Yes, apple sauce or yogurt

Applesauce

Applesauce is an accessible and affordable substitute for oil in quick breads. If your recipe calls for a solid fat, like butter or vegetable shortening, use half as much applesauce. Replace liquid oil with three-fourths the amount of applesauce. Opt for an unsweetened, all-natural applesauce as a fat substitute. Applesauce works well in fairly dense, strongly flavored quick breads or muffins, as well as in chocolate baked goods.

Yogurt

Nonfat yogurt can replace vegetable shortening, butter, oil, or sour cream in quick bread recipes. Yogurt adds moistness and an appealing tang to the finished bread. If you're replacing sour cream, use yogurt to replace all of the sour cream. Try replacing half of the butter with half as much yogurt or half of the oil with three-quarters as much yogurt for low-fat banana, cranberry or zucchini bread that doesn't sacrifice flavor or texture.

You can also use baby food mashed bananas, at the same rate as applesauce.

I keep the little school lunch size unsweetened applesauce cups in my pantry for quickbreads. I always sub half applesauce for oil in quickbread and muffin recipes, including brownies. Depending on the recipe, there might be a couple of tablespoons of applesauce left over. I just gulp them down as a snack.

I only sub for half the amount of oil called for. Once I made banana bread and ran out of bananas. I used applesauce for half the oil AND to make up for the missing banana. My husband didn't notice, but i didn't like the end result. The applesauce became more prominent than I liked, so I bought some baby food banana jars to keep in the pantry for my banana-related emergencies.

I like having the small cups of applesauce handy. A jar of applesauce doesn't get eaten up fast enough. So the small servings of the applesauce & baby bananas are perfect.

You can subsitute with mayo or any other oil. But if you use mayo you would be substituting for eggs to, but it makes them fluffier.Also in my opinion It is possible to replace oil with butter in a muffin recipe as generally most muffin recipes are quite forgiving and you may find that butter gives a better flavour. You can swap in 125g butter for the oil but the muffins may be a little dry and will possibly stale more quickly as the fat content of butter is lower than that of oil. For better results you may have to make some minor adjustments to the amount of fats and other liquids used. Butter is approximately 75% fat (the remainder being water and milk solids) so to switch butter for oil you need to increase the amount of butter used, but reduce slightly the other liquids (such as milk) used in the recipe.

I don't make muffins, but I've been using coconut oil, but cut about 25% of the oil called for. So for 1/2 c., I'd try for something a little more than 1/3. It works great for zucchini bread.

This post was edited by laceyvail on Sat, Oct 11, 14 at 5:51

I use melted butter

Heck, I've used all kinds of things to substitute for half the oil, sometimes more. Pureed pumpkin or butternut squash, applesauce, mashed bananas, babyfood prunes, peanut/almond/cashew butter, yogurt, lowfat sour cream...

They all work OK, but you want to watch the flavor profile. I wouldn't put peanut butter with your carrots, for example, but I'd use applesauce or pumpkin puree. Peanut butter is good in banana muffins, sour cream in more savory choices.

Annie

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned pureed pears. Buying the baby food is expensive, and if you have a blender or food processor it is so easy to puree the (drained) canned pears or even fresh, slightly overripe pears.

When you puree the pears, dip your fingers in and feel the texture. It feels a little oily, and that's why it's so perfect as an oil sub (or partial sub) in quick breads and muffins.