The Famous Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins

Of all the blueberry muffin recipes, Boston’s Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins recipe bests them all, thanks to its moist texture, generous blueberries, and golden sugar crust. Here’s the official recipe from the old Boston department store, with a few pro pastry chef improvements for perfect results.

The Muffin, the Myth, the Legend: Jordan Marsh’s Blueberry Muffin Recipe

The Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins are legendary, and perfect: moist, sweet, stuffed with jammy fresh blueberries, and topped with a crunchy sugar crust. The muffin was baked for years by baker/muffin man John Pupek at Boston’s now-shuttered Jordan Marsh department store. The original Jordan Marsh department store was absorbed into a Macy’s in the 1990s, but you can still bring some of their famous, beloved dining room muffins to your home.

Jordan Marsh’s blueberry muffin recipe has been floating around for a while in various places, like the Boston Globe, a local Boston news station, and most famously in the New York Times, where it was adapted by Marian Burros. (You should also make the Marian Burros NYT Plum Torte recipe.)

This recipe is pulled from the official sources, and more: I also found an old news story from a local Boston TV station in which Pupek, the original Jordan Marsh baker, makes the muffins himself on camera. This yielded a couple of key, from-the-horse’s-mouth insights, especially about the berries and flour (more below).

With this original blueberry muffin recipe, plus my pro pastry chef notes, you’re in for a batch of perfect blueberry muffins. Serve them warm from the oven with good butter.

And I love anything baked with blueberries. If you do, too, you’ll want my recipe for perfect blueberry pound cake and this easy blueberry cobbler recipe.

Why This Recipe Works

This blueberry muffin recipe is particularly good and trustworthy for several reasons:

• It’s adapted from the original recipe at Jordan Marsh, beloved for decades
• Uses techniques from the original pastry chef, adapted by me — also a pro pastry chef
• Makes the “mash the blueberries” step optional. Side-by-side testing proved that skipping the step doesn’t change the result, and makes the recipe easier.
• Results in a muffin that has the perfect balance of buttery batter, fruit, and sweetness that stays moist for days.

Ingredients for Jordan Marsh’s Blueberry Muffins

This recipe uses basic kitchen ingredients. While the original industrial-scale recipe used a combo of bread and pastry flours, regular all-purpose flour for home use has the same effect, balancing the high- (bread) and low-gluten (pastry) flours. You will need:

• Dairy: Unsalted butter, eggs, milk
• Sugar for sweetness and to help whip air into the batter
• Pure vanilla extract adds a sweet aroma
• Optional lemon zest: this is the only ingredient that is not original, but it heightens the blueberry flavor
• Dry ingredients: All-purpose flour (I use unbleached King Arthur flour), baking powder for leavening, Kosher salt (I use Diamond Crystal)
• Blueberries, washed and picked over for stems. The star of the show. You can use fresh or frozen. If using frozen, do not thaw.

Step-by-Step Instructions

This recipe stays true to the original, with a couple of helpful — optional — tweaks. The Jordan Marsh recipe calls for fork-mashing 1/2 cup of the blueberries, and does not use lemon zest. You can certainly mash the blueberries, but this recipe makes the blueberry mashing optional to save time, because the blueberries will actually cook and get jammy all on their own. Adding lemon zest heightens the flavor of the blueberries just a bit, without tasting lemony. But feel free to leave it out.

The Jordan Marsh muffin recipe uses standard blueberry muffin ingredients, and is mixed together easily and then baked. Here’s how to bake a batch.

1. Preheat oven to 375°F and line a standard 12-muffin tin with cupcake liners. You can also make 6 giant muffins, which will take longer to bake.
2. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
3. Add the eggs, lemon zest (if using), and vanilla extract. Mix the batter on medium-high again until very light and fluffy, scraping the bowl to make sure everything is evenly incorporated.
4. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt, alternating with the milk. Mix just until incorporated. Do not overmix.
5. Stir in the blueberries until evenly distributed.
6. Scoop the batter into the muffin tin. Sprinkle the tops generously with sugar.
7. Bake, then let cool for at least 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Serve warm with soft butter.

You will also like: Really Good Banana Bread and Blueberry Hand Pies

The History of the Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins Recipe

I am pretty sure that I’m not the first, thousandth, or last person to assume that Jordan Marsh of the famous blueberry muffin might be the name of one person, perhaps a kindly home baker who rose to fame as part of a regional baking contest or county fair. But no! The Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins’ history is quite different.

What are the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins? The history of the Jordan Marsh department store‘s blueberry muffin recipe goes back to the 1800s.

Jordan Marsh is a now-shuttered New England department store, based in Boston, founded by Eban Jordan and Benjamin Marsh in 1841. Like many grand department stores of yore, Jordan Marsh had a dining room, where visitors could enjoy, among other things, buttery blueberry muffins. When the store was acquired by Macy’s in the mid-1990s, however, the dining room (and muffins) were phased out.

But the recipe lived on. According to the New York Times, in 1985, the Times food journalist Marian Burros got wind through a reader that the best blueberry muffin recipe was not the Ritz-Carlton recipe she had written about, but rather, was the muffin served at the Jordan Marsh department store. Ms. Burros got hold of the muffin recipe and the rest was blueberry muffin history.

But wait, there’s one more coda to the story, because the source of Jordan Marsh’s original recipe remained unknown until very recently. According to the Times’s blueberry muffin recipe headnote:

[In 2023,] Mara Richmond of Burlington, Vt., wrote The Times to say that the developer of the recipe was her father, Arnold Gitlin, then the executive food consultant for Allied Stores, which owned Jordan Marsh at the time. His recipe, Richmond said, was an adaptation from one in Esther Howland’s 1847 cookbook, “The New England Economical Housekeeper, and Family Receipt Book.”

F.A.Q.s and Helpful Tips

Here are a few quick tips and notes for baking these muffins.

1. Which blueberries to use in blueberry muffins?

It is fine to use fresh or fresh-frozen blueberries (IQF) for the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffin recipe. Do not defrost the blueberries before adding them to the batter. Just add them frozen. Note: frozen berries may take the muffins an extra minute or two to bake.

I love wild Maine blueberries, but they do not make the best muffins. These little jewels taste great, but tend to get lost in the blueberry muffin batter. Use standard blueberries for muffins to get nice, big bursts of jammy blueberry.

2. How do I keep blueberries from sinking to the bottom of blueberry muffins?

Here’s a very helpful tip that you should know when baking with blueberries, both in cakes or muffins:

Toss the blueberries with a small amount of the flour mixture before folding them into the blueberry muffin batter. Use part of the flour measurement in the recipe, not additional flour. The flour forms a grippy coating on the blueberries, which prevents sinking. That said, this is a fairly thick batter, so I have never had a problem with blueberries sinking in these blueberry muffins when you stir the berries in plain to the large mixing bowl with the rest of the batter.

I also like to dot the top of the muffins with a few blueberries before baking. This ensures that there will be visible, juicy blueberries on the top of each muffin.

3. What is the secret to moist muffins?

The secret to moist muffins boils down to three things:

1. Not over-mixing the batter: Over-mixing results in too much gluten development, which could make the muffins a bit tough. Once the dry ingredients and berries are fully folded in, stop. 
2. The right ratio of fats and liquefiers to dry ingredients: “Liquefier” is a fancy term for wet ingredients (eggs, vanilla extract, milk), plus sugar, which dissolves into a liquid when heated. Here, the nice amount of sugar and butter makes these moist blueberry muffins.
3. Baking for the correct amount of time: Muffins can over-bake quickly, thanks to their small size. The 30-minute baking time should be fairly accurate. But test the muffins with a toothpick or cake tester a minute or two before the listed time and go from there. They’re done when they’re done.

Pastry Chef Pro Tip: How to REALLY Freeze Blueberry Muffins

Freeze your muffins in advance — but raw! It’s a great trick. (Not everyone wants to roll out of bed and start baking, bleary-eyed, before the coffee is even made.)

1. Make the muffin batter.
2. Portion the batter into muffin cups.
3. Freeze the whole muffin pan before storing each frozen muffin in a large freezer bag.
4. You can pop how ever many raw, frozen muffins you want to bake back into a muffin tin, then into the oven whenever you want. They will just take a few extra minutes to bake from frozen.

This way, you have fresh-baked muffins whenever you want, instead of just thawed, reheated ones. You can also freeze this muffins in an airtight container once they are baked and cooled. The Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins will keep in the freezer for up to three months.