Claire Saffitz Makes Peach Cobbler | What's For Dessert

this is going to be my father's favorite episode good i know if it is dad oh god the pressure are you going to make it for him yeah yeah okay you messaged me recently she doesn't have a feature yeah i've been called out people are like where is the cobbler hey everyone i'm claire saffits welcome to my kitchen today is a very special day because i am premiering the first recipe from my new book what's for dessert a couple hours ago i got my advanced copy in the mail the first time i've seen it in person printed oh my god so the timing couldn't be better and i'm showing you one of my favorites from the book which i'll say every time it's peach cobbler i get asked a lot like do you have any peach cobbler recipes and i never did one until now and i love this version i'm very very excited to show you [Music] i thought so hard about peach cobbler and the reason i hadn't really ever created a recipe for peach cobbler until this point is because if i get my hands on a right peach i'm 100 eating the peach plain i could never really come up with a baking recipe that would be better than just eating a ripe peach on its own and then i decided it's such a classic and staple and so beloved that you know i should give it a try so i really worked hard to dial everything in so that the filling is really fruity really peachy and also the topping bakes all the way through and it doesn't get squidgy and wet you can use fresh or frozen peaches and that was important to me also you shouldn't only be able to make peach cobbler for you know six weeks out of the year so i'm really excited to show you for the biscuit topping i have all-purpose flour frozen butter lemon just for zest kosher salt a pint of heavy cream baking powder sugar and then demerara sugar and heavy cream for brushing the top that's for the biscuit topping for the filling i have four pounds of peaches light brown sugar a little bit of corn starch lemon juice salt and some warm spices i have ground ginger nutmeg a little bit of cinnamon and vanilla extract like very very straightforward i'm not adding herbs or like other fruit or fresh ginger or anything like that it's just mostly pantry stuff besides the fruit if you were going to add herbs i did test this with some thyme some fresh thyme and i just sort of like didn't i just got lost i was like i just it's not really here other than it sounds interesting so i took it out so i'm starting with four pounds of peaches when i tested the recipe i tested it with frozen and fresh what i have here are these are very special peaches so these are from something called the peach truck which is based in georgia drove up here to new york harris and i were lucky enough to get our hands on 50 pounds of fresh georgia peaches and we ate basically all of them except for ones that were over ripening a little bit so we froze those so these are sort of these are different from the frozen peaches you would buy in the grocery store because they are more ripe and a little softer and a little juicier you will probably have a slightly different result at home using store-bought frozen or just otherwise fresh peaches [Music] so you cook the filling you put the filling in the baking dish hot you put the cold biscuits on top and bake it and to me it was like this seems so wrong like hot filling cold pastry but actually the heat from underneath helps to cook the biscuits from below so that you don't have this like i kept getting this wet uncooked dough layer between the fruit and the top of the biscuit which i did not like it was not appetizing not tasty so the pre-cooking of the filling it's mostly to concentrate the juices and thicken everything so i don't have to add an excessive amount of cornstarch but that is going to be after i make the biscuits so for now i'm actually just going to dump the peaches into my skillet right here and i'm going to focus on the biscuits [Music] i am making a cream biscuit dough now in what's for dessert i have this kind of all-purpose biscuit dough that i use to make both shortcakes and drop biscuits for cobbler so it starts with frozen butter and i use the box grater to grate the butter into my flour mixture so i'm going to start by mixing my dry ingredients i have flour in here kosher salt and i have four teaspoons of baking powder it's a lot of baking powder because you need that lift from that chemical leavening to you know make the biscuits puff and get really light because it's a cream biscuit meaning the liquid that i use to bring it together is heavy cream it's not a very sweet biscuit i have just a third of a cup of sugar and to this i'm going to add about a teaspoon of finely grated lemon zest you could do orange you could do lime for that matter so that's about a teaspoon so before i add this to my dry ingredients i'm going to work the zest into the sugar with my fingertips what is that doing so i'm kind of massaging it in and this is forcing these little tiny sharp sugar crystals to cut into the lemon zest and it's releasing the essential oils and making it like super aromatic and really really lemony so keep going until you've massaged the mixture and it looks like wet sand so this is going to go into the dry ingredients toss all that together this is an essential recipe not just because it's used in a couple different places in the book but because the technique is kind of foundational so like this idea of grating in frozen butter to a flour mixture is used to make many different styles of flaky pastry and it's just such a reliable method for flaky tender dough so i'm gonna grab my butter out of the freezer one and a half sticks make sure you give it at least a couple hours to freeze solid and first what i do is i toss it in the flour mixture to coat it it helps to give me a better grip and then box grater goes into the bowl and i'm using the large holes try to work quickly and try to work in a somewhat cool kitchen if you can because you want the butter to stay frozen and if it's getting a little bit soft because from the heat of your hands just give it a little more flour so once you get down to like a tiny little nub just throw it in you don't want to grate your fingers and lift up the grater and what you see are these little shreds of butter that's exactly what you want instead of using buttermilk i use cream for the biscuits and it just makes them really rich and really tender so keep your cream cold the name of the game here is keeping everything cold if your kitchen is on the warm side i would recommend freezing your flour or at least sticking it in the fridge keep your flour cold and that will prevent everything from getting too warm as you work either way try to go as quick as you can so i have just this little bit left don't be a hero i know i know i know i need to take my own advice okay so make sure you get everything oh oh my god could you see it the ghost is blowing out [Music] look i'll take it over an 85 degree kitchen so here you have all of your little shreds inside your bowl and the next step is to toss everything together so that each shred of butter is coated in some of the flour i'm just going to give it a gentle toss this looks great it's still cold to the touch i'm going to make a little well in the center and i'm going to grab my heavy cream and a fork so i have heavy cream here for short cake dough this is where the kind of the recipe forks a little bit it's like you choose your shortcake path or you choose your biscuit path i'm doing biscuit so i'm going to incorporate two cups of heavy cream and i'm going to do just a cup and a half at first and i'm kind of eyeballing so i'm pouring this into the well and stirring everything together so that's about a cup and a half of the cream and use the fork you could use a spatula to distribute the cream so the the purpose of these next steps is to evenly hydrate everything get the flour well incorporated so you don't have any like really wet areas and then any flowery areas so if anybody checked out our natasha picklewith episode where where natasha and i mahesh is an amazing pastry chef we made she showed me how to make like a savory cream scone she did this step which is and she called it salad fingers i think it's such a great way to put it where you're kind of lifting up and letting the mixture fall between your fingers and as you do this take any large clumps that seem kind of wet and break them up this also further distributes the moisture but it's a very very gentle way of treating the dough because once you add liquid to flour that initiates gluten development you need a minimal amount for structure but you don't want too much because that will make it kind of tough okay did you ever watch the animation salad fingers no what's that hello class sounds familiar but i don't know what it is we'll show you later is it creepy it's different okay so once you have big clumps broken up we're going to add the rest of our cream so i'm going to drizzle in the remaining half cup go ahead and stir everything together and we want a firm but hydrated dough that's evenly mixed once you have the cream incorporated i'm going to switch to a flexible spatula and just kind of fold everything a little bit this is already looking great it looks really evenly mixed but just to make sure you have no like really wet patches give it a little bit of a fold we have this firm yet moist dough and now i'm going to portion my drop biscuits the recipe in the book says to use a one and a half pound scoop but there's an alternative if you don't have one of those little spring loaded ice cream scoops you can just use two spoons and drop them and certainly for a cobbler like precision is not a thing for this recipe it's okay if they're a little bit different in size so i have just like non-spring-loaded ice cream scoop so i'm just gonna scoop it would be about the size of a golf ball right onto your platter and if you're using a scoop so your portions are even you'll have like around 25 portions you might have a little more or less if you're doing it this way so you want to work quickly enough that it's not going to have a lot of time to warm up but all of that fat in the cream and all that butter really contributes a lot of tenderness to these biscuits it's a forgiving recipe so i'm going to portion the rest of the dough this will go in the fridge because i want all this to stay cold it will rest in there while i cook the filling you can make this in advance so if you wanted to do this ahead of time portion everything and then just cover it and let it sit in the fridge you can do it up to like a day or so in advance you don't want to go much longer otherwise that baking powder will lose its puffing effect so i have my peaches in the skillet i'm going to add to that three quarters of a cup of brown sugar i'm gonna turn this on i already have a ton of liquid pooling in here so basically i just want to bring this up to a simmer and i'm going to let it cook at a lively simmer until the juices from the peaches are reduced so i basically want to see thick bubbling juices and the level of the juice will be below the level of the peaches so they will not be fully submerged that's how you know you've basically cooked it down enough now while that's reducing i'm going to mix my thickener with my other spices in my salt so i have a tablespoon of corn starch i really don't like using a lot of thickener in my fruit fillings because it can be like so gloopy and i don't want to taste the starch i want to taste the fruit so i only use a tablespoon of corn starch and i really let the natural juices just thicken through cooking so just a tablespoon a little bit of nutmeg i have like a real sensitivity to nutmeg where it's just sometimes i just don't love it but it works so well with peaches so i really love it here some ground ginger a little bit of ground cinnamon i think just like the hint of cinnamon and the warmth is really nice with peaches and then salt all fruit fillings need a little bit of salt so stir all of this together mostly what you want to do is distribute the cornstarch and eliminate any lumps from the cornstarch because that is going to help you incorporate the thickener without forming like you know lumpy lumpy pockets so only after this is reduced down am i going to add my thickener [Music] so it depends on the juiciness of your peaches how long it's going to cook this has been going like 20 to 25. the juices have reduced and thickened and they are now kind of like just below the fruit so the fruit is no longer submerged and that's what you want because you don't want like the biscuits to go on and just sit in liquid on the filling when it goes into the oven i did not peel these peaches i like the texture so i don't feel any need to do the extra step of blanching peaches and peeling them it's just kind of like tedious frozen peaches come already peeled obviously that's fine but just fyi no need to peel so now i'm going to add my spices and the cornstarch so this is my thickener and it's all stirred up and i'm going to just sprinkle this over the filling stir it gently to combine bring it back up to a boil because i want to sort of activate the cornstarch to like kick start the thickening this bakes once the biscuits go on the filling is totally cooked it really just bakes with the biscuits can cook through and it only goes for like 35 to 45 so the filling is not going to have a chance to really like reach a boil in the oven so we want to boil it now so that we don't have any unactivated corn starch so i'm just sprinkling this over top now i'm going to gently stir to incorporate and i'm going to bring it back up to a boil just for about 20 seconds to activate the cornstarch so in about 20 seconds i'll pull it off the juices are thickening getting nice and bubbly so now i can bring this over here like the filling now it's glossy so i'm now going to add my lemon juice another reason for like reducing it that much is now i'm adding more liquid so i don't want it to be too wet so three tablespoons of fresh lemon juice and i'm going to double check the recipe it's two teaspoons of vanilla don't quote me my oven is on 425 so we bake this the way i bake most pastry which is to put it in pretty hot then turn down the temperature and let it bake through so it's going to go in at 425 i have my 13x9 pan glass of ceramic is best on a room baking sheet and i just put a silpat on it to catch drips so they don't bake onto the baking sheet itself so into your pan four pounds of peaches seems like a huge amount but it really doesn't cook down into like a ton of filling okay so go ahead and spread that out now it's biscuit time i'm to grab them from the fridge and here i have heavy cream and some demerara sugar for topping them this part it still feels weird to me but it works so just go with it i'm going to put cold biscuit dough on hot filling and this part is like totally haphazard just want to arrange them over the filling any which way probably won't run out of space because if you're using the right size pan but you can just kind of tuck them into each other if you need to you can like break you know one portion apart and i like having some of the filling peeking out in between the biscuits you don't want just like a totally solid topping so now just some cold cream dab this over the tops of the biscuits if you're using a scoop you tend to have like a slightly smoother surface to cover but you don't have to get full coverage here what does this do the cream contributes browning so it'll turn nice and golden but also the fat in it will give you a little bit of a crispy texture especially once you cover it in demerara so now the demerara i'm really generous with this because everything else is not not very sweet so i want to get this in the oven i don't want to let it sit out too long so i want to get those biscuits like going in the oven 425 center rack i'm going to bake it for 15 minutes go down to 350 and i want to bake until the biscuits are really golden on top and i see some bubbling filling around the edges i'm going to pull the cobbler it's done the biscuits are golden brown they puffed up really nicely and kind of filled in the gaps and the filling is bubbling so i'm starting to get a little bit of browning around the edge of the filling i know it's done i think that cobbler can be warm or room temperature it's great warm it's not like a cake where you're going to ruin the texture if you slice into it hot i'm going to let it cool a little bit and then as a final flourish to serve it i add cold heavy cream and pour it over top so you get that great temperature contrast between cold cream warm cobbler it's so so good of course you could do vanilla ice cream same idea i'm just going to set this aside let it cool you can see it's already kind of started to settle those you know the bubbling has subsided so i just want to let this cool off so i don't like burn my mouth this is not burning hot it's still pretty warm but i don't want to wait any longer i'm really excited to eat it so i'm going to spoon it onto my serving plate and then crucially i have some cold heavy cream here i put in this little pitcher like truly just straight out of the fridge so i'm going to kind of spoon out the biscuits along with the filling okay so see this let's take a look you have fluffy biscuit interior from top to filling this was so important to me in development and i'm so glad that i stuck with it and got there because i did not want that like wet uncooked layer of dough on top of the peaches it's just not appealing and everything about this dish should be like absolutely delicious this is what i wanted this peach cobbler to be and i'm so excited about it the finishing touch i'm so excited cold cream and i'm not going to go on top of the biscuits because i want the top to stay crunchy so i'm just going to drizzle it around this is like a natural sauce you know it's i think it's like yes vanilla ice cream is great but i i don't want the sugar of vanilla ice cream i think it's sweet enough so i love just having that cold cream on top i'm definitely going to have this beautiful peach right there i take just a little piece of this biscuit so fluffy and so tender oh my god you guys so good there's like this brightness from lemon right at the end the peach so silky plus the cold cream this is really good because there's sound technique but the peaches were just amazing peaches so definitely try to start there but to me this is the answer to the question of like what's better than a fresh ripe peach i'm so proud of this recipe and i'm so excited to show you more recipes from what's for dessert this is really like kicking off this little preview that i'm going to give you up until the book comes out on november 8th i really hope you pre-order it check the link in the description below here is the book this is my little advanced copy and i'm so proud of this book and so excited to show your recipes from it these are straightforward streamlined recipes for every kind of dessert from frozen and chilled desserts to desserts made on the stove top to every kind of dessert baked in the oven and i could not be more proud of it and it's almost here so i hope you check it out thank you for watching and don't forget to like and subscribe [Music] you

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 519,952

Keywords: peach cobbler recipe, peach cobbler, how to make peach cobbler, dessert, easy peach cobbler, best peach cobbler, homemade, peaches, cobbler, peachcobbler, dessert recipes, pie, cobbler recipe, southern peach cobbler, homemade peach cobbler, peach, peach dessert, cooking, food, recipe, easy peach cobbler recipe, how to make cobbler, claire makes peach cobbler, claire saffitz, bon appetit, gourmet makes, dessert person, whats for dessert, desserts, cobbler dessert, biscuits, biscuit

Id: n_RL9KI3EXs

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 25 2022