I began my quest for the perfect blueberry muffin when Justin and I moved into an apartment in Larkspur in 2016, his last semester of high school. Actually, that’s when I began cooking again, after decades of relying mostly on food delivery apps and Christina’s cooking. Neither Justin nor I knew what to expect, and I am sure he will never forget our first meal in the Larkspur apartment–shrimp scampi, studded with enough garlic to blow our heads off. In my defense, I did follow the recipe (sort of, at least I followed the garlic part), and it is not an altogether bad version of shrimp scampi, though it does call for about twice the optimal garlic.
Cooking changed dramatically in the some-30-year hiatus I took from it. Cookbooks still existed, and I have an impressive collection of them to prove it. Not that I used them much before 2016. But cooking had exploded beyond the confines of books and onto the pages of blogs and subscription recipe sites. This presented both opportunity and a confusing array of possibilities. I quickly subscribed to a number of cooking sites and started following a handful of food blogs.
The blueberry muffin recipe that I finally settled on as my favorite is a variation of Jordan Marsh’s blueberry muffins, as originally published in a 1987 article by Marion Burros in The New York Times, “The Battle of the Blueberry Muffins.” Jordan Marsh was a now-shuttered department store in Boston. How does a worthy contender for best blueberry muffin recipe originate in a department store? I feel like I need to put this in context for you. There was a time when shopping at department stores in large cities was an expedition. People traveled to cities for the experience, they dressed up, and they often spent hours exploring the merchandise in these stores, which was spread across many floors, connected by escalators. Because a trip to a department store could involve hours of shopping, many stores had restaurants that served reliably good brunch and lunch fare, and a trip to the department store, for some shoppers, would have been incomplete without a visit to the store’s restaurant.
I can’t say how many different versions of blueberry muffins identified by Google as “best” I tried, before I landed on the Jordan Marsh recipe and started making it my own. I know I tried the rival recipe for the Ritz-Carlton’s famous blueberry muffins, published in The New York Times in 1985. I found it disappointing, though Justin said he liked it. It certainly was not as bad as some of the other “best” blueberry muffin recipes I tried. Some yielded muffins that were too hard, others produced muffins that fell apart, or were too small, or too bland, or too lacking in color.
Soon, I discovered that, in addition to finding the right muffin recipe, I needed to perfect the art of producing a crisp muffin top. I wanted a big-domed, golden-brown, crusty top, like the ones on the muffins at Molly Stone’s in Larkspur. That became another quest, one that I have yet to fulfill. My muffin tops still don’t have the deep crust and golden-brown color of those at Molly Stone’s. I am beginning to wonder if that’s even achievable, other than in a commercial oven. But I have made progress.
With that, my version of the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffin, with a somewhat crispy top. I use less sugar and more salt than the Jordan Marsh recipe, because the batter—not to mention my waistline—really doesn’t need the 1 and 1/4 cups of sugar called for by the original recipe, and more salt enhances the taste of the blueberries and the cake. I also sprinkle the muffin tops with a coarser sugar and start my bake at a higher temperature, to help give them a crisper texture.
You can use this basic recipe to make other types of muffins. Try substituting fresh cranberries (they will cook as the muffins bake) and walnuts for the blueberries. Make lemon poppyseed muffins by swapping out lemon extract for the vanilla, grating in some lemon zest and adding 2 tablespoons of poppyseed to the batter. You can get as creative as you like.
Ingredients
1/2 cup softened salted butter
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups flour
3/4 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup milk (preferably whole milk, or use half and half, or a combination of cream and lower fat milk)
2 cups blueberries, washed and dried
Turbinado or Demerara sugar
Instructions
Preheat oven to 425 degrees and place a rack in the middle of the oven.
Cream the butter and sugar until light in color. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well until incorporated. Add the vanilla.
Combine flour, salt and baking powder in a small bowl.
Add 1/3 of the flour mixture to the wet ingredients, alternating with 1/3 of the milk, until all wet and dry ingredients are combined.
Crush 1/2 cup of the blueberries with a fork. This works better if the blueberries are frozen. Fresh blueberries can be frozen until you are ready to make muffins. Mix the crushed blueberries into the batter, then fold in the rest of the blueberries.
Line a standard, 12-cup muffin tin with cupcake liners. I use reusable silicon liners, but paper cupcake liners are also fine. Spoon the batter into the liners. I fill the liners close to the top, as I want a larger muffin. Filling the liners close to the top, this recipe makes about 15 muffins, so you will need to do a second bake for the last three muffins.
Sprinkle the top of each muffin with coarse sugar. Granulated sugar will work fine, if you don’t have Turbinado or Demerara.
Bake at 425 for 15 minutes. The purpose of baking at the higher temperature is to get a quick rise out of the muffins and achieve a crispier muffin top. After 15 minutes, turn the temperature down to 375 and bake for another 20 minutes, or until the tops have achieved the desired golden-brown color and a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Turn the tin ten minutes after lowering the oven temperature for a more even bake.
MaeNot Favorite Recipes 