Blueberry Muffins with Maple Syrup & Sourdough

When I first started to become interested in natural sugars, I found a few cookbooks with delicious natural sugar baking recipes. One of these cookbooks is Real Sweet by Shauna Sever. So today I decided to adapt her Blueberry Maple Oatmeal Muffin recipe by incorporating sourdough starter. This recipe is one of my favorite blueberry muffin recipes - Shauna describes them as tasting like “a cross between a good bowl of oatmeal and a hearty stack of whole-grain pancakes” and I couldn’t agree more! This taste combination is because the recipe incorporates rolled oats as well as maple syrup for the sweetener and it’s a delicious combination.

One note - Shauna’s recipe used dried blueberries but I decided to incorporate fresh blueberries. This resulted in a bit more batter than would fit in the muffin pan so if you have this “problem” as well you’ll want to either add it to a second muffin pan or mini muffin pan and bake as well.

Enjoy!

Ingredients

• 1 cup (250 g) buttermilk*

• 1/2 cup (165 g) pure maple syrup

• 5 tbsp. (70 g) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

• 1 egg

• 1 tsp. vanilla extract

• 1 and 1/3 cups (135 g) old-fashioned rolled oats

• 100 g sourdough starter discard

• 3/4 cup (85 g) whole wheat pastry flour*

• 1 tsp. baking soda

• 1/2 tsp. salt

• 1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon

• 1 cup (135 g) blueberries or 1/2 cup (80 g) dried blueberries

Directions

1. In a large bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, maple syrup, butter, egg, and vanilla extract. Mix in the oats. Let soak for 45 minutes (or up to overnight in the refrigerator).

2. Preheat the oven to 425 F. Grease a muffin tin with butter or cooking spray.

3. In a small bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Add the blueberries and stir until coated.

4. When the oat mixture is done soaking, stir in the sourdough starter. Then fold in the dry ingredients - avoid overmixing.

5. Portion the batter into the prepared muffin tin (as noted above, you might have a bit extra batter if you use fresh blueberries). Bake for 15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Notes:

If you don’t have buttermilk, you can substitute with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and then fill the measuring cup up to the 1 cup level with milk and let sit for five minutes.

If you don’t have whole wheat pastry flour, you can substitute with whole wheat or all purpose flour mixed with two tablespoons of cornstarch. And if you don’t have cornstarch, then just use whole wheat or all purpose flour - it will change the texture a bit but should still turn out delicious.