You're Going To Need This

Here is the cobbler dough recipe given to me by my old friend, chef Lou Lane, about twenty years ago. It has never failed me. It works for absolutely any kind of fruit, and you can also cut it into little biscuits and make shortbreads out of it, but it's best on top of the fruit so that it can soak up the yummy juice.

Lou "Butch" Lane's Cobbler Dough

Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 Tbl baking powder
1 tsp salt (1/2 tsp if using salted butter)
2 Tbl sugar
1/2 c unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
+/- 1 cup cream (Half & half will do, or even milk, if that's all you have. Cream is best.)

Tools
Food processor
(This recipe can of course be made without one-- use a fork to toss the dry ingredients, use your fingers or a pastry blender to incorporate the butter, as you would for biscuits, and go back to the fork for the cream.)
Spatula (the white one)
optional: parchment paper and rolling pin

Method
Measure dry ingredients into bowl of food processor, mix
Drop butter bits around the flour, pulse a couple of times, then spin until fully incorporated.
Open the processor and sprinkle about half the cream on top of the flour*, close the processor and turn on. Drizzle cream into the bowl until the mixture just forms a ball and starts to chase itself around the bowl. Stop immediately.
Place a square of parchment paper on the counter and scoop your dough ball out of the processor, pressing all of the loose bits in.
Chill for about half an hour. (Or not.)


(For cobbler, you can use this time to cut up enough summer fruit to fill your square glass pan, loaf pan, or pie pan, mixed in a bowl with about a tablespoon of sugar and a pinch of salt. Don't be afraid to fill it up-- the fruit will shrink and the dough will soak up the juice. This is peaches, apricots, cherries and blackberries.)

Open up the parchment and flatten the dough out to about the size and shape of your pan, flip it over on top of the fruit. Cut a few slits in the dough, and throw it in the oven at about 350 degrees. I set the timer for 30 minutes and check it. This one took 45 minutes. About. But I lost track because I was blogging and it turned out fine.

I'm tellin' ya', this one is so super easy that it's going to get you invited back to all of the barbecues this summer. Try it hot out of the oven with ice cream. (Don't worry, I won't be having any ice cream tonight.) I'll bet you could even make some of this dough up in advance, roll it into the right shape for your pan while it's still soft, and put it in the freezer in a plastic bag. Think how cool you'd be. *Note: the sprinkling bit was not called for in the original recipe. The reason I do this is that if you turn the food processor on, the flour spins to the outside of the bowl, leaving a space. When you start to pour the cream directly in, it goes directly into the bottom of the bowl and then spins outward, making a paste at the very bottom, and distributing unevenly. If you put some of the cream in first, then turn the processor on, it mixes more evenly. IF you just poured it in and got the paste thing, either stop, scrape up the bottom and give it a couple of pulses, or just gently knead it in with your hands when you ball it up at the end.