acidity from the juice (and an extra bump from some malic acid) offers a nice counterpoint to all the sweet stuff, and it also happens to boost and complement the flavor of the banana.We tried all kind of methods for intensifying the banana flavor by cooking the fruit—pressure cooking with baking soda for more Maillard browning; roasting them in their skins, like we do with our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/roasted-banana-pudding">Vegan Banana Pudding</a>—but using large chunks of fresh banana yielded muffins with some really nice big pieces of fruit. So instead of cooking the fruit, we just worked in some freeze-dried banana powder into the batter and some banana extract into the icing. And while there’s nothing wrong with the walnuts usually used in banana-nut muffins, we figured if we’re going to do an ultimate version, we might as well kick it up a notch with pecans. The key step for success here is emulsifying the batter properly, and it helps a lot if you’ve got your ingredients at the right temperature. The recipe calls for warming the eggs but be careful about using orange juice straight from the fridge or chunks of frozen bananas. For the best results, you’ll want to warm the juice and bananas to about room temperature.

Ultimate Banana-Nut Muffins