Garlic Bacon Cheddar Sourdough Muffins revisited

While I'm well aware the mistakes I made the first time around making these muffins were all my fault. I can say positively that this round has worked much better - and yay for me I even remembered to take a few photographs of the progress. Few being the key word but well I remembered in the first place is a positive.

Same basic recipe as last time see here Bacon Sourdough Muffins - Take 1 - only not really. I did do some things majorly different.

This time I added almost no other herbs & spices, and there's only about 1/16th of a tsp of salt in the entire recipe and no baking soda so there's limited added sodium other than what existed in the bacon I used. Everything else just added up to be an awesome combination. These would make excellent breakfast for any SCA event requiring a breakfast component and you can make up a ton of the batter ahead of time and keep it in the fridge until the morning of to bake for the crowd. Someday when I get around to making bacon jam - I can state these would probably be even more awesome topped with that heavenly spread.

Here's what I did differently:
For the sauteed onions & garlic I added 1/2-3/4 cup diced sweet onion, and 3 whole cloves of fresh elephant garlic - so about 1/4 cup of garlic finely diced. I added this into a pan of unsalted butter 4tbsp of unsalted butter that had already started to brown a bit, and 1/2 tablespoon of bacon grease for some flavor, about 6 good turns of black pepper on a pepper mill set on medium - coarse, about 10 grains of coarse sea salt, and 1/2tsp dried basil, as this cooked and reduced down a bit I added about 2 heaping teaspoons of grated Parmesan cheese stirring gently (note here this smelled good enough to eat out of the pan - and I'm not the biggest fan of onion/garlic sauteed).

I let it all cook down until the onions & garlic were nice & golden brown and a little crispy. Removed this mixture from the heat to cool to room temp. I wasn't sure how much mixture I'd have in the end so I poured it into a temporary container to cool to room temp (so as not to kill Leroy like I did last time). And so I could get the mix going.

Next I poured in the starter I would use 1cup so I could get about 18 larger muffins, and then fed Leroy & stuffed him back in the fridge. Since I knew these would turn out better I doubled his feeding so I could have more of him for next time - possibly as early as Thursday or Friday.

I doubled the basic recipe Laura had given me originally. Though I did end up adding about 3Tablespoons of water to the mix just so it wasn't quite so dry and thick given how much additives I was going to add in. I mixed the dry ingredients and substituted baking powder for the baking soda in the original recipe so as not to kill off leroy again. No extra salt other than in the saute. I added the eggs (2 this time) and the oil - so I had a basic flavorless batter. I then added in the entire mix of onions & garlic and the oil from its sauteing about 3-4tbsp depending on your original measurements plus the saute liquid. Then about 2/3 cup each of mozzerella and sharp cheddar cheeses - finely shredded and another 2 Tablespoons of parmesan. (I wanted cheesy muffins dammit).

I folded gently and filled each paper lined muffin cup about even with the edge and then baked per instructions.

During the last 5 minutes of baking I topped each muffin with a sprinkling of both mozzerella and sharp cheddar cheeses to bake on a nice crispy melty cheesy topping.

Fresh out of the oven these are so dense, chewy and garlicky good that its hard to describe. One should be plenty but I think I'll have another soon so I can show you what the inside looks like.

They're flavorful without being so overpowering that you'd be afraid to eat them for lunch at work. Garlic flavor without the pungent after-breath.

I think if I get enough sales at Market that I'll have to make a quad batch of these to take to Simple Day in July...even if you don't like sourdough anything you'll like these.

frawggie