I didn’t think I needed a recipe for summer fruit cobbler…until I came up with this one.
Last Friday night, I read somewhere on the interwebs that my favorite fruit farmer from Paonia, Colorado would be making the trek to the farmer’s market in Boulder the next morning with (gasp) the first cherries of the season. All of my other plans were cancelled to meet these first sweet fruits when they landed. The farm where they’re grown is about 6 hours drive from where I live, but this is still just close enough that I can taste the sunshine, tender spring rains and high-desert wind that grew them – a taste and an essence that is long lost on the California fruits that come off the truck at my grocery store.
When you have fruits this fresh, there’s really nothing else to do with them but commemorate their existence in a dessert of some form, cradled, covered or coddled in whole grains mixed with a bit of butter, cream or in this case buttermilk. With the simplest ingredients you really don’t need a recipe but this particular cobbler was so good that it’s worth commemorating for next year so that when the first cherries arrive, I’ll have a plan in place for them. And for a woman who makes so much pie, cobbler, crumble, crisp and galette, to have one that was SO GOOD is really saying something.
A pie is defined by a top and bottom crust or some kind, encasing fresh fruits that bubble and boil to tender doneness.
A galette is just one pie crust, that wraps up fresh fruits like a little packet.
A cobbler is identified by the “cobbles” of biscuit dough that are dolloped on top of cooked tender fruits.
A crumble uses a crumbly mixture (typically sugar, flour or oats, and butter) to encase the fruit.
A crisp uses more butter and sugar than dry ingredients in the crumble mixture, so that the topping melts into a crispy layer atop the cooked fruit.
You don’t often go so far as to make a proper buttermilk biscuit to top a cobbler, but in this case I sure did and I will again and again. The tangy buttermilk in the biscuit, set against the sweet/tart cherries spiked with lemon zest needs almost no additional sugar as you’ll see in the recipe below.
This extremely low sugar, high-vibe, maximum-enjoyment dessert is everything I want in the summer to celebrate the gift of these special fruits.
I didn’t actually even have time to take proper pictures of this beautiful feat of nature, but as soon as I make this cobbler again (and I WILL) I’ll certainly stop my guests from digging in until I have a chance to eat first with a camera lens. It will surely be harder than it sounds.
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