Nº 37: Winter Morning Glory Muffins
Big Flavor at Small State
Good morning and happy New Year,
Last weekend I visited Small State Provisions, a Connecticut bakery, for the first time and was so taken with a muffin I tasted that I asked the owner, Kevin Masse, if I could interview him and share the recipe here at Formal Assignment. He generously agreed to both, and you’ll find the interview and the recipe for Winter Morning Glory Muffins* below.
It goes without saying that I recommend you visit Small State Provisions if you’re anywhere near their Avon or West Hartford, Conn., locations. In addition to the muffin, I brought home a baguette and a few viennoiseries. It was all finely crafted and delicious.
Other (less local) recommendations:
Watch The Penguin, a limited series starring Colin Farrell;
Read the novel Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. I’m about two-thirds through it and have enjoyed every minute of reading;
Peruse Elysian Kitchens, Jody Eddy’s new cookbook. I’ve been waiting for this book to released ever since its photographer, Kristin Teig (who also shot my book), told me about it in 2021. I was thrilled to receive it as a Christmas gift, and the stories, photos, and recipes are every bit as beguiling as I had expected they’d be.
Make my New York Times “One-Bowl Lemon and Olive Oil Cake” recipe, as I’m so glad to see many people already have!
Let me know what you think if you read/watch/make any of the above (or below). Talk to you soon.
Brian
*Formal Assignment P.S. is for paid subscribers. It’s just $6 a month—or even less for an annual subscription.
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BIG FLAVOR AT SMALL STATE
An Interview with Kevin Masse of Small State Provisions
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The last thing I expect to be impressed by at a bakery is a muffin. But when my mother’s flight home last weekend was delayed and we made a detour to Small State Provisions in Avon, Conn., to kill some time and have some breakfast, it was the Winter Morning Glory Muffin my mother ordered that rocked my world.
My croissant was perfect, but it was a taste of the heavily spiced, cranberry-laced muffin that started my tastebuds.
Small State’s founder, Kevin Masse, shared his recipe for the muffin with me, and we talked on the phone while he and his husband drove through upstate New York to drop their dogs off with Masse’s father before leaving for Italy (more on that below).
Bread is where Small State got its start, and Masse revealed a trick for the bakery’s gorgeous baguettes: a touch of molasses. “It just provides a little bit of the texture and depth of flavor.”
The sandwich selection reflects what Masse refers to the bakery’s ethos of favoring a selection of simple, high-quality items rather than endless options. “When you go to Europe, you walk into a boulangerie and they’ve got the sandwiches pre-wrapped, ready to go, and they’re super simple because you want the ingredients to shine and you don’t need to put a ton of different things on.” Further evidence of this focus on quality over menu length: Every other Wednesday evening, Small State’s pizza night features a single type of pizza, and it’s not unusual for them to sell out very quickly.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
Can you tell me about the origin of Small State? I took a bread class with Terry Walters – she’s a cookbook author and teaches bread classes – probably in the spring of 2018. And then I had a friend from Argentina, Ramon (who runs the channel Gluten Morgen), who came up [to Connecticut]. We baked sourdough together at our house, and it was really through that method that I picked up how sourdough works, and I started to really dive into it. And then I just was baking at home, and in 2019 West Hartford started to allow cottage food businesses to operate, so I got a license and started baking bread and selling like 10 loaves a week, plus granola, via social media, as Small State Provisions. [At the time,] I worked about 25 hours a week for Bake from Scratch; I was heading up all their digital print partnerships for the magazine, working with brands like Bob’s Red Mill.
And then, eventually, you opened a space at the GastroPark in West Hartford. Yes; The way the cottage food operation thing worked is you can only make up to $25,000 a year in revenue before you have to become a commercial operation and find a commercial kitchen. The owner of GastroPark – I was making bread for his food truck – said “You should come check out what I’m building.” At the time I wasn’t really looking for something outside of the house, but I went and looked, and it’s a little 200-square-fot space inside a large food hall, and I decided to take the plunge and I built that little space out and we opened in July 2021.
Two years later, in July of 2023, you opened your second (much larger) location in Avon, and you have dozens of employees, whom you must trust, as you’re going away for a couple of weeks. Yeah, I’ve got an amazing team. We’re close to 30 employees now, so it feels nice that I can step away. And, to be honest, I think it’s good for them, too. It gives them some freedom to run things and not have me [constantly checking in].
Tell me a little about your personal history with baking. I don’t have any professional training in baking, but I’ve always baked and cooked. My grandmother was Italian (her parents came from Italy) and she was always making pizzas and cookies, and I’ve always really enjoyed the process. I always wanted to be in the food industry, and when I was in high school I wanted to go to the Culinary Institute of America. My parents – I was very fortunate they were helping me pay for college – basically were like, “We want you to go to the traditional four-year school, and then you can go do whatever you want to do.” That’s kind of how it ended up working out; I worked in marketing for a little over a decade and then we moved to Hartford and then I moved into the food space and now I have a bakery.
Have you found your marketing background helpful with the bakery? And is that what you spend most of your day working on now, rather than being in the kitchen? Yeah, that marketing background has been very good to have. I’m not super involved in the kitchen anymore. I’ll get in the kitchen when I want to some recipe testing or development – like with this [Winter Morning Glory] muffin. I’m more like the creative director now. And I spend a lot of time looking at sales numbers and doing payroll and building our wholesale. I can’t remember the last time I mixed the bread, but I can still jump back there if I need to.
Your sourdough breads are wonderful. Do you use sourdough starter for your pastries, or are those yeasted? Now our pastries are yeasted, for consistency. [When we used levain in the past,] It was one of those things where I didn’t really feel like the juice was worth the squeeze. People just want a good pastry, and you’d have to be able to pick up on a lot of flavor nuance to know if pastries are 100% sourdough. And, you know, we use all organic grains, and for me it’s about making the best product we can make.
And how did the Winter Morning Glory muffin end up on the menu? For the longest time, I didn’t want to offer something that was gluten-free, because I felt like we’re not a gluten-free bakery; We’re a bread bakery. But we had a lot of requests for gluten-free items and I got worn down and remembered that this is about the customer first. And eventually we made the seasonal muffin our gluten-free option.
How did parsnips end up in the muffin? We do a carrot cake that is super popular, and we tend to do that in the spring. We work with a distributor out of Massachusetts called Myers Produce and they focus primarily on small farms out of New England, and they’re almost all organic. I was looking through their produce list and I saw parsnips on there around Thanksgiving and thought “That could be a good way to boost the sweetness and the moisture content” [as carrots do in carrot cake]. I wanted to bring in the flavor and orange, cranberry, and toasted coconut. I leaned into warm winter spices. That’s how it was born—out of wanting something a little bit different that our carrot cake and our gingerbread loaf.
It's kind of amazing how the parsnips really melt into the batter in a way that carrots don’t. Yeah, and parsnips have a slightly higher sugar content than carrots. You wouldn’t necessarily know that parsnips are in the muffins, and we’re very cautious about how we name things for the menu, because people will be turned off if you call it a “Parsnip Cranberry muffin.” They’ll be like, “No thanks.” I love our brownies, but when we called it a “Rye Brownie” everybody expected it to taste like caraway, so it’s all about the naming of it.
Have you baked other things with parsnips? I have not. This is my first time. I’ve baked with beets before, but they can be overwhelming and they don’t break down. I’ve done a seeded beet sourdough, too, which is pretty good, but you have to really like beets.
What are your bestsellers? All of our bread is still really at the top of what we sell. And we’ve actually been cruising through the muffins. And we’ve been selling a lot more prepared foods in the Avon spot, like the breakfast sandwich and avocado toast.
Has there been anything you’ve put on that menu that surprised you by not being a hit? Yes: the brownies! For whatever reason, they just never were super popular – and it was a good brownie! My gut feeling is that chocolate in the morning just doesn’t feel like breakfast. I never in my wildest dreams anticipated how many blueberry scones we would sell. Out of our pastry case, they’re probably our number one seller, which is so bizarre to me. But when I added chocolate chips to the scones (in a chocolate chip oat orange scone), people were like, “Chocolate feels not so breakfast-y.”
You’re off to Italy to accompany your husband Michael, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Trinity College, as he teaches a course called “Exploring the Science of Awe: Rome as a Natural Laboratory.” So I wanted to ask if you have any memories of food inspiring awe in you. I think for me growing up with my grandmother always baking, there was always this awe at the transformation. You put a raw batter or a dough in the oven, and then you take it out and you’ve got this golden, puffy thing, and it’s completely changed in the way it looks and tastes. That’s awe-inspiring every time.
I get the impression that you’re interested in being a part of your community and in fostering a pleasant work environment. Yes, I’m super keen on our work environment and making sure that it’s a place people want to come to. I worked in as a waiter in a French restaurant during college and it was the cliché kitchen environment with lots of yelling from the owner. I want a place where people can come and have a creative outlet and be part of a team and make a good living. So I’m really trying to structure the business from the get-go thinking about the employees, because they’re the engine that makes us run. The other thing that we do at the bakery in Avon which I’m really proud of is that our staff is primarily composed of highschoolers. I really want to provide a place where highschoolers can have their first job experience and have an environment where they’re supported and they’re learning and they’re interacting with customers and with adults. Because a lot of these kids went through the pandemic at a very prime age of their lives, so it’s a good place for them to connect and to learn and to have a real place that they can go.
On to the recipe. . .
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Recipe:
WINTER MORNING GLORY MUFFINS
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Adapted from a recipe by Kevin Masse of Small State Provisions in Avon and West Hartford, Conn.
Masse was inspired by the classic Morning Glory Muffin, created by Pam McKinstry in 1978 for café on Nantucket, which was made with spices, raisins, walnuts, carrot, apple, and a blend of all-purpose and whole-wheat flours. Grated parsnip takes the place of carrot and apple in Masse’s wintry version; cranberries are swapped in for the raisins; and a gluten-free flour blend is used to accommodate customer demand (Masse uses Ardent Mills all-purpose G-F flour blend and also vouches for the quality of King Arthur’s blend).
Masse uses frozen cranberries, as they’re reliably available. I used fresh ones, as I had them on hand. Either works. The batter can be kept in fridge for a couple of days and baked as needed.
Makes 12 muffins
Active time: 45 minutes
Total time: 1 hour (includes cooling)
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INGREDIENTS:
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