Salba® Anytime Muffins!

Most people have heard about the benefits of eating flax seed to increase your heart health, bring down your cholesterol, and add more fiber to your diet. Flax is an especially beneficial food item for us vegetarians, because it helps us get our Omega-3’s.

You may not have heard of this, but there is something out there that is similar to flax, but on steroids and supersized! It is called Salba®. According to the Salba® website, it is “the richest whole food source of Omega 3 fatty acids and fiber found in nature. Gram for gram, Salba® provides 8x more Omega 3s than salmon, 25% more fiber than flax, 6x more calcium than whole milk, 30% more antioxidants than blueberries, and much more. Salba® is all-natural, has no trans-fats, very few carbohydrates, and is certified Non-GMO, Vegan, Kosher, and Gluten-Free for those who suffer from celiac disease.”

Salba® is a grain with a fascinating story. It is said to have been a primary staple of the Aztec diet. Because of its health benefits, it is a very exciting “rediscovery”, especially for us vegetarians!

Salba® is quite easy to cook with, and can be used as an egg replacer, like flax, by mixing it up with water. It can also be used as a grain, and has a neutral taste that blends well with many foods.

In the spirit of finding new and exciting ways to include Salba® in my diet, I have been testing and modifying recipes, trying to include this exciting grain in order to further enhance the health benefit of my food items. So far, I am really excited about these muffins, some granola bars I have come up with that have a whole day’s dosage in each bar, and some cookies that I will post about at another time. This particular muffin recipe is actually based on one at the Salba® website, but I have modified it quite a bit in an effort to make it even more tasty, healthy, and with significantly less sodium, less fat, and better proportioned calories. For those who take note of this sort of thing, the Thinlandic version of these muffins gets a B+ rating at www.caloriecount.about.com, a food site that rates the healthfulness of recipes according to their ingredients!

Muffins can be quite subjective, size-wise, depending on how much batter you put in each muffin cup. For my purposes, as I have smaller children and am also watching my calories carefully, I made smaller muffins that had about 111 calories each. Even at this more petite size, each muffin provides over a third of my daily dosage of Salba® (1 tablespoon per person per day is recommended).

To make this a little more special, try adding a nice, light cream cheese frosting, and watch this recipe happily morph into a yummy, healthful “carrot cupcake!” And if you really wanted to supersize it and get your day’s worth of Salba® at one whack, you could use a 1/3 or 1/2 cup measure to make this batter into six jumbo muffins of less than 400 calories each! (And maybe even frost them, YUM!) That’s on the lower end of the jumbo muffin caloric range. Hey, it works for Starbucks, and these babies have a LOT more health benefits!

The “jumbo cupcake” idea may initially sound bizarre. But just for comparison’s sake, Costco’s Kirkland Brand Jumbo Almond Poppy Seed Muffins weigh in at 670 calories, 38 grams of fat, 140 mg of cholesterol, 650 mg of sodium, 10 gm of protein, and only 2 gm of dietary fiber PER MUFFIN! In comparison, if you made these Salba Anytime Muffins jumbo-sized, you’d have 398 calories, 14 gm of fat, not even 6 mg of cholesterol, 300 mg sodium, 11 gm protein, 7.6 gm of dietary fiber, and an ENTIRE DAY’S RECOMMENDED INTAKE of Omega 3s!

Worth noting: I have not tried it, but I would figure that if you do not have Salba®, this recipe would still taste pretty decent and be very healthful with ground flax meal.

Salba® Anytime Muffins!

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and prepare muffin pans with nonstick spray or muffin liners.

Mix together the dry ingredients:

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup brown rice flour
1/2 cup Salba Ground Seed
3/8 cup Bown Sugar Blend Splenda
(I did NOT pack this firmly)
1/2 teaspoon Also Salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon no sodium baking powder
1/4 cup Craisins
1/4 cup golden raisins
1/4 cup chopped walnuts

Set aside.

Next, thoroughly mix together:
2 tablespoons non-dairy egg replacer
5-6 tablespoons pineapple juice

(I just used the juice from one small can of pineapple chunks, and saved the chunks to use in stir-fry later. One could just use eggs here – but this way, you get to dump the cholesterol and fat of the egg yolks, get a delightful pineapple taste, and not significantly alter the wet/dry ingredient ratio.)

Blend well. Add the following:

2 tablespoons coconut oil
(This really adds a slight hint of the tropics to the muffin.)
1 cup buttermilk (I used gourmet buttermilk made from whole milk)
1 cup finely grated carrots (about 2 medium carrots)
1 T grated lemon zest (about one medium lemon’s worth of zest)

Mix well.

Take two egg whites, whip to somewhere between soft and firm peak stage, and fold into liquid.

Fold liquid/egg white mixture into dry ingredients, trying not to overbeat the batter.

Drop batter into prepared pan or muffin cups, and bake for 18-20 minutes or until tops are golden.

Take them out, and marvel at how yummy healthy food can taste!

The size of your muffin may vary widely from the size I made mine. Therefore, here is the nutritional information per batch of muffins:

Total calories: 2390
Total Fat: 84 gm
Total gm Protein: 65
Total sodium: 1795
Total gm carbohydrate: 387
total mg cholesterol: 35
Total mg Omega 3: 15,128
Total mg Omega 6: 4192
Total mg Omega 9: 1384
Total dietary fiber: 46.6

You can make them whatever size you like
and just divide by the total number of
calories, fat, and so on.

Tip: This is the 1/8 cup scoop that I used to scoop my batter into the muffin cups; I got 21 1/2 muffins. (21 full muffins, 1/2 muffin’s worth of batter for me to eat.)

Making them with the heaping 1/8 cup scoop, they had 111 calories, 3.9 gm fat, 3 gm protein, 18 gm carb, 85 mg sodium, 1.6 mg cholesterol, 703 mg Omega 3 (more than a third of a daily dose), 195 mg Omega 6, 64 mg Omega 9, and 2.2 of dietary fiber.