Simply Bread Co.

Baking muffins in the Simply Bread Oven.

A lot of muffin recipes recommend starting with a really hot oven, then lowering the temperature partway through the bake. That initial blast of heat helps the muffins rise quickly before the structure sets. The chemical leaveners react fast, steam rapidly develops inside the batter, and all of that expansion pushes upward early in the bake to help create those tall rounded muffin tops.

The biggest thing to understand with muffins in a stone deck oven is that the bake is being driven by stored thermal energy instead of rapidly changing air temperature.
In a home oven, when you turn the temperature down, the oven air cools down pretty quickly too. In a stone deck oven, the stones are still holding a large amount of stored heat underneath the muffin tin throughout the bake. So while the air inside the chamber may cool down some, the pan is still receiving strong conductive heat from the stones below.

Instead of preheating hotter and lowering the temperature later in the bake, choose a temperature somewhere between those two ranges and bake straight through without tapering the bake downward halfway through. This creates a more even bake across the entire pan because the muffin tin continuously absorbs and redistributes the stored energy coming from the stones. Even in a fully loaded muffin tin, the center muffins bake at a much more even rate alongside the outside muffins instead of lagging behind them.

Have you tried muffins in the Simply Bread Oven yet?