Chocolate Muffins

A plain chocolate muffin batter: dry ingredients in one bowl, wet in another, combined quickly and baked. No country is claimed. Muffins in this sense are American, and the method is the standard muffin method. That method is the only thing that matters here, and the source is right to shout about it. Mixing the wet and dry ingredients separately and then combining them with as few strokes as possible is not a shortcut, it is the technique. Every stroke after the flour is wetted develops gluten, and developed gluten in a muffin gives you a tough, rubbery crumb full of long tunnels instead of a tender open one. A properly mixed muffin batter still has visible lumps and streaks of flour in it. That is what it should look like. This is also why muffins are quick. There is no creaming stage, no aeration to build, nothing that rewards patience. The raising agent does the work and the oven does the rest. The recipe as written is fairly lean, no butter, no chocolate chips, no sugar beyond half a cup, which makes it closer to a breakfast muffin than a dessert. The source's own description mentions chocolate chips that appear nowhere in the ingredients. Adding a handful is an easy improvement.