Claire Makes Cherry Cobbler

Wait, what do I have to say though?

'Cause I really don't really remember.

[Woman] I am Claire.

[Man] Hi, I'm Claire.

Today, I'm making gourmet. No, no, don't tell me.

You're really gonna mess me up.

[Man] I'm sorry.

People, this is where I just start talking, right?

[Man] Yes.

[jovial music]

I'm super excited today to show you

a recipe that is in the June/July issue

that is kind of close to my heart,

just because sometimes recipes are kind of special,

and you really like get to know them and love them,

and this is one of those.

It's a cherry cobbler,

and it's kind of near and dear to my heart

because this recipe convinced me

that cobbler can be just as good as pie,

even though I'm a die-hard pie lover.

So it's really easy to put together,

and it works with a lot of different summer fruit,

so I'm excited to show it to you today.

Oh my God, I cannot tell you how relaxed I feel

that like all the ingredients are out.

I know what I'm doing.

I have a recipe to follow.

I've made the recipe many times before.

It is my recipe.

I love these days.

I basically feel like I'm on vacation.

Okay, so the first thing I want to do

is start with my biscuits.

There's two main components,

a biscuit topping and the fruit filling.

The biscuit topping is kind of inspired

by like shortcake recipes.

It's a little bit special because it's a cream biscuit,

but it also has butter.

So it's ultra, ultra rich,

and it makes for a biscuit that's somehow kind of flaky,

but also fluffy and delicious.

Just regular all-purpose flour, two cups.

A quarter cup of granulated sugar.

A tablespoon of baking powder.

This gives the biscuits a lot of lift,

but then it's also gonna get lift from butter,

and I'll show you that step when I get to it,

and kosher salt.

I sort of feel like there is no such thing

as a traditional biscuit recipe.

There are so many different styles of biscuits.

But somewhere in between a cream biscuit AKA scone,

and like a flaky biscuit,

so it's very lightly sweetened,

but most of the sugar is gonna come from the filling.

I like to use lemon zest.

I actually like to use a whole lemon in a recipe,

so in this case, the zest goes into the biscuit,

and it kind of adds like a nice perfume,

and then I put the juice into the filling.

So I'm just gonna zest the lemon directly into the dry.

So heavy cream is like around 30% butter fat,

so it's an incredibly rich ingredient

in addition to the butter,

and that is gonna make the biscuit just super, super tender.

Okay, so the first thing I want to do is add my butter.

It's really important

that both of these things are super cold,

so leave these in the fridge

while you're putting together your dry ingredients.

The colder the ingredients,

the easier the dough will be to work with,

and it's also important

that the butter stays in discreet pieces,

and if it gets kind of soft,

it can start to kind of disappear into the flour.

So now I am doing a process that will be familiar

to anyone who's made pie dough or biscuits before.

I'm smashing the butter pieces into the flour mixture.

So I started with the butter cut

into about half-inch pieces,

and I'm just taking kind of

my thumbs and forefingers and pressing them together,

and it's a little bit easier

if you coat all the butter in the flour first.

I'm kind of going for regular pieces.

That's gonna make for a nicely textured biscuit,

but I kind of want the biggest pieces

to be around the size of like an English peep,

and you want to work relatively quickly,

because the warmth from your hands

will start to soften the butter.

If this mixture starts to feel a little warm

and your butter is getting really soft,

you can always stick it back

in the fridge or even the freezer.

Now I'm going to add my liquid ingredient,

which is my heavy cream, also very cold.

So I just drizzle and constantly agitate

the flour mixture to try to distribute.

The key here is that you want to

evenly hydrate all the flour,

but it's not really like making pie dough

where the object is to

add as little liquid as possible to bind it altogether.

It'll be a fairly sticky dough.

So I have a pretty wet shaggy dough.

I'm just gonna bring it together in the bowl.

Now I'm going to roll out the biscuits,

so I need to sprinkle the bench with a little bit of flour.

If you sprinkle from high above the counter,

then the flour kind of spreads out.

I just want to get everything out of the bowl,

kind of in one mass onto the surface.

So the dough is, it's a little sticky,

but with a nice coating of flour,

you'll be able to handle it okay.

So I just patted it down

into like a 3/4-inch rectangle or square, it doesn't matter,

and now this is an important technique.

You can skip this part if you want,

but I think it really adds a lot of texture to the biscuits.

So I'm gonna stack the dough in quadrants.

So, I'll show you.

I'm gonna cut it first

in half lengthwise and then crosswise.

I'm trying to be even about it,

but it doesn't really matter.

Okay, and now I'm gonna stack each of these quadrants.

So first, I'm gonna dust a bit of flour,

and what this is doing is

it's taking all the pieces of butter

and quadrupling them in terms of height.

Now what I'm gonna do is pat this down

and I'm gonna roll it out,

and I've taken all the butter that's in there

and I've stacked it, and now flattening it.

So it's making lots and lots of little sheets of butter.

Those sheets of butter

is what is going to produce a very flaky biscuit.

So this is a technique that I use for pie dough,

anything where like you want flakiness.

Like almost like a quick puff pasty you can do this.

So it's just a nice, quick,

they call like lamination is a technical term

for making croissant dough and that kind of thing.

It's sort of a quick like cheaters version of lamination,

and I'm gonna get it down into a half-inch slab.

Okay, this looks great

and I decided to make the biscuits

really small for several reasons.

One, the smaller the biscuit,

the less kind of gaps you have all the way around

when you fit them into the baking dish,

and secondly, I thought they were very cute.

So I'm using a one-and-a-half inch cutter.

If you don't have a cutter this small,

you could use like an upside-down shot glass.

So I'm just gonna go around and start punching out,

and then as I punch, I'm gonna transfer to this plate

because once I'm done with the biscuits,

these are gonna go into the fridge to chill

while I make the filling.

I also like to flour the cutter.

It just helps everything to release really cleanly,

and I'm also cutting the biscuits

fitting them as close together as I possibly can.

I'm gonna try to get a yield around 40,

which I was finding is approximately how many I need

to cover the whole baking dish.

It's a two-quart baking dish.

With dough like this,

we always want to work quickly.

You want to work cold,

and it's always better when you're cutting something out,

the first cut, the biscuits

that are from this initial round of punching

are gonna look better,

but if you need to gather and reroll the scrap,

it's perfectly fine.

I did it before.

So a good technique for biscuits is press all the way down,

and then once you hit the surface, give it a turn,

and it will just help

to release the biscuit from the rest of the dough.

All right, so let's see how many that is.

Two, four,

six, eight,

10, 12,

14, 16,

18, 20,

22, 24,

26, 28,

30, 32.

I lost count.

How many?

26, 27,

28, 29, 30.

My hands are clean.

31, 32,

33, 34,

35, 35.

Okay, 35.

That's what I got. So okay, I have to cut five more.

All right, so I'm gonna take the biscuit scraps,

and I just kind of like put them on top of each other,

especially the larger pieces.

I only need five, so that's not so many.

It kind of, really your yield depends mostly

on the dimensions of your slab

and how ably you

can like cut the biscuits out

close together minimizing gaps.

Yeah, with rerolling scraps,

I try not to gather the scraps and put them into a ball,

because I don't want to really destroy

the formation of the layers.

Let's see if I can get five out of here.

I think I can.

So here's my plate of biscuits.

These are going to go into the fridge now.

I don't need to cover 'em.

They won't be in the fridge very long,

but the idea is that I want these to be cold

when they go into the oven,

so they're gonna chill while I make the filling.

All right, so fresh, hold on [laughs].

Let me figure out what my thought is.

Okay, fresh cherries are just making

a first appearance in stores,

so we have two pounds fresh cherries,

of course, you can use frozen.

So these are pitted.

You don't have to buy a cherry pit,

although I highly recommend getting one of these.

It is kind of one of those

slightly annoying single function kitchen items.

So the cherry pitter, this is a common design.

You put the cherry in and this little piece

kind of plunges down to remove the pit.

Sometimes it gets stuck and you kind of have to pull it out.

That's kind of annoying.

I always tell people if I'm making cherry pie,

like eat carefully because there might be a pit in there,

but that just shows you that it's homemade.

Where is the pit?

[Man] And this biodegradable glass straw here.

Oh yeah, so this is a straw from my ice coffee.

It is biodegradable.

I know plastic straws are on their way out,

which is a good thing,

but another way you can pit cherries,

or so I've heard if you don't have a cherry pitter is,

it's unfortunate [laughs].

Okay, but anyway, you can use a wine bottle.

You just need something where you need a small opening

where you can rest the cherry,

and then there's room underneath.

So you just force the straw,

this biodegradable straw [laughs].

It's a little bit flimsy.

We don't have any metal straws or anything like that?

I have metal straws at home, but anyway.

[Man] Yeah.

We might have to cut this part out [laughs].

But anyway, you just [laughs].

[Man] Only three-hundred more cherries to go after that.

[laughs loudly]

Part of the problem is that these cherries

are also like fairly underripe,

so this works better with ripe cherries.

You know what, instead of this dumb method,

I suggest something else which is

here's what I really suggest

if you don't have a cherry pitter, just use a paring knife.

Cut around the cherry pit

like you're cutting open a peach and just pull out the pit.

No big deal.

Your hands are gonna get stained.

You do have to do two pounds, sorry.

So I have right here a two-quart baking dish.

This is an oval baking dish,

but you can use anything

with a two-quart capacity with low sides,

and now I'm just gonna mix together my filling ingredients.

I have a half-cup sugar,

and I'm using a full quarter cup of lemon juice.

So that was the, you know I already used the zest,

now I'm using the juice,

and I do think it just benefits

from a good amount of acidity.

Then cornstarch is a thickener, that's three tablespoons,

and I always like a little bit of warm spice with cherries,

so this is ground cinnamon, a little bit of vanilla extract.

You could use a vanilla bean if you want.

A pinch of kosher salt,

and now another ingredient I really like to combine

with cherries which is almond extract.

Cherries and almond, classic combination.

I love the way the flavors go together.

So it's only a quarter teaspoon because almond extract

can be a very overpowering flavor,

and you just kind of want

a hint or essence of it without it

overwhelming the rest of the filling, so it's optional.

A lot of people are kind of put off

by the flavor of almond extract.

I really like it, but only in small amounts.

There we go.

All right, just putting the filling in the dish

if you're interested.

So let me speak for a minute

about why I love baking with cherries,

and why like I do even recommend

going through the trouble of pitting them.

So cherries are one of those kind

of stone fruits that like blueberries,

they're fully covered in kind of

a shiny skin with a taut skin, and so because of that,

unlike peaches or plums where they're much bigger

and you have to cut them,

so cherries are a great filling for cobbler

because the juices don't immediately release

which gives the biscuits a chance to start

to bake all the way through rather than

immediately just get drowned in liquid,

then prevents them from fully baking.

So cherries are really an ideal fruit for cobbler.

Okay, so I'm gonna bring in my biscuits,

and I haven't added any butter to the filling

for a couple reasons.

One, is there's already butter in the biscuits,

and two, I'm gonna brush the biscuits with butter,

and that butter is going to

kind of drain into the filling and enrich it,

so I don't need to add it. It's a good idea always

to bake on a foil-lined baking sheet with a rim.

I recently baked a bunch

of slab pies with nothing underneath,

and it was at the full-on

smoke alarm like category five disaster,

so always put something to catch the drips.

Now these are nice and cold,

and I'm just going to start laying them down

in no particular pattern.

The most important thing is that you just kind of

tightly fit them together.

The more tightly you pack them,

the more it will encourage the biscuits

to rise up and get tall rather than kind of out.

Now I have melted, but cooled butter.

I don't want to use hot butter

because I'm not trying to soften or warm up the biscuits.

It's a lot of butter, so I'm going to be very generous

and just dab all over the tops

so the butter obviously is about flavor,

but it's also gonna

make the tops of the biscuits brown really well.

And now just a little bit of raw sugar.

If all you have is granulated

because that was what you put in the filling,

totally fine, you can use granulated.

But raw sugar is just kind of sparkly,

and it has bigger crystals,

so it looks really pretty on top.

This is ready to go into the oven.

I have the oven preheated at 400.

The idea is to initially give

the biscuits a generous blast of heat

so that they get kind of a jump start

in baking through before the filling

starts to get really juicy,

and then I'm gonna turn down the heat.

So the whole thing has the rest of the time

to kind of bake evenly and all the way through.

So it's initially in the oven for 10 minutes at 400,

and then I drop the temp, and it's been 55 more minutes.

So 65 total, and it's done.

I have lots of bubbling juices and golden brown biscuits,

so I'm gonna pull it, and just let it rest for a little bit.

So this is like molten hot bubbling filling.

I'm gonna let it rest,

and I can serve it warm or room temp,

so we're just gonna let it sit here

until it kind of tends to cool down.

Also, you know it's done

because you should see the juices running.

That's a good sign.

There should be an active bubbling

and you should expect drips,

which is why we're happy we've done the foil.

I will say that this cobbler

falls into the category of fruit desserts

that is acceptable to eat for breakfast

the day after you make it.

It's my favorite kind of dessert.

So there's not a lot of cornstarch here.

I didn't want a really thick, almost like loppy filling.

If you like a slightly more set filling,

you can add a tiny bit more.

I don't think it really needs it.

Of course, it kind of depends on

the juiciness of your fruit,

and because it's so warm the juices are a little bit runny.

I think cherry desserts

are my new favorite category of dessert.

I love them.

Okay, I'm gonna give it a taste.

My favorite way to eat this cobbler is my hands.

Just take a biscuit, invert it.

Put a little ice cream on it,

and then top it with more cherry.

There's no better dessert

than a warm dessert served with vanilla ice cream.

It's so good.

The biscuits are so light and tender.

You can look at the crumb right there.

So good, and I love how the tops

get really crispy from the butter,

and it's just like it's so ideal then

to have this kind of juicy filling,

and then use the biscuits to soak it up.

It's just everything I want in a summer dessert.

It doesn't even make me,

I like it so much I don't even care about

having to pit two pounds of cherries.

It's quick to assemble.

It uses in-season fruit.

It has that great served warm with cold ice cream thing.

It's good for breakfast the next day.

It's easy, it's oppressive, it's all those things.

It's fun.

You want to taste a little cobbler?

Yes.

Not just because this is a beautiful dessert,

but because I think at this point

you know that I love cherries.

I love cherry desserts.

I love cherries.

[Woman] Andy, I think I want to share one.

Yeah, I figured.

Take whatever you want.

Oh gosh.

Where do you start?

I just keep sitting over here

picking off pieces one by one.

Fruit is nature's dessert.

This is just so pretty, like to look at.

Yeah, fun to make, fun to look at, fun to eat.

The biscuits are so good.

I know.

That's just sweet and so fluffy.

I have to stop eating them.

You guys, I have to stop. Yeah, they're really light.

I'm gonna go over here.

All right, thank you.

Thank you, Claire.

Oh, you're welcome.

Thanks for trying.

Hi, want some?

Yeah.

Can I make you some?

Yeah.

I think this is my favorite dessert that you've ever made.

Really?

Yeah.

This time it's with fresh cherries too.

They're available. Had this like four times.

I know. I guess when we did it we did.

You know what? I've had it a lot of times too,

and it does not get old.

It is so good!

Thanks, it is really good.

You can stay here.

I have to go away, because I can't be around this.

Did we already shoot?

Can I destroy this?

[Man] It's all yours.

Okay, good.

You know there's nobody upstairs at work today?

Nobody.

But 50% of the reason why I came in today

was because I heard that the cobbler was gonna be made,

and that was like my motivation for coming in.

I feel like that was a good decision.

Yeah.

Ultimately.

I can't stress enough,

there's zero people on the office floor.

[laughs loudly]

I got like the scraps from Gaby and Andy.

[Claire] All right.

No one else eats scraps.

There's half of it left.

[Man] Thank you.

Are you feeling self-conscious about your shirt?

No.

[laughs]

[Man] Andy, are you taking school pictures today?

It's like the one day I wear a Polo shirt,

and you know what?

You look so cute.

This Polo shirt is a really old shirt

and I will give it to my son or daughter in the future.

I don't have a son or daughter, but in the future,

and so I'm holding onto it,

and I tried wearing it today and yeah, it's a little snug.

[Claire] Yes. So I won't wear it again.

Was it your dad's or something?

No, it was mine.

Everyone bugs me. Oh, I think we

talked about that shirt before.

You like it on me.

Yeah, I like it.

I like Polo shirts. I've got the collar.

Polo shirts are good. I've got the stache.

My mom would never buy me this shirt.