Practical Alchemy: Cobbling Together a Cobbler
Fruit cobblers are a sweet and easy way to finish a meal. A fresh, hot dumpling of dough and fruit — straight out of the oven — ready to be topped with vanilla ice cream or another sweet creamy sauce of your choice. Cobblers are great dessert recipes for any cook's arsenal, given both how quickly they can be thrown together and how many endless variations can be created on the theme.
Cobblers consist of 2 or 3 main parts: the biscuit-like cobbler dough, fresh fruit, and an optional sweet syrup to mix with the fruit. Since the dough takes 5-8 minutes to toss together and dicing fresh fruit is as easy as introducing your favorite fruits to your collection of knives, a cobbler can be in the oven in as little as 10 minutes flat &emdash; tossed in just before a meal begins and ready to eat when the main course has been consumed.
Click through to learn how to cobble together a cobbler.
Cobblers are defined by their biscuit-like dough which rises during the baking process to intermingle with the fruit. To start, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and get a baking pan ready. I usually use a 9"x9"x2" glass dish or a loaf pan depending on the ratio of fruit to dough I prefer. The square pans allow for more fruit to be added, while the loaf pan allows for a more dumpling-like end result.
Before mixing the dough, I first prep the fruit and sauce. The fruit preparation itself is drop-dead simple: dice larger fruit into bite-sized pieces and put them in the pan. If using small fruit like berries, they can be put into the pan whole. I usually add approximately 2 inches of loosely packed fruit in the bottom of the pan.
For bitter or dry fruit, adding some type of simple sugar syrup is a good idea, but it's not necessary for sweeter or juicier fruits. The syrup (actually called "simple syrup") is easy to make and consists of equal parts sugar and water boiled together on the stove and then cooled. For a standard 9"x9" recipe, 1/2 cup each of water and sugar works well, a little less for loaf pans. The syrup can also be a great vessel of flavor. For example, sometimes I'll break down another fruit, like rhubarb, into the syrup or add extra liquid, like white wine and citrus, and boil it down. If I feel like I want to be a bit more indulgent, I often make a little extra syrup and save a bit of it to combine with cream to pour over the top of the cobbler once it's baked.
The cobbler dough I used is borrowed from the Joy of Cooking. To start the dough combine 1 1/3 cups flour, 2 tbsp sugar, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp salt in a large bowl and mix it well. Take 5 tablespoons of cold unsalted butter and dice it into small cubes then mash this into the powdered mix. Mashing it in can be done most easily with a pastry blender. A fork, however, can be used almost as easily in a pinch. Mixing in cold butter ensures that the dough will have a light and fluffy texture when baked. As the dough rises from the baking powder, the butter will melt and leave behind pockets of air.
Once the mixture has the consistency of bread crumbs, gently fold in 1/2 cup milk or cream. Cream will give the richest finish to the dessert, but packs a lot of calories. I've tried it with fat-free milk and still ended up with decent results, so don't feel that the extra fat is a necessity. It's important to be gentle with the dough at this stage and handle the dough as little as possible to avoid forming gluten chains in the flour, which would give our light flaky biscuit dough a chewy, bread-like consistency.
After the dough is ready, arrange bits of it over the prepared fruit pan. The dough likely won't cover the whole surface and that's to be expected. As the dough rises, it will sink down into the fruit a little and expand to cover the top nicely. Once the dough is properly arranged, drizzle a few tablespoons of melted butter over the top for a richer dessert or skip that step to be a bit more health conscious. Pop the cobbler into the oven for 45-50 minutes and kick back and relax. The cobbler is done when the top has golden brown peaks and the fruit and syrup are bubbling up around the edges. It will be extremely hot after taking out of the oven, so 5-10 minutes of cooling prior to serving are recommended for those lacking metallic mouths. 
As I stated earlier, one of my favorite things about cobblers is their versatility. It's a basic dessert form that can take on any number of flavors depending on what you put in it. A few of my favorite combinations so far:
Strawberry Rhubarb Cobbler - use diced strawberries as your fruit, and add diced rhubarb to the syrup while it boils. The rhubarb will break down in the boiling water, and after a quick blitz in the blender will be a thick chunky syrup ready to pour over the strawberries.
Nectarine Black Tea Cobbler - sliced nectarines pair well with a syrup made of strong black tea. When boiling down the sugar and water add several tablespoons of loose black tea (or a few teabags), and then strain it after 10 minutes of steeping. Warning this makes for a caffeinated dessert so plan accordingly.
Apple-Pear bliss Cobbler - The syrup here is made from pureed pears reduced down to a sludge with white wine, cinnamon, and sugar. This decadent sauce is then poured over sliced apples. Usually, I let the chunks be a little larger on apples to give them a more recognizable form. And there you have it-- three variations on a simple theme with wildly different results. Play around with this Cobbler blueprint and share your favorite flavor combinations in the comments. --Sparky
What say you?!