The Best Bran Muffin Recipe

5 from 10 votes

Grandma's classic bran muffins are a quick breakfast or snack!

Course Breakfast

Cuisine American

Keyword bran muffin recipe, bran muffins, classic bran muffins, old fashioned bran muffins

Prep Time 15

Cook Time 18

Total Time 33

Servings muffins

Calories 271kcal

Adjust an oven rack to the middle position. Preheat oven to 400°F. Take about half of the All Bran cereal, place it in a food processor, and process until finely ground. Alternatively, you can place half of the cereal in a large Ziploc bag, and use a rolling pin or meat mallet to crush the cereal into fine crumbs. Set aside.
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the sour cream, oil, eggs, brown sugar, molasses, and vanilla extract.
Stir in the crushed cereal and the remaining whole cereal. Let the mixture sit until the cereal is evenly moistened, about 5 minutes.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. Stir just until combined; do not over-mix. Gently fold in the raisins, cranberries, or cherries.
Divide the batter into greased or paper-lined standard muffin cups, filling each cup to the top. Bake for 16-20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.
Cool muffins in the pan for about 5 minutes, and then transfer to a wire cooling rack.

This recipe calls for All-Bran Original cereal. This is an easy way to incorporate wheat bran into the muffin batter, since regular oat bran or wheat bran can be hard to find in some stores. You can probably substitute with Fiber One, raisin bran cereal, or bran flakes cereal instead, but I have not tested this recipe with those other varieties.

Properly measure the flour by fluffing the flour with a fork, and then spooning the flour into the measuring cup and leveling it off with a knife. Do not use the measuring cup to scoop the flour directly out of the canister. This will pack the flour too tightly in the measuring cups, resulting in more flour than you need, which in turn yields dry, dense muffins.

Keep the muffins moist by using full-fat sour cream. Also, don't overmix the batter. Mixing too much activates the gluten in the flour and results in dry, dense muffins.
Recipe adapted from America's Test Kitchen.