It’s all about dedication. In the course of my research for Interesting Thing of the Day, I have sometimes gone to great lengths to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the articles I write. If that means drinking absinthe or eating doughnuts or trudging through Paris museums, well, these are the sacrifices a responsible journalist must make. I even enlisted my wife’s assistance to undertake a tedious and grueling muffin-baking experiment, subjecting myself to untold nutritional perils to be sure that you, gentle reader, receive the most reliable information. And indeed, I now feel qualified to hold forth on the culinary mystery of muffin tops.

Do You Know the Muffin, Man?
Muffin tops are, as everyone knows, truly the upper crust of muffindom. Most people prefer the top to the stump—at least when you’re talking about those jumbo-sized, coffee-shop muffins, as opposed to the kind you make from a mix in your kitchen. But this fact suggests several questions. Why is the top so much better? How does one go about making a muffin with the kind of top beloved by Seinfeld partisans? And how can one obtain a high-quality top without wasting a perfectly good but less appealing stump? These were the questions I set out to answer.

In my book, the ideal muffin has a top that protrudes significantly over the sides of the cup in which it was baked, thus looking rather like a giant mushroom. This large surface area is exposed directly to the hot, dry air of the oven and therefore becomes somewhat crispy, especially around the thin edges—unlike the outside of the stump which barely forms a crust because the sides of the pan hold in most of the moisture. It’s this large crispy surface that gives muffin tops most of their appeal. But most muffin recipes result in more modest, rounded-top muffins. The key, it turns out, is not to take the recipe seriously when it says to fill up the pan only halfway with batter. If you want a mega-top muffin, you have to fill the pan all the way—in fact, with a significant bulge on top. This means, of course, half as many muffins as the recipe calls for, as well as a longer baking time. A further refinement: sprinkle sugar generously on the surface of the batter before baking. This will result in a shiny glaze and a crisper, sweeter crust.

Divide and Conquer
But what you really want is a great muffin top without the bottom. Simply cutting off the bottom, while effective, is wasteful. The best solution so far has been muffin pans that are extremely shallow—only about 1/2 inch (1.25cm) deep. When loaded to overflowing with batter, these provide enough of a base for the top to rise reasonably well, while minimizing the stump. Muffin-top pans are, not surprisingly, quite popular, but they are still an imperfect solution because they don’t enable the top to get quite as large as a full-size pan does, and they still leave a partial stump. The alternative, which has met with mixed success, is to find a way to recycle the stumps. Obviously they don’t qualify as food, but technology now has a way to make oil from organic waste products. That seems to be our best hope for a muffin-stump-free future. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Muffin Tops...

Get a free recipe every day plus kitchen tips and other useful information for food aficionados at Worldwide Recipes.

Muffin top pans are available from Amazon.com and Sur La Table. Other sources include A Cook’s Wares, Kitchen and Much More, and Kitchen Conservatory.

Rogue Engineering inexplicably sells freshly decapitated Muffin Tops for a mere US$9.99 each.

You can read a transcription (such as it is) of the entire script of the Seinfeld episode “Muffin Tops” at NewsGuys.

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Many years ago I read an article in which the author jokingly referred to something called the “International Stop Continental Drift Society.” Believe it or not, ISCDS was an actual organization in the early 1980s that produced a tongue-in-cheek newsletter for geologists. If it were still around, I’d join in a second: stopping continental drift, like any number of other futile and pointless endeavors, is a cause I could really get behind. Besides, given the complex subject matter, I’d probably learn a lot more from a humorous article than a dry textbook.

In our family, I’m the science guy; my wife tends more toward arts and literature. But she also took a college class that covered plate tectonics, a subject I knew very little about. It gave me a warm feeling in my heart to hear her excitedly talking about continental drift and what happens when the edge of one tectonic plate dives below another one. That’s the kind of stuff we should find interesting, especially since we get plenty of firsthand experience with seismic activity here in San Francisco. But one topic from Morgen’s class stuck out as being particularly interesting: the theory of mantle convection.

Passing the Mantle
The mantle is the thick layer of rock below the crust of the earth. It’s not quite molten, but it’s softer than the crust, and because of the enormous pressure it’s under, it behaves almost like a very thick liquid, with the tectonic plates “floating” on top. The big question that has confronted geologists and seismologists since the existence of tectonic plates was postulated is why they move. And the most reasonable theory to explain that at the moment is that the mantle is fluid in a way—though moving extremely slowly. How slowly? Think in terms of hundreds of millions of years for a given portion of the mantle to circulate from its lowest point to its highest point and back. And that appears to be exactly what’s happening: an unfathomably slow but powerful circular movement within the mantle.

You may be familiar with the term convection to describe water or air currents. The idea is simply that hot portions of a fluid rise, and as they cool, they sink back down. The hot bits going up and the colder bits going down need to stay out of each other’s way, so a somewhat circular motion builds up. It isn’t perfectly uniform, though; watch a Lava Lamp for a while and you’ll see the unpredictable convection currents in action. The theory of mantle convection says that a layer of the earth 1,800 miles (3,000km) thick is doing exactly that: responding to heat from the molten core below, moving upward, then cooling and sinking back down. This movement in turn causes the plates above to shift, accounting for many earthquakes and volcanoes, not to mention the formation of some mountains.

Moving Pictures
Sci-fi adventures notwithstanding, no one has been able to dig under the crust and explore to find out exactly what’s happening down there, but seismological data and computer models give us a fairly good picture of the currents beneath the earth. Not good enough to predict earthquakes—at least not yet—but that problem is analogous to predicting the movement of a piecrust resting on a boiling cherry filling. Tricky, to say the least. What the theory of mantle convection can give us insight into, though, is how and why some features of the planet’s topography came to be the way they are. And with time, I’m sure it will lead to a solution to that whole continental drift thing. Or at least a good movie or two. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Mantle Convection...

This article was featured in Panta Rei (#4).

Web sites relating to mantle convection:

• Scott D. King’s Mantle Convection Homepage
• Some unanswered questions from the U.S. Geological Survey
• Convection in the Oilfield Glossary
• Walter Kiefer: Mantle Convection Research
• Mantle Convection at the University of Winnipeg

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