One of my most treasured and deeply ingrained food memories is making Blackberry Cobbler with my grandmother. We would gather blackberries along the creek on their acreage and carry them to the house in buckets and bowls and later in the day she’d tuck them into a cobbler that I can still taste the crisp edges of when I close my eyes. I remember listening intently as she told me her secret — that you always, always use salted butter in the bottom of your baking dish because that saltiness tastes so good with the sweet. And she was right. While I suppose you could just add some salt yourself instead, this cobbler was heaven on earth, so while I don’t use salted butter anywhere else in baking, I follow her rule every single time I make cobbler. And you should too.
Whether you’re using peaches, apples, blackberries, or blueberries (or really any other fruit at all), cobbler is one of the easiest desserts out there. It’s one of my favorites too. There are crisps, buckles, crumbles, and slumps, sure — but to me, cobbler rules them all. It’s homey and rustic and is one of the best ways to showcase the fruit of the current season.
In late summer, that’s blackberries.
Making cobbler can be a little deceiving because you kind of make it upside down. You pour your melted butter in the bottom of your baking dish. (In this case, salted, please.) And then you whisk together a quick batter and pour that over the top.
The fruit — which you toss with a little more sugar, generally — goes on top of that batter and then when it bakes the batter comes up through the fruit so you end up with bubbly, syrupy fruit filling below and soft cakey crumb on top (with some delicious crisp edges in the corner).
I told you it was heaven on earth.
It’s forgiving too. A little more fruit, a little less sugar, a little lemon zest stirred in to dress things up… it all works.
Just make sure you top it all off with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Because that’s really heaven on earth.
Yield(s): Serves 6
10 m prep time | 45 m cook time
