How to Really Keep Berries from Sinking in Baked Goods

Some cooking advice is just plain wrong. My favorites are “add oil to your boiling pasta water” and “microwaves are bad for cooking.” Let’s add “toss add-ins (berries, nuts, or chocolate chips) in flour to prevent sinking” to the list. Not only is this move unnecessary, but it can ruin your baked goods.

Why do berries, nuts and chocolate sink?

Add-ins, also called inclusions, sink in batters simply because they’re heavier or more dense than the batter itself, not because they’re slippery or need flour to help them “stick.” What matters most is making a batter with enough strength and structure to hold inclusions in place.

Even if your chocolate chips or blueberries sit on top of the batter before baking, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll stay there. As the batter bakes, the leavening agent (like baking soda or baking powder) activates and creates gas bubbles. These bubbles gather around and under the inclusions. A chocolate chip (with its now relatively higher density) will meet these air pockets and simply drop down. If you have an especially liquid-y, airy batter, like in a hot-water chocolate cake, you could coat your chocolate chips in flour and still see them on the bottom after the bake.

No one wants pockets of dry flour

You might think that an extra layer of flour-y protection won’t hurt, so why not take the extra step? But there’s something even worse than blueberries sinking to the bottom of your cake—blueberries concealing pockets of pure, dry flour.

The day I bit into a dusty blueberry flour bomb was the day I stopped tossing inclusions in flour. I broke up the muffin and found that each of the blueberries had a small, dry flour barnacle. Upon further inspection, it clicked. The flour was getting lodged in the blossom end of the fruit. That little nook protected the flour from the batter, and there it stayed. Biting into a muffin and discovering flour pockets is on par with finding a hair in your muffin.

Blueberries aren’t the issue, by the way. Anything with nooks, wrinkles or deep creases will present the same problem. Walnuts, pecans, dried fruits—they’re all risky. Ditch the flour bath. It’s not helping, it’s hurting.

The real way to prevent sinking

To be safe, don’t add inclusions to a recipe that doesn’t call for them. Use a batter that has been created to suspend add-ins. These batters are denser, thicker, and have the structure needed to hold them up during and after baking. Our have been developed to support the juicy berries included. has the right structure for the job. Our looks almost overloaded with add-ins, but the batter doesn’t mind. You can pretty safely swap out the inclusions in these types of recipes since the batter is already primed to carry them. No flour tossing needed.

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Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.