Summer Fruit Cobbler

Filling:

¼ c water

2 Tbsp cornstarch

2 Tbsp lemon juice

¼ to ½ c sugar

4 c fresh blackberries and/or other berries, and/or soft fruit such as peaches (peeled and sliced)

Topping:

1 ½ c all-purpose flour

1/3 c sugar

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

6 Tbsp butter

1/3 c milk

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. In a medium bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Cut in butter.

In a large saucepan, mix cornstarch and water until smooth, then add lemon juice, sugar to taste, and fresh fruit. Heat to a boil, stirring, then pour into a 9x9 or larger dish.

Add milk to the topping mixture and blend until just combined. Roll out like biscuit dough and cut into rounds. Place rounds on top of the fruit mixture. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until topping is done through. Allow to cool somewhat before eating.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make a cobbler! Technically it’s a blackberry cobbler but you can use pretty much any kind of summer fruit. I’ve never tried it with apples or pears, but my guess is you would need to cook them longer on the stove over medium heat until they soften before putting them into the baking dish. The baking is basically just to cook the topping, so it isn’t in the oven long enough to fully cook harder fruit like apples.

I don’t make this recipe often because if I have the berries, I’d rather make a berry pie, which was an episode I released last summer. But a lot of people love cobbler. A cobbler has a layer of fruit filling topped with pieces of sweet dough. This recipe has a relatively thin layer of fruit, but be careful if you use more fruit than the recipe calls for because your pan may overflow in the oven while it bakes.

You’ll need a 9x9 baking dish, or a 9x13 baking dish if you’re using more than four cups of fruit, a large mixing bowl, and a pot big enough to hold all the fruit. What kind of berries you use is up to you, but blackberries are traditional. This time I used about a cup of blackberries, a cup of raspberries, and two cups of blueberries that I bought, since the blackberry and raspberry harvest isn’t very good this year in my usual spots and I didn’t get as many as I hoped when I went out picking. You can use soft fruit for this too, such as peaches or plums.

Start with the large mixing bowl. Mix the dry ingredients of the topping together: flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Cut the butter in until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Then set the bowl aside.

Next, take the pot and dissolve the cornstarch into the water and lemon juice. It should only take a few moments to mix it up, although you will have to fight with the cornstarch at first because it wants to make a solid hard lump in the water that takes some scraping with a fork or whisk to break up. Once you’ve done that, you need to add the fruit to the pot.

If you use soft fruit, peel and slice it into the pot. If you use berries, give them a rinse and pick them over to remove any leaves or bugs, then pour them into the pot. Stir them up with the cornstarch mixture, then add the sugar.

How much sugar you add will depend on what kind of fruit you use. I recommend going with less sugar than you think you might need, since the topping is sweetened and it’s easy to overdo it with this recipe. Too much sugar will overwhelm the flavor of the fruit. If you use all wild blackberries, you might want to up the sugar to half a cup, since wild blackberries are not usually very sweet. If you use blueberries or soft fruit like peaches, you definitely don’t want more than a quarter cup of sugar. Pour the sugar over the fruit and mix it up well.

At this point, turn the oven