Blueberry Peach Muffins
A farmstand favorite at home!
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I’m still on vacation! I’ll be back in action next week, but in the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this guest post from Alaina Chou (@crumbsandnibbles) who has been working with me this summer on my new book and on Susanality. These muffins sound great, and I can’t wait to get back into my kitchen so I can make them!
To me, August means the countdown to school and summer’s inevitable end; it means hot, hot days made bearable by salty ocean waves and drippy ice cream cones—days I savor because they are oh-so-numbered. But August also means that farmstands everywhere are laden with peak-summer fruit, from blueberries and raspberries to peaches and apricots. Today’s recipe is a celebration of that fact.
I started coming out to East Hampton with my family about ten years ago. Throughout our decade of summers spent on the Eastern end of Long Island, we’ve moved around, my brother and I have grown up, and this place became home in a way we never thought it would when the pandemic hit in March of 2020. But some things have stayed constant amidst it all, and one of those things is my love for the muffins from Round Swamp Farm.
If you ask anyone who spends time out here, I’m sure they’ll agree that Round Swamp Farm is a Hamptons institution. The original stand on Three Mile Harbor Road has a 50-plus-year history, tracing back to Carolyn Lester Snyder and her father, who built a small red stand for his daughter to sell produce out of when she was young. While Round Swamp now has three locations scattered throughout the island, the whole business remains a family operation, from the farming out back to the baking in the kitchen.
Carolyn’s daughter, Lisa, is the woman behind many of the baked goods that line the shelves at Round Swamp. As a kid, you can imagine how tempting those rows and rows of cakes, pies, and muffins were, all sitting out there in the open air, just begging to be tasted. I remember my first encounter with Lisa’s Blueberry Peach Muffins, despite the fact that I was only ten years old. My mother had picked them up while out doing her morning errands, and it only took one bite for the two of us to get hooked. Now, I find it nearly impossible to resist adding them to my basket when I shop at Round Swamp—the experience of breaking into one, still warm from the oven and so tender and fruit-laden that you can’t help but make a mess, never gets old. The muffins are baked in jumbo muffin tins and set out hot, lids tucked underneath so that their craggy, sugared tops don’t lose their crunch from the steam. They fill the entire cup and then some, those crispy tops spilling out just enough to tempt (or even invite) you to sneakily tear off a piece. That kind of behavior is something I will forever be a culprit of, but I will say that the bottom halves of these muffins, which have so much fruit in them you can barely believe they hold together, are nearly as delicious as the tops
The recipe I’ve developed here is an homage to Lisa, her muffins, and the sense of nostalgia and joy they still bring me. I tried to crack the code to these muffins years ago, when I was taking a class on the chemistry of cooking during my Junior year of high school. The resulting muffins were great, but still a far cry from the texture and flavor I was after. Another four years and some five or six iterations later, I’ve finally landed on a recipe that yields a muffin as simultaneously rich in flavor and light in texture as the ones they intend to emulate. They are fluffy and not cakey, just barely sweet, and crowned with crackly cinnamon sugared tops. Feedback from my chemistry teacher and the wise words of esteemed author and food scientist Harold McGee could only help so much, it turns out, because the answer was almost too simple. That answer, of course, was butter.
These are my ideal muffins, from their crumb and their high ratio of fruit-to-batter to the ease and speed at which you can have them out of the oven and in your mouth. Incorporating the flour into the butter before hitting it with the buttermilk helps to inhibit gluten formation (read: insurance against tough muffins, a tip I picked up from Christopher Kimball’s The Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook). Melting the butter means there’s no need to wait for it to soften or to pull out your mixer. Instead, the whole thing comes together in one bowl in less than 20 minutes. Try them just once, and they may become a weekend staple in your house… as they have in ours!
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Blueberry Peach Muffins
Click here for a printable version
Makes 6-9 muffins
These muffins are light in texture and rich in flavor—so plush that they don’t really need help from an extra pat of butter once split open (though if you’re like me, you’ll add one anyway). In my many rounds of testing for this recipe, I found that the key to achieving muffins as intendedly indulgent (and addictive) as the farmstand version of my childhood lies in the amount of butter. Don’t skimp on the fruit either, as I firmly believe that the perfect fruit muffin is essentially a heap of juicy, in-season fruit surrounded by just enough batter to hold it together. You may use any mix of berries and stone fruits here as long as the total volume comes to a generous 1½ cups. That high ratio of fruit can make the muffins quite delicate, but I still prefer to butter my pan rather than use muffin liners for the look, for better browning, and for the slight flavor boost that the butter imparts.
7 tablespoons/99 g unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
1 large egg, at room temperature
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
Scant ½ teaspoon kosher salt
1¼ cups/160 g all-purpose flour
½ cup/118 ml buttermilk
6 tablespoons/75 g plus ½ tablespoon granulated sugar, divided
1 heaping cup/5-6 ounces blueberries
½ a peach, pitted and diced into ¼-½-inch pieces, about ½ cup or 3 ounces (you may slice some additional thin slices of peach for topping the muffins, if you’d like)
Pinch of cinnamon
Heat the oven to 400° F. Butter 6 cups in a 12-cup standard muffin pan or line with muffin liners.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the butter, eggs, vanilla, baking powder, baking soda, and salt until smooth. Add the flour and mix with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon until partially combined.
Measure out the buttermilk (using a liquid measure) and add 6 tablespoons of sugar to the measuring cup. Stir together with a fork until combined. Pour the milk mixture into the bowl with the muffin batter and stir until just barely combined (it will still be lumpy, but be sure not to overmix). Gently fold in the fruit.
Divide the batter evenly among the 6 buttered muffin cups, filling each cup to the top (you may have a bit of extra batter, depending on the depth of your cups and the volume of fruit, in which case butter and fill up to 3 more cups as needed). Combine the remaining ½ tablespoon of sugar with a pinch of cinnamon and sprinkle the mixture generously over each muffin. Bake for 18-22 minutes, or just until the muffins are light golden and a toothpick comes out clean when inserted into the center, rotating the pan halfway through. Cool the pan on a wire rack for at least 10 minutes or until ready to serve. To serve, use a knife or offset spatula to run along the sides of the muffins and carefully remove them from the pan. If you opted to butter the cups rather than use liners, you’ll need to use a gentle hand, as the high ratio of fruit and delicate crumb can make these fragile. Eat them slightly warm, and savor every bite!
The best muffins I've ever made!
Made these for company this morning. I measured out all of the ingredients last night so it was easy to assemble and ready to go.
I used ripe peaches and wild blueberries. They were very delicious, not too sweet and I added coarse sugar to the tops. My only complaint, probably my fault, was to make into 8 muffins. I thought they were too small. So I ate 2 instead! Thanks for another great recipe.