Welcome back to the kitchen. I'm just sitting here on an early Sunday morning
the birds are chirping and I'm having that first cup of coffee of the day.
And I'm thinking to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice to make a berry crumble?"
I have beautiful strawberries, I have beautiful raspberries, I have beautiful
blackberries, and I will tell you something very magical happened to me
one day, when my son wanted me to make cookies and I was making crumble.
Normally I take butter, toasted almonds, add a little bit of flour and brown
sugar, and then I crumble it on top and that's my crumble recipe. But my kid
wanted cookies, so what I did was I take my typical crumble topping and I add the
elements of a sugar cookie, you see where I'm going with this? I know it's amazing
so the first thing that we want to do is we want to combine our sugar, and our
berries. Two parts strawberry, to one part each raspberry and blackberry by volume.
And then I just season it with a little bit of vanilla, pinch of salt and some
cornstarch. I want to make sure that I toss and get that all nicely
incorporated. I don't use a spoon, I don't use a spatula because that may break my
berries. You know with cornstarch you can actually see it going to work and unlike
flour it actually thickens something that's cold.
Step two, let's put our nuts, and by the way I do this in a food processor, breaks
this up, don't do it a blender, it's impossible. You don't want your machines
to work too hard, so I don't want this food processor kicking around one big
piece of butter. Let's help the machine by separating those pieces. I pulse a
couple times and the reason is I'm trying to incorporate my butter, and the
minute it starts to ball up like that you're done. If I was making my
traditional crumble topping I'd have flour in there, I'd have less butter, I'd
have more nuts, I'd have more brown sugar, but I'm making this quasi-cookie thing.
Okay, so the mixture goes in here, egg yolk, throw that in, a little more vanilla,
my baking powder, a little bit of salt, sugar, flour, and start slowly.
I don't want flour flying everywhere.
Now, I had that at the highest moment, it went
from zero, to one, to two, to three. But you don't want to overwork anything that has
flour in it, and all I'm doing is just coming down to the bottom and combining
and picking up that last sort of teaspoon or tablespoon of ingredients that kind of
stick there, that don't really happen. Just scatter this, I'm trying to get
total coverage but I also, I don't necessarily want to occlude all the air,
right? I want some space for this crumble to breathe, but at the same time the best
part is the crunchy little topping stuff. And yes, you can take this and you can
put it in a little no-stick pan and make one big cookie and eat it by yourself.
And then this goes in to a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes. So we have time for
more coffee.
Always let this cool, I don't like to put it in the fridge, and I want the bottom to
still be warm, but it's been cooling for about, I don't know, a half hour, 45
minutes. The top is cool to the touch but I know it's still yummy and warm on the
inside. So you can see what I mean about that sort of sugar cookie quality to it
and I like to do two layers, and a nice scoop of Graeter's Madagascar vanilla bean ice cream.
Doesn't get any better than that.