How You Handle This Frozen Ingredient Will Make or Break Your Baked Goods

Picked during peak season, frozen berries are often more delicious than the oversize and expensive ones you find in the produce section of the grocery store outside of your local growing season. Freezing is a good way to preserve flavor and nutrients, so baking with frozen berries is a wonderful way to work antioxidants, vitamin C and fiber into your diet. While it’s true berries are delicate and won’t be as pretty after freezing, this is less important when you’re folding them into batter and baking them into a muffins or bars. In fact, berries are often baked or made into jam when they’re overripe and too soft, so there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using frozen berries for baking.

Most recipes call for thawing berries before baking, particular if the recipe can be made with either fresh or frozen berries. This allows the ice crystals that may have formed around them to melt away. Here’s how to prep your frozen blueberries for baking.

1.  Pull berries out of your freezer and place in a colander set over a bowl until they have thawed. Setting up berries this way allows you to capture the juices, in case you want to add them to a smoothie or use in another way.

2.  Gently transfer thawed blueberries to a paper towel-lined sheet pan and pat dry.

3.  If desired, transfer berries to a bowl and toss with flour. 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.

Blueberries are excellent baked into cobblers, crumbles, bars, pies, quick breads and muffins. Need we go on? The only limit is your own imagination. That said, we do have a couple fan-favorites recipes to recommend.

Psst, you can also turn your berries into a sauce to drizzle over your pancakes, French toast or angel food cake!