Simple Apple Cobbler...But Better

Hey guys, Sam here. Today, I'm going to be making a super simple, but honestly incredible apple cobbler. Juicy apples, buttery, biscuit-esque topping, but super easy. Let's get started by peeling our apples. Ultimately, you'll need seven, yes, seven cups of peeled, sliced apples. You'll want to peel them nice and thin. I like to use my little, I think it's called a Johnny Peeler here. Makes really quick work of it. So to get to the seven cups of apples needed, I usually start with two and a half pounds of apples. And when all said is done, I'll have about seven cups or 700 grams. Just so much easier than how I used to peel them. And then if you're using a peeler like this, you're going to kind of have like a slinky apple. So go ahead and just cut that in half. That way you don't have apple rings. At least that's my preference. I guess apple rings would be totally fine. Just how I feel. We'll do this till we have seven and a half cups. And when I say thin slices, I like them to be under one fourth inch. See that right there. It's just so satisfying. So once we have all of our apples peeled, we're going to head over to the stovetop and we're going to cook the apples. Let me tell you, when I first started this recipe, I didn't think we were going to be cooking it. I wanted to keep it super easy and just toss everything in the pan and bake it that way. But of course I had to test everything multiple ways and you are just going to get a much better flavor and just a better sauce, a better texture to the apples if you cook them first. Unfortunately, this is a super quick process. 700, look at that. So we used exactly six apples, but your mileage will vary depending on the size of your apples. All right, let's head over to the stovetop. We'll start with two tablespoons of salted butter. You could use unsalted if you prefer. And we're going to melt this in a medium sized skillet. So we're melting this over medium heat. And once the butter is melted, we're going to add our apples. We're also going to add a third cup or 65 grams of firmly packed light brown sugar, a tablespoon of lemon juice, one and a half tablespoons of all purpose flour, one and a half teaspoons of ground cinnamon, a half teaspoon of salt. Give everything a quick stir and then we're going to add a half cup of water. We're going to cook this stirring constantly for about five minutes. What we're looking for is the sugar to dissolve. And we want this juicy sauce to start to thicken just a little bit and cling to the apples a bit more. All right, once you have these off the heat, we're going to stir in three fourths teaspoon of vanilla extract. Oh, I still don't have a three fourths teaspoon. Here's my half and a half of that half. All right, we'll stir this in. And we're going to bake this in a 13 by nine baking dish. It's actually technically a little smaller than a 13 by nine, but it's prettier and everything is still going to fit nicely in this. This is what I'm using. Pour it without losing all my apples. All right, I'm just going to spread this into an even layer. Ooh, steamy. All right, and let's just set this aside and make our biscuit topping. Careful, it's hot. Oh, you should also have your oven preheating at this point to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Can't believe I didn't say that sooner. So the apple cobbler topping, it's very biscuit-esque. A little softer than a regular biscuit, but it works really nicely with the apple filling. We're going to start with two cups or 250 grams of all-purpose flour. And we're going to add one third cup of firmly packed light brown sugar, or 65 grams. Usually won't find brown sugar in a biscuit recipe, but I love it here. It really accents the apples so nicely. We're also going to add one and a half teaspoons of baking powder, and we will add a half teaspoon of table salt. All right, let's go ahead and stir the dry ingredients together real quickly. Okay, and there's no mixer needed for this. No pastry cutter, no food processor. It's like a drop biscuit, so it's really easy. We're going to be using a half cup of melted unsalted butter. Add that into the bowl. Get all of that in there. We don't waste butter. I even made a butter sticker for my membership on YouTube because that's how strongly I feel about butter. We're also going to be adding one cup of heavy cream. And if you don't have heavy cream, you could use buttermilk instead. That also has a nice flavor, but of course, I've tested this many, many ways, and heavy cream was just my favorite. So we're going to gently stir this together. You want everything to be nicely combined and uniform, but you don't want to overwork the dough big time because if you stir too much, it's going to be dry, dense, and rubbery. Spatula would actually be better for this step, but I'm already committed to the spoon. All right, let's bring back our cobbler, and we're just going to drop this over the apples. I'm going to try to evenly distribute it, and I don't want any super tall mounds because I want this to cook evenly. And it's not going to completely cover the apples, but it'll mostly cover it. I'm so excited to eat this. Apple cobbler, it seems like something so simple, but we tested... Nikki, how many versions of this recipe did we test? So we did over seven different versions. So good. We also tried the competition that's out there because we always want to make sure, you know, if we're putting a recipe out there, especially something like apple cobbler, when there are literally hundreds, thousands of recipes, I want to make sure we're putting out the best version. That has always been my goal. I really feel that we did that here today. All right, we have that cobbled topping. And then real quickly, we're not done yet. Just going to mix together a tablespoon of granulated sugar with 1 1⁄4 teaspoon of ground cinnamon. Just going to mix that together. No time for a whisk. We're just going to use our little teaspoon. And we're just going to sprinkle this over our biscuit layer. That's a really nice touch on top. All right, this is going to go into our 350 degree Fahrenheit preheated oven, where it's going to need to bake for about 28 to 30 minutes. When it's finished baking, you're going to just check to see that the biscuit is baked all the way through. You can use a toothpick for this, but I usually like to use like a sharp knife or a toothpick to just kind of pry into the biscuit and just make sure there's no wet batter and that it's nice and dry and baked through. All right, this is all bubbly and looking good. And as you could hopefully see, the biscuit layer seems to be cooked completely through. So we are going to let this cool for a couple of minutes, like, I don't know, 10 minutes. You just don't want to burn yourself and you want the sauce to have a little time for it to just thicken slightly so it's not too watery. Once it's had time to cool, let's go ahead and take a look at this. And that is how you make my favorite apple cobbler. Juicy apples, perfect biscuit topping. All you need is some vanilla ice cream. It's still hot. I love it, I love it, I love it. It doesn't like cooking anything, huh? Okay. That's actually not as much as I thought.