Tuesdays with Dorie - Savory Corn and Pepper Muffins

Ah, corn muffins. So hearty and filling, a perfect accompaniment to a winter's bowl of chili. I was really looking forward to this recipe - simple, yet creative. And it's a Dorie recipe, so they would of course be wonderful, right?

Well... sort of.

I made this recipe with some minor tweaking: since I knew that most of us (husband excluded) wouldn't be crazy about the jalapeno, I subbed it out - instead I added 1 tsp. of toasted cumin seeds, and dropped the chili powder back to 1/2 tsp. so that it wouldn't compete with the cumin.

The flavor of the muffins was terrific; the cumin really shone, the corn and pepper gave it some sweetness and we all loved the cilantro. Winner!

But.

The organic corn meal that I keep on hand has a rather different texture than most cornmeals. Rather than being granular, it is almost powdery.



This is the only thing I can figure that would cause the texture of the muffins to be very dry and overly crumbly; they fell apart in our hands. I found this a little odd, since I can use this cornmeal successfully in my other "standby" recipes (well; not polenta, but that's a different story entirely), but it didn't work for this recipe. The flavors were so intriguing, however, that I am almost itching to give this recipe another try with a coarser cornmeal - the recipe does call for "stone ground", which I would assume would generally have a more granular texture.

And even crumbly muffins look good in pictures...




A super-duper thanks to Rebecca over at Ezra Pound Cake for this week's pick! And as always, thanks to Laurie for the herculean effort of coordinating the TWD bakers. Check out the blogroll this week for lots of interesting variations and opinions!