It’s not often that we make dessert specifically for after dinner. Sure, we make treats from time to time, but almost never do we think of making something to have ready once dinner is done. This past Sunday was an exception, when we decided to make Thomas Keller’s Blueberry Cobbler. We made sure to have it in the oven before we started cooking dinner, and it came out right as we were serving, allowing it to rest and cool a bit before we served up some cobbler.
While we followed the recipe in Ad Hoc at Home, by Thomas Keller, almost exactly — we used lime zest instead of lemon — we did make half the amount, which fits into an 8×8-inch pan. If you double the recipe, you’ll use a 9×13-inch baking pan, instead. We do list the ingredients by weight, too, just in case you measure with a scale, as we do.
Blueberry Cobbler
Ingredients
Filling
- 25 g sugar (2 Tbs)
- 10 g all-purpose flour (1 Tbs)
- 1/2 tsp grated lemon zest
- 18 ounces blueberries (4 cups)
Topping
- 120 g sifted all-purpose flour (1 cup)
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 40 g unsalted butter, room temperature (3 Tbs)
- 75 g sugar (1/4 cup + 2 Tbs)
- 1 large egg
- 60 g buttermilk (1/4 cup)
Cinnamon sugar
- 7 g sugar (1/2 Tbs)
- 1/8 tsp ground cinnamon
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350°F.
Filling
- In an 8x8-inch baking pan, stir together sugar, flour, and lemon zest. Add blueberries, toss to coat, then spread into an even layer. Set aside.
Topping
- In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and baking soda. Set aside.
- Combine the butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix to combine, increase speed to medium, and beat until fluffy, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed, about 3 minutes.
- Add egg and beat in completely.
- Add the flour mixture in three additions, alternating with two additions of the buttermilk, mixing just long enough to combine between additions.
Cinnamon sugar
- Stir together sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl.
Assembly
- Top the blueberries with about 6 dollops of topping mixture, leaving space between. Dust with cinnamon sugar.
- Bake for 40 minutes or until filling is bubbling. If the topping begins to brown too much, loosely cover with foil during the last few minutes.
- Let cool 10 minutes before serving
Ingredient discussion:
The original recipe called for 8 cups of blueberries. We cut the recipe in half, so we needed 4 cups, but blueberries are sold in little 6-ounce containers. How many containers are needed for 4 cups? We measured, and, it turns out, almost exactly three 6-ounce containers make 4 cups. Now we know, and you do, too. Everything else is pretty standard, although we used lime zest in place of lemon zest, and it was fine.
Procedure in detail:
Mise en place. If you want to get this into the oven and have it baked so it comes out just in time for dessert, you’ll need to get everything ready and all the ingredients pre-measured. We did. We placed the sugar, flour, and zest in the baking pan, measured and mixed the flour, baking powder, and baking soda for the topping, put the butter and sugar into the mixer, measured out the buttermilk, got out the egg, washed the blueberries, made the cinnamon sugar, and then we were set.
Preheat oven to 350°F.
For the filling:
Coat blueberries. If you haven’t done so, mix together the flour, sugar, and zest in the baking pan. The original recipe suggests that you use a bowl, coat the blueberries in a bowl, then place them in a baking dish. We say, mix the dry ingredients in the dish, add the blueberries, toss to coat, and smooth into an even layer. Set aside.
For the topping:
Mix dry ingredients. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Set aside.
Cream butter and sugar. Combine the butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix until combined, then increase the speed and beat on medium until pale, light, and fluffy, about 3 minutes. This beating whips air into the butter, which will help make for light fluffy biscuits on top of your cobbler.
Add egg. Turn off the mixer, add the egg, and beat in. At first it’ll look as if the mixture has broken, but it hasn’t. Just keep beating on medium and it’ll come together and look like batter.
Add flour and buttermilk. We’ll do this in five steps: some flour mixture, half the buttermilk, flour, rest of buttermilk, last portion of flour, mixing just enough to combine completely between additions. This is the traditional method of mixing cakes, and we’ve read that it helps make the cake as light as possible. We don’t know for sure, but it’s so easy to do this alternating dry, wet, dry, etc.; we figure it can’t hurt, so we do it.
For the cinnamon sugar:
Mix. We did this as part of our mise en place. In a small bowl mix together the sugar and ground cinnamon.
For assembly:
Dollop topping. Divide the topping across the blueberries in about 6 large dollops, keeping some open space between each dollop. You can go with fewer or a couple more if you want to have a certain number, but about six seemed ideal.
Dust with cinnamon sugar. Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar over the dollops of topping. Sometimes you might think that this bit of cinnamon sugar isn’t going to make a lot of difference, but we find that sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference. So we sprinkled away.
Bake. Slide the cobbler into the oven and bake until the fruit is bubbling away, the topping mixture is browned, and everything smells wonderful, about 40 minutes. You might want to check a few minutes early; if the topping is browning too much, you can place a piece of aluminum foil over the top. Just set it on top, as you want the steam to escape.
Cool. Before serving, let the cobbler set up for about 10 minutes. It’ll still be nice and warm, the fruit will have thickened and cooled somewhat, and the biscuit topping will firm up a bit more.
We really loved this cobbler and wished that we’d had some vanilla ice cream or whipped cream to go with it, as suggested in the recipe. Alas, we’ll have to make it again when we have Triple Vanilla Ice Cream at the ready. We will say that we had some leftover cobbler the next day along with tea as our breakfast. With just a little warming in a microwave, it was almost as good as cobbler fresh from the oven. Five stars.
