Sorry, Betty Crocker, but fresh blueberries are mandatory
For the longest time, I only made blueberry muffins from a bagged mix because it was what I grew up with. As a kid, I loved experimenting with muffin mix at my Granny’s house and it was inexpensive enough that no one minded buying me multiple packets. Never mind that my “experiments” mostly consisted of adding food coloring to the mix to see what disgusting shade of muffin I could make.
I kept buying muffin mix — mostly the Martha White brand, but sometimes the H-E-B store brand that makes six muffins and uses freeze-dried blueberries. I was perfectly happy with my mix-made muffins for years, until I began making baked goods from scratch to flex my culinary muscles a bit more. Once I found Jordan Marsh’s blueberry muffin recipe, I saw no reason to buy a blueberry muffin ever again, let alone settle for freeze-dried fruit. However, it is possible to hack the boxed version and make it taste more like homemade — which is especially useful for those times when I don’t want to go through the rigmarole of making muffins.
I first began hypothesizing whether simply mashing down fresh blueberries — the trick that gives the Jordan Marsh muffins their warm mouthfeel — would work well with a boxed mix. I decided to run an experiment in my kitchen. First, I bought a Betty Crocker muffin mix that comes with canned blueberries. The two most eyebrow-raising features of the mix are that its blueberries are positively tiny, and its recipe requires eggs, water, and vegetable oil — ingredients that don’t appear in the scratch-made muffin recipe I like to use.
Since it had been years since I used a box mix with canned blueberries, I decided to first make them according to the instructions and see how they compared to the from-scratch recipe. That attempt, sadly, was an epic fail: I forgot to drain the canned blueberries, which resulted in off-putting purple muffins.
My second attempt turned out a proper batch that looked perfect but didn’t taste right. Compared to the Jordan Marsh muffins, the texture was chewier and stickier, something I blamed on the vegetable oil. It was clear that before I could get to a blueberry solution, I would need to hack the muffin itself. After some tweaking, I landed on my own mixture of the ingredients from the Jordan Marsh recipe: two eggs, ⅓ cup whole milk in place of ⅔ cup oil, and ⅔ cup melted butter in place of ⅓ cup water. This swap felt right, intuitively, because using more butter than milk, I presumed, would give me lighter muffins.
With my formula down, I cooked another batch with the canned blueberries, this time draining the liquid first. The muffins were okay, but didn’t offer that mouthful of warm berries that I craved. My goal was to recreate the feeling of Jordan Marsh’s recipe, where half the fresh blueberries are smashed and the other half are folded in whole. This method gives you a hot flash of warm berries that the tiny little canned blueberries just don’t deliver.
For my next attempt, I popped open a container of fresh blueberries and smashed a half-cup of them with the back of my fork. I folded them into the batter along with the whole berries and my newly perfected liquid ingredients. The difference in flavor was noticeable in the first bite: These muffins were less sweet than my first two batches thanks to the fresh berries, and could easily compete with their scratch-made counterparts.
Since I am not always the best at using up fresh ingredients in a timely manner, I also tried a batch using frozen blueberries. Mashing a half-cup of those yielded a lot of dark blue juice that looked more or less the same as the excess from the canned blueberries. I don’t think there is a way to avoid purple muffins if you’re using frozen fruit, unless you were to make a batch only with whole frozen berries, but I don’t think that would deliver the same from-scratch quality. If you can bear serving purple muffins, however, then frozen berries can be defrosted and mashed down to create a muffin that’s similar to one baked with fresh fruit. Something else to note is that because frozen blueberries are frozen at the peak of freshness, muffins made with them will be a touch sweeter than those made with fruit from the grocery store. When baked, frozen blueberries don’t quite capture the feeling of eating a muffin made with fresh ones, but they do come a lot closer than the tiny canned ones and are miles better than freeze dried.
In the end, making muffins from a box wasn’t much easier than making them from scratch after all my adjustments to bring them closer to the Jordan Marsh version. The main benefit is that you don’t have to sift flour and baking soda together or get out a hand mixer, and the cooking time is shorter.
I’m likely to stick to scratch, unless I have a late-night craving or am cooking on a trip, where minimizing ingredients is of dire importance. Either way, I won’t skimp on fresh blueberries — that little tin will never compare to the real thing.
Additional photo illustration credits: Courtney E. Smith
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