Secretly switch your family to whole wheat

White whole wheat flour makes for great muffins.

Mon, Mar 15 2010 at 11:04 PM EST

"White" Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Muffins

I’ve been having a difficult time trying to switch my family to whole wheat products. That may be changing. I recently discovered white whole wheat flour. Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?

White whole wheat flour is milled from hard white spring wheat. The whole wheat flour you’re accustomed to is milled from traditional red wheat. The flour from the spring wheat is milder in color and milder-tasting that traditional whole wheat but it has much of the same nutrition of whole wheat. The white whole wheat can be used in recipes that call for white flour, and it’s difficult to tell the difference. It’s the best of both worlds. White flour taste with wheat flour nutrition.

I bought a bag of King Arthur 100% Organic White Whole Wheat Flour and decided to try one of the recipes on the King Arthur website. I chose Golden Chocolate Chip Muffins. They were a huge hit with my boys and my husband and no one suspected they were made with whole wheat flour.

The amount of sugar in these muffins makes me hesitate to call them healthy, but I wanted to try the white whole wheat flour for the first time in a recipe that everyone would want to dive into. This did it.

Ingredients

1/2 cup (4 ounces) butter 
1 cup  (7 ounces) granulated sugar   
2 teaspoons  baking powder    
1/2 teaspoon  salt    
1 teaspoon  vanilla extract   
2  large eggs   
1/2 cup  (4 ounces) milk   
2 cups  (8 1/2 ounces) King Arthur 100% Organic White Whole Wheat Flour *   
2 cups  (12 ounces) chocolate chips   
coarse sparkling sugar, for topping

Time Estimates

Prep time: 15 min

Cook time: 30 min

Total time: 45 min

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Lightly grease (or line with muffin cups, and grease the muffin cups) a standard-size muffin pan.  
Beat together the butter, sugar, baking powder, salt, and vanilla until fluffy. Beat in the eggs, then stir in the milk.
Mix in the flour, then the chocolate chips.
Spoon the batter into the muffin cups; they’ll be quite full.
Sprinkle each muffin with a little coarse sugar.
Bake the muffins for 30 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the center of one comes out without crumbs clinging to it (a little chocolate is OK!).

Yield

12 standard muffins

My notes

I rarely say this about chocolate, but I think these muffins could have used fewer chocolate chips. I’m sure my boys would not agree.
I used almost all organic ingredients except the vanilla and the eggs, although the eggs were local, truly free-range eggs. There might have been a bit more sugar than I would have liked, but the quality of all the ingredients was high.
I’m going to try using the flour to make pizza crust next.

Do you use white whole wheat flour in any recipes? Share, please.

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