Best Blueberry Cobbler Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why do you put cornstarch in a cobbler? ›

Making the Fruit Filling

You can bake a cobbler with just fruit as the filling, but a little sugar and cornstarch tossed with the fruit before baking will work together to create a lush sauce from the fruit's juices. This is the thing that turns a good cobbler into a knock-out dessert.

A probe thermometer inserted in the center of the cobbler should reach 200°F in the thickest part of the topping. The filling should be bubbly around the sides, and the tops of the biscuits should be more deep amber than golden.

If your Peach Cobbler is mushy, it means either 1) your peaches were too ripe and broke down too much when baking (this can also produce a mushy topping), or 2) the Peach Cobbler was overbaked. Take care to use firm but ripe peaches and bake the cobbler until the topping reaches 200 degrees F.

Ingredients in Blueberry Cobbler:

Butter: A few tablespoons of butter, melted at the bottom of the pan, keeps the cobbler from sticking to the pan, and adds to the amazing flavor. Batter: The batter for this cobbler is made from flour, sugar, milk, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon.

While both are fruit desserts that can be made in the oven in a baking dish, or on a stovetop skillet, cobblers and crisps have nuanced differences, including: Exterior: Cobblers are denser due to the biscuit dough topping and base, while crisps use oats and a streusel topping, making them lighter.

Water and flour can be combined to make a thickening agent for peach cobbler. This mixture is commonly known as a "flour slurry."

Blind Bake

The most common way to ward off a soggy pie crust is by a process called blind baking. Blind baking means you pre-bake the crust (sometimes covered with parchment or foil and weighed down with pie weights to prevent the crust from bubbling up) so that it sets and crisps up before you add any wet filling.

If you use enough batter to completely cover the fruit, you'll end up with a cobbler that's far too bready, more like an upside-down cake.

Believe it or not, it's the pH scale. Blueberries turn reddish when exposed to acids, such as lemon juice and vinegar. Blueberries turn greenish-blue in a batter that has too much baking soda (or grey in a smoothie with a lot of dairy), which creates an alkaline environment.

Mistake: Baking at too high of a temperature

Cobblers need enough time in the oven for the topping to cook through and brown, but at too high a temperature, anything above 375 ℉, the fruit filling might not be cooked by the time the top is burnt.

Will cobbler thicken as it cools? ›

Baking cobbler has a distinct challenge: You can't see the bottom of the biscuits and the filling won't completely thicken until it cools, so how do you know when it's done? Try this: Because the cobbler topping is a variation on a quick bread, we can take its temperature to ensure doneness.

The method for the topping goes like this: Combine equal parts flour and sugar, and add enough melted butter to make a dough. This makes a very sweet cobbler with a topping somewhere between a sugar cookie and pie crust.

Cobbler: A fruit dessert made with a top crust of pie dough or biscuit dough but no bottom crust. Crisp/crumble: In Alberta, the terms are mostly interchangeable. Both refer to fruit desserts similar to cobbler but made with a brown sugar streusel topping sometimes containing old-fashioned rolled oats.

The biggest difference between a cobbler and a pie is the placement of the dough. Pies have, at a minimum, a bottom crust with the fruit placed on top, while a cobbler has the fruit on the bottom and a dolloped dough on top instead.

A brown betty is similar to a crisp or crumble, except the topping is layered into the fruit mixture before baking for an intensely crunchy effect. Food Network Kitchen's Grilled Rhubarb Brown Betty is warm, sweet and super-crisp — excellent when served with a scoop of strawberry ice cream.

Use as a Thickening Agent

Here's how it works: when cornstarch is added to a recipe, the starch molecules work to absorb water and thicken the mixture. When heated, those molecules swell and consume even more of the liquid in the recipe.

“I have used tapioca flour in place of cornstarch for crisps, pie fillings, and cobblers,” Guas says. “The rough substitution is 2 tablespoons of tapioca flour for 1 tablespoon cornstarch.” Another significant benefit of tapioca is that it freezes well, keeping your baked goods the perfect consistency.

Cornstarch has thickening power similar to Instant ClearJel. Like flour, it lends a cloudy, semi-transparent look to filling. It can also give filling a starchy taste. For full effectiveness, make sure the pie filling is bubbling up through the crust before removing your pie from the oven.

All-purpose flour is an easy substitute for cornstarch; in fact you may see recipes for thickening pie fillings or soups with either. You'll need 2 tablespoons of flour for every 1 tablespoon of cornstarch in a recipe.