The Best Way to Let Summer Fruit Shine

What do you picture when you hear the word cobbler?

Is it a bubbling pan of baked peaches topped with a flaky lattice pie crust? Or syrupy berries covered in fluffy biscuits? Or a slice of butter cake strewn with jammy fruit?

(If your first thoughts have to do with cocktails or shoemakers, you’ve obviously not eaten enough cobblers in your life. Read on.)

Regardless of the version being served, the common feature of this pastry is plenty of fruit — preferably fresh, dead ripe and picked at the height of the season. It’s this fruit that’s critical to a cobbler’s excellence. No matter whether it’s baked with pie dough, biscuits or cake batter, the fruit needs to release enough juice to boil up, forming all those wonderfully condensed, sticky pockets.

For biscuit cobblers like this one, the simmering juices have another advantage: They keep the biscuit bottoms supple and soft, basically steaming them tender. Then the tops, exposed to the dry heat of the oven, turn golden and crisp. It’s this juxtaposition of the soft, syrup-soaked caky layer crowned with a very crisp surface that makes biscuit cobblers my favorite of the three.

Here, I’ve kept the topping and filling as simple as possible so that the fruit shines.

You can use almost any fruit as long as it’s juicy. Summer fruit works best: berries, peaches, plums, cherries, nectarines, apricots, pears or a combination. Save your apples, figs and bananas for other projects. You’ll want a little more than a cup of cut fruit per person.

Then sweeten the fruit to taste. Tart berries and sour cherries may need more sugar than gentle, low-acid peaches and pears. Start with a few tablespoons and go from there, tasting along the way. Bear in mind that as the juices cook down and the water evaporates, the fruit will become even sweeter.

A little instant tapioca in the filling helps thicken it. Be sure to let the cobbler bake until you see those juices bubble up. This is a sign that they are boiling, a necessary step to activate the gelling power of the tapioca.

Before covering the fruit with the biscuits, you’ll need to chill the dough. This helps the biscuits keep their shape. Twenty minutes will do it, though if it’s more convenient to make the biscuit dough a few hours in advance, you can. Just keep it well chilled until baking.

A little ice cream, whipped cream or a dollop of sour cream on the side is always welcome when serving a cobbler — at least for the majority of its incarnations.

Recipe: Fruit Cobbler

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