Summer fruits cobbler

Adapted from Mark Bittman

This cobbler taste great and its effortless (it is literally 10 minutes of work, excluding the baking time). It is essentially perfect recipe from my favorite cooking bible, humbly named ”How to Cook Everything”.

I love to make cobblers in the summer – when fruits are cheap and at their best. I had discovered this recipe 2 years ago, and since then I baked this cobbler more than 20 times, always thrilled with the fantastic result.  So far my favorite filling was a combination of strawberries and nectarines (2:1 ratio), but you can use any fruit of your choice. Try blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, peaches, apricots, even rhubarb. Experiment making it as a single fruit variety, or mix different fruits together (like on the picture below).

Cobbler dough is somewhere between a biscuit and a cookie: fluffy, a bit flaky, buttery and slightly sweet. The key is not over mixing the dough; get it so that it’s just combined, barely holding together (visible small chunks of butter are perfectly ok), than drop it onto the filling in the mounds, leaving space for steam to escape from the cooking fruit. When fully baked, the surface has the appearance of a cobbled street – that is where the name comes from! 

Ingredients:

175 g cane sugar

120 g butter, cold, cut into small cubes

60 g all-purpose flour

½ tsp baking powder

Pinch of salt (omit if you are using salted butter)

1 egg

vanilla (½ vanilla bean or use 1tsp of vanilla extract)

800-1000g fruit of your choice (washed, sliced if necessary)

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 190 °C. Toss the fruit with half the sugar and spread it in a lightly greased baking dish.

2. Combine in the bowl: flour, baking powder, salt, and remaining sugar; mix together.

3. In a small bowl, by hand beat the egg and vanilla.

4. Add the butter and egg to the flour mixture and combine roughly until barely blended.

5. Drop dollops of this mixture onto fruit by tablespoonfuls; do not spread it out. Bake 30 minutes, until golden and just starting to brown.

Personally I prefer to eat it cold, I think it taste even better the next day, however, the original recipe suggests serving it immediately. Try both ways! Top it with vanilla ice-cream, whipped cream or just enjoy it plain. Mmmm...!