Hubby came home with a bag of free peaches yesterday and asked if I could make cobbler. Looked up some recipes (I’ve neve made it before) and there seems to be two kinds-- the peaches imbedded in a biscuit-y dough or topped with some sort of biscuit-y looking dough.
Which is the real deal? Which should I, a first time cobbler, make? Got any good tasting tips? Surefire recipes? Something easy peasy?
I think, by definition, the fruit is topped by dough (not embedded). If you want something “lighter”, look at recipes for a peach crisp.
And consider halving peaches and grilling them!! I love to do this. Char the skin side, grill the fleshy side first.
Topped! What sort of uncaring monster would imbed? That’s an abomination unto God.
Easy is using bisquick. It should be somewhat stiff batter. Toss the fruit with some sugar put on bottom of greased pan. Plop the batter dumpling like on top. I like to leave openings rather than completely cover the fruit. 350 for 25-35 minutes.
If you put the fruit on top, it’s a pie. Dough or streusel on top, it’s a cobbler. In my opinion. Peach season is now, here in the North, and if I ever stop eating my ingredients before I can cook them, I will make a cobbler.
“While crisps are baked fruit topped with streusel, fruit cobblers are instead topped with a single layer of pastry dough. In other words, a fruit cobbler is essentially a fruit pie without a bottom crust. Which means it can be prepared with any fruit, fresh or canned, that you can use for making fruit pies, but apple, pear, peach and cherry are especially popular. Sometimes biscuit dough is used in place of pastry dough.
I was thinking of going the sweet Bisquick biscuit route but that ‘topped with pastry dough’ reminded me I have puff pastry dough in the deep freezer. I think I will put them in the refrigerator right now. It’ll be a Frenchy Peach Cobbler.
Yes, please. Like a giant turnover. This has me thinking: I think I have a package of phyllo dough in the freezer and I haven’t made baklava in several years. Now all I need is the energy.
That sounds absolutely delicious.
Serendipitously, I am moving my recipes from Evernote to Google sheets,
Here is my peach cobbler recipe:
| 1 | cup Original Bisquick® mix |
|---|---|
| 1 | cup milk |
| 1/2 | teaspoon ground nutmeg |
| 1/2 | cup butter or margarine, melted |
| 1 | cup sugar |
| 1 | can (29 ounces) sliced peaches, drained |
Heat oven to 375ºF.
Stir together Bisquick mix, milk and nutmeg in ungreased square baking dish, 8x8x2 inches. Stir in butter until blended. Stir together sugar and peaches; spoon over batter.
Bake 50 to 60 minutes or until golden.
Around here I see two desserts called cobbler, pie crust cobbler and biscuit cobbler. Most restaurants serve pie crust cobbler, probably cause it’s easier. But I grew up with biscuit cobbler, and that’s the only one I like
Don’t do the Bisquick if you are good with pie dough. Just make a deep dish amount of dough.
You’ll have to do something to the peaches. Precook with a bit of sugar cinnamon and butter til they are slightly syrupy. Pour in deep dish slightly cooked bottom crust. Top with top crust and bake til the crust is done.
Or look up peach dumplings, they are great.
(There’s is a very easy crock pot cobbler made with boxed cake mix. Never had it, but I hear it’s good)
Make a crumble not a cobbler. Its vastly superior 
I was kind of indifferent to cobblers until I found this recipe. Now I have to limit them to a couple per year. The dough is almost shortbread like, complimenting any fruit. I hope you try it!
Cobbler recipe (works for any cobbler, my favorite is mixed berry but peach is also delicious)
Preheat oven to 375F.
Measure out 4 ½ cups prepared fruit. Sweeten with sugar to taste (I use about a third of a cup). Add 1 to 2 TB of flour to thicken and toss all together (more flour if peaches are really juicy). Let mixture stand while you make your cobbler dough.
If you have a food processor, this is super easy. If no food processor, just use a pastry cutter. Still easy!
1 ½ cups all purpose flour
½ tsp salt
2 TB sugar
2 ¼ tsp baking powder
8 TB butter
¾ cup heavy whipping cream
In food processor: Mix dry ingredients and cut in butter with pulse until mixture resembles cornmeal. Add the cream and pulse several times, just till mixture comes together as a dough.
No food processor: Mix dry ingredients and cut in butter with pastry cutter. Add the cream and stir lightly, just till mixture comes together as a dough.
Put the fruit mixture in a lightly greased 1 ½ quart gratin or baking dish.
Pat the dough into patties 2 inch to 2 ½ inch in diameter and ½ inch thick. Arrange patties on top of fruit mixture.
Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until fruit mixture bubbles up thickly around the browned biscuit mixture.
Serve with ice cream or regular cream poured over. Makes 6 generous servings.
Had a super easy plan for my first cobbler. Peel, chunk, season, put in oven, take out of oven and top with puff pastry squares (gotta have peak through peaches) put back in oven until pastry is done.
The peaches, however, are far from ripe. They smelled pretty nice but they were not soft. And even after ‘blanching’ them for over 5 minutes, the skin did not loosen and I am far, far too lazy to try and peel 6 peaches.
I took off as much skin as I could, sliced them thin and put them to simmer with some (OK, a lot) of sugar and cobbler spices. Because they are far from tasteless. They are very peachy. But they are very, very tart. And hard. I like tart, I do not like hard. I’ll throw in a handful of frozen Highbush blueberries once I get the peaches softish because they are lovely and sweet and the jam I made with some of them is fantastic.
AND THEN I’ll cover it with puff and put it in the oven. Fingers crossed. Also, how do you deal with under-ripe fruit?
Me, too. If I’m going to have pastry, why not go ahead and make a pie?
I don’t have an opinion on the title question.
I did, however, make Salted Caramel Peach Crisp the other day, and it was delicious.
Technically, I only made half the recipe, because I overestimated how many peaches we had left from our peach picking adventure last weekend. But half a recipe still filled a pie plate nicely, and gave the three of us generous servings twice (on separate days).
The puff pastry was a fail. It did not puff. In fact, it shrunk significantly. The upper part browned nicely and puffed a little bit but the underside stayed wet and the opposite if crisp and puffy.
I removed my mistake and am in the process of eating it as I type. It’s wrong and tough and not a worthy topping, but it doesn’t taste bad.
I covered the baking dish with the filling in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. I will try again tomorrow but with a Bisquick-y topping.
I’ve always thought of it as embedded, but don’t quite get you mean by topped - we make the batter, them dump in the peaches, and the batter cooks up around them, so you don’t generally see the peaches through the crust once it’s done, just an even-looking golden brown crust.
I have seen pie-crust style, but did not grow up with it and don’t care for it. While I can make it from scratch, I usually go with Calhoun Bend Mill peach cobbler mix. Yeah, it’s a mix, but it looks like our homemade version looks.
Unripe peaches. Hmm?
That’s a tough one.
If you can sit them on a deck rail outdoors. Hope the birds, bugs and squirrels leave them alone.
I’ve never really successfully done it with peaches.
We may pick over ripe occasionally but I’d rather have that problem.
Easier to solve and cut away if needed.
I do not think you can cook them ripe.
If they taste ok, maybe dicing very small? Might work.