Peach Crumble

I know.  It’s not peach season, but for whatever reason, I had a hankering for peach cobbler or crisp this week.  It probably had something to do with my visit to Royersford Elementary’s Career Day last week.  As a cooking blogger (my "career"), I decided to have the students create fruit smoothie recipes.  I packed up a produce section's worth of assorted fruit.  One of the ingredients I selected was frozen peaches.  Not only did the picture on the package look inviting, but that peach taste whetted my appetite for more.

Fresh peaches were not an option at this time of year, so I bought several jars of canned peaches.  At that point, I didn’t even have a recipe, but knew what I wanted.  I toyed with the idea of using my new cast iron Dutch oven to make peach cobbler.  I decided that the gratification with that route would be too delayed, what with making a fire and using the coals to bake it.  (A Dutch oven recipe is in the future, so stay tuned.)

A search online revealed a variety of cobbler and crisp recipes.  Cobbler is traditionally made with a wetter, biscuit-type dough baked on top of the peaches, as in this previous post:  Peach Cobbler.  Crisp is made with crumbs baked on top.  Then I started to find peach crumble recipes.  So what’s a crumble?

According to the O Chef website (“Answers to life’s vexing cooking questions”), a crumble is “a British dessert in which raw fruit is topped with a crumbly pastry mixture and baked.”  There is an indication that crumbles are like crisps, but not as rich.  That may be so, but this crumble recipe calls for an entire stick of butter.  Feel free to cut that back to 6 Tablespoons.

The recipe also calls for a one-eighth teaspoon of ground cloves.  If you don’t like cloves, leave it out.  Naturally, peach crumble is going to be better served warm with a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream on top.

PEACH CRUMBLE

(click on any image to enlarge)

Ingredients:

1 can/jar of canned peaches (approx. 24.5 oz.), drained

1 teaspoon lemon juice

For the topping:

½ cup flour

½ cup rolled oats

½ cup brown sugar

¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

¼ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

¹/₈ teaspoon ground cloves

½ cup (1 stick) butter

Directions:

Drain peaches and placed in the bottom of an 8”x8” or equivalent greased baking pan/dish.  Sprinkle lemon juice over peaches.

Mix dry ingredients together.  

Using a pastry blender, blend in the cold butter until mixture is uniformly crumby.  If you don’t have a pastry blender, just use a fork. 

Evenly sprinkle the crumb mixture over the top of the peaches.  Some crumble recipes stipulate patting the mixture down on top of the peaches.  I chose not to, and it was fine.  Bake at 350° for 45 minutes.

Don’t try to serve like a piece of cake.  Allow the peaches to jumble together with the crumble.  It is so good!

Enjoy!