The secret to baking with frozen blueberries

Ah, a lovely batch of golden blueberry muffins.

Except, sometimes they're not golden. Sometimes, they're more like greenish-blue blueberry muffins instead. 

Fresh blueberries are a pleasure to bake with. But unless you have access to a blueberry patch, fresh berries can be quite expensive; and their season is short. Enter frozen blueberries, the backbone of many a winter blueberry pie.

But pie is one thing. Muffins, scones, cake, and coffeecake are quite another, frozen berries bleeding juice into batter to turn these golden-hued beauties a sickly shade of purple-green.

This doesn't have to happen, you know. There's a simple solution.

Rinse your frozen blueberries before you use them.

Rinse berries in cold water several times – until the water is noticeably lighter when you drain them. It'll start out dark blue, but will gradually shade its way up to a watery red/blue.

When that happens, dry the berries well with several layers of paper towels, top and bottom.

Let's see what happens when we use them in muffins. Specifically, Famous Department Store Blueberry Muffins.

Gently and quickly stir the frozen berries into the batter. You'll see a few inevitable streaks of blue, but the entire batter shouldn't turn blue. If that starts to happen – stop stirring, you're done!

The muffins made with rinsed frozen berries are on the left; the un-rinsed frozen berries are on the right. See how much more the juice bled into the batter when we didn't rinse the berries beforehand?

And here are the baked muffins. The rinsed frozen berries tinted the muffins just a bit, but not nearly as much as they would have had I not rinsed them.

Man, now I REALLY want a blueberry muffin, don't you? This berry-packed recipe is for Famous Department Store Blueberry Muffins, a clone of the sugar-crusted muffins once served in the top-floor café at Jordan Marsh, a Boston department store (and New England institution). Jordan's, sadly, is out of business; but their muffins live on.

Remember, rinse and dry those frozen berries before you use them; it DOES make a difference. Enjoy!

Note: To those of you below wondering about losing flavor and nutrients when you rinse the berries, it's true, you probably lose a little bit of the berries' nutrition. But most of the juice (and vitamins) remain inside the berries; and I doubt you could notice a difference in flavor. By all means, use berries without rinsing, if that's your preference. As usual – no baking police here!