The Cobbler Column
BY JAMES NORTON
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I’ve put a significant - possibly an exorbitant - amount of energy into nailing down a reliable pie crust recipe, finally settling on a 3:2 butter/shortening blend that seems to be an ideal mix of flaky and tender. Thanks to an aggressive pre-bake, most of my soggy bottoms problems have become a thing of the past, and I can turn out reliable cherry or apple pies as needed, which seems to be more and more frequently in our increasingly sociable post-pandemic times.
I don’t mind the occasional crisp or crumble or whatever (it’s a great way to dispose of the apples that couldn’t make it into lunch for school or the most recent apple pie) but I don’t generally like to put good fruit under anything but a proper pie crust. Why waste the opportunity to bring together two elements that are so naturally made for each other?
Well, here’s why:
James Norton / Heavy Table
The cobbler. Becca and I hunted down one of the itinerant Tree-Ripe Fruit trucks a couple of weeks ago, and bought two boxes of incredibly good Georgia peaches, which had been carted up straight from the orchard. We figured that buying roughly 60 peaches for roughly $60 was a reasonably good deal and our family’s propensity for peach-eating would take care of the surplus in no time.
Well, 30-40 peaches later we realized that we had a problem. “Ah,” I remembered, “we could make one of those things. A cobbler!” I’ve actually never eaten a cobbler before, and before tackling this recipe, I couldn’t tell you the difference between a cobbler, a crisp, a buckle, or any of the other random "dough plus fruit" recipes out there. I knew “cobbler” went with “peaches,” but not really why.
The reason: cobbler crust is pretty damn close to a sugar cookie (it’s 2:1 flour to sugar), which means the fruit itself can stay pretty close to natural and the biscuit-like crust carries a lot of the necessary power to dessert-ify the dish. It’s a delicious mix of fruity and crispy sweet and carries the additional advantage of being far, far easier to make than a proper pie crust. A win-win.
The Peach Cobbler recipe I used came from Epicurious and I recommend it, but here’s a (partially) original recipe from me to you: the cherry cobbler.
If you read these newsletters, you know I’m always buried in this fruit (which I now harvest from a tree each in my front and back yards), and a cobbler seemed like a fun, simpler spin on the usual cherry pie process. The challenge with adapting the cobbler recipe for cherries came with finding the right sweetness level. My first guess was to trust the crust to bring sweetness and go with a recipe that was only half as sweet as my cherry pancake topping - ½ cup of sugar for 4 cups of fruit, rather than a full cup. And as sometimes turns out, my first guess was right - this recipe made a remarkably tasty, tart-but-sweet, perfect-for-dessert cherry cobbler. I love this fruit format!
James Norton / Heavy Table
CHERRY COBBLER
4 Cups of pitted sour cherries
1 Tbsp lemon juice
2 tsp cornstarch
1/2 Cup sugar
Biscuit topping:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 stick cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/4 cup boiling water
Preheat oven to 425. Combine cherries, lemon juice, cornstarch and sugar in a baking dish and bake for 10 minutes.
Stir together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Blend in butter with pastry blender until mixture resembles coarse meal. Stir in water until just combined.
Drop clumps of topping atop the cherries and then bake until golden brown, 20-25 minutes.