Took me 7 years to realize I was overmixing my muffin batter

I always thought lumpy batter meant I had failed somehow, so I would whisk those muffins until they were smooth as glass. It wasnt until my sister watched me make her birthday batch and yelled at me to stop that I even noticed what I was doing. She pointed at the bowl and said "those lumps are fine, you are gonna get hockey pucks" and honestly she was right. Every batch I made had that weird dense tunneling thing going on and I just assumed it was my cheap oven. Nope, it was me being extra for no reason. First time I left the lumps and did a bare minimum fold, they came out tall and tender, total game changer. Has anyone else had a relative or friend call out their baking habit like that out of nowhere?

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holly_foster13d ago

My grandma caught me doing this about 3 years ago with pancakes, not muffins, but same idea. She watched me stir the batter forever and said I was beating all the air right out of it. I always thought smooth batter meant light and fluffy pancakes, so I kept doing it for years. Turns out those little lumps are what make them rise right, and once I started mixing just until it came together they got so much better. So yeah, I was wrong about that one.

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