Oat & Berry Muffins Recipe with Frozen Fruit (2024)

FAQs

Can frozen fruit be used in muffins? ›

When mixing frozen fruit into cake or muffin batter, small, still-frozen pieces work better. Keeping the fruit frozen eliminates the possibility of smushing them into your batter while mixing (ultimately turning your beautiful batter red or purple), and keeping the fruit small keeps that distribution even.

If using frozen berries, don't thaw first!

Not only because that can mean death to a nice fluffy muffin, but it also can decimate the blueberries leaving the batter (and your soul) with sad, blue streaks.

Coating berries with flour helps them suspend in the batter and prevents them from all sinking to the bottom. Taking this step also keeps the berries from turning your batter blue.

Healthy Blueberry Muffin Recipe Ingredients

The whole wheat flour adds more fiber and nutrients than the all-purpose would on its own, but using part all-purpose helps ensure that the muffins come out light and fluffy, not dense. Almond flour – It gives the blueberry muffins a delicious moist texture.

Tip #1: Keep your frozen fruits frozen

First, most fruits are about 90% water and usually frozen at their peak ripeness. If you defrost them, thawed fruits will add excess liquid to your ingredients, making pies and desserts runny right from the start.

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! Make sure not to overmix the muffin batter, or the blueberry juice will still bleed.

Coating the berries with a spoonful of the recipe's dry ingredients prevents sinking. Instead, it helps the berries adhere to the batter, keeping them well distributed throughout the muffin. And if you're using frozen blueberries, the flour will also help minimize how much the berries bleed into the batter.

You can use the fresh blueberries you have in your fridge but frozen blueberries are great too. In fact, frozen blueberries might even be better. The color of frozen blueberries doesn't leach into the batter as much. This results in a clear definition between muffin and berry.

The light coating of flour around the berries will absorb some of the fruit's liquid, making them less likely to sink. This is especially helpful when the batter is thin; thicker batters are a little better at cradling the fruit and keeping it suspended.

Why are bakery muffins so much better? ›

The best bakery-style crumb muffins start with cake flour

Cake flour is more finely ground and has less protein, which leaves the muffins with a fine, light crumb and soft texture. Using cake flour is an easy way to avoid heavy, dense muffins even if you end up stirring just a bit too much.

Most store-bought muffins are like glorified cupcakes—they're full of sugar and simple carbs. "They can be packed with added sugar and low in fiber, sending your blood sugar levels on a roller coaster before you even get to work," says Charlotte Martin, MS, RDN, CSOWM, CPT.

Is an English muffin better for you than bread? A. English muffins are slightly healthier than bread because they include fewer calories, carbohydrates, fats, and sugar than bread. However, both have a high carbohydrate content, which can offer energy throughout the day, and many nutrients.

Most fruit can be added to recipes straight from the freezer, but you might prefer to use fresh fruit to garnish. Now you know how to freeze and defrost fresh fruit, it's time to put your skills to practice and try out one of these delicious fruity recipes.

This means frozen fruit is safe to eat for 8-10 months beyond the printed date on an unopened package. But… the fruit will not stay safe indefinitely. Signs that frozen fruit has gone bad, rotten, or spoiled include discoloration (dull color) and a frostbitten appearance with white colored ice crystals.

The only thing to keep in mind when baking a pie with frozen fruit is that it may warrant an extra 10 or 15 minutes in the oven, unless you thaw the fruit all the way to room temperature.