Generally filled with bubbling fruit nestled into a buttery, sugary foundation, cobblers are beloved in the canon of homey desserts. The problem is, there’s no consensus about what, exactly, they are.
For some cooking authorities, like the Virginia-born chef and cookbook author Edna Lewis, cobblers are baked summer peaches layered with raw pie dough to help thicken the juices, then topped with a flaky crust.
Others prefer syrupy berries covered in fluffy biscuits shaped like golden cobblestones, a likeness that may have inspired the name (or not; there’s no definitive etymology).
Then there are those who believe that cobblers consist of batter strewed with fruit, which bake up solid and caky with jammy pockets throughout.
Finding my own place on this spectrum was the first step for the final episode of my YouTube series, “Shortcut vs. Showstopper.”
All three of the aforementioned cobbler styles are fairly simple, but the batter version is the easiest. It’s made with melted butter, so there’s no need to worry about keeping the fat cold and using a gentle touch when working it into the flour — steps essential for light, flaky pie and biscuit doughs. So it was exactly the style I gravitated toward.
Standard batter cobbler recipes are so straightforward that they hardly need streamlining. But I did make one big edit: cooking everything in one skillet to reduce cleanup.
Then I made two tweaks to add depth but not work. The first was to simmer the peaches in a brown sugar and lemon juice instead of regular sugar to lend caramel notes and tang. I took it one step further by letting the butter brown after melting it, which gives the cobbler a nutty, toasty character.
Creating anything more elaborate for a showstopping recipe was a bigger challenge. After all, the point of cobbler is a fuss-free, casual and delectable dessert. I’d need a compelling reason to complicate it.
The answer was right in front of me, or rather behind me, in an upside-down peach cobbler, which I wrote about last summer. The idea here is that French apple tarte Tatin meets biscuit-topped peach cobbler, and both go head over heels.
To make it, I use peaches instead of the usual apples, letting them simmer in caramel and their own juices until they turn translucent and candied. Crunchy-topped sour cream biscuits stand in for the usual puff pastry.
It’s a stunning dessert that rewards the effort, including the part where you make caramel from scratch. If homemade caramel seems out of reach, I urge you to watch the video, which can help you know exactly what to look for to nail it. You’ll also pick up some baking tips and tricks along the way, applicable to all kinds of desserts, cobblers or otherwise.
Though you can make both cobblers year-round with frozen or out-of-season fruit, fresh peaches and their stone fruit cousins (nectarines, apricots and plums) are all at their peak right now and can stand in for one another depending on what you’ve got. You don’t even need pristine fruit. Cobblers are a perfect place to use up the overripe specimens that are starting to weep juices all over your fruit bowl — before you get a chance to eat them over the sink.
Instead, let those juices burble and concentrate in the oven’s high heat, imbuing your cobbler with an inimitable perfume — no matter what version you decide to make.
