*
Adjustments to the recipe and predicting/explaining the impact it has on the finished product:
When adjusting the recipe, peanut butter was both substituted and omitted. This will impact the final product in different ways. The batch with almond butter will marginally shift from the batch with peanut butter, because they have similar properties, ingredients, and effects when cooked. Properties of peanut butter, like its fat content for example, are similar in almond butter. However, while both are a good source of nutrients, their differences cause the muffins to have an altered texture and taste. In the batch with the peanut butter omitted, the muffins will have a more liquidy texture, because it does not have the nut butter’s properties to bind it together. One can predict that the omission of peanut butter will cause both the batter, baking, and final results to have an altered result, and they will not hold the way that original recipe muffins do.
After baking trials, the above theories were confirmed as the almond butter muffins crisp seemed marginally greater than the crisp of the peanut butter. Though this was not a major change, it shows that substitutions inevitably cause differences in final results because of the chemical properties the substituted ingredients possess. The muffins that lacked peanut or almond butter did not cook as well as previous batches, as shown by the results, liquidy and breakable muffin. Again, this can be a result of the lack of nutrients within peanut butter, like fat and water, which help the muffins bake the way that they are supposed to.
The adjusted muffins also differ in taste. Because the muffins have very few ingredients, it is easy to taste the peanut butter and almond butter when it is present. In the case of omission, the muffins seem to be lacking an ingredient, though anyone who does not know the original recipe may not be able to tell what said ingredient is. Through the trials it was demonstrated that while omission of peanut butter does solve the allergen issue, adequate substitution, like almond butter must be included in the recipe and omission is not possible when trying to achieve a tasty and enjoyable muffin.
**Photo taken by Dana Sorokin