Raspberry Cobbler

The Art.

    My sister is in college, and she recently complained to me that all the recipes I post are too complicated for her to make. I feel kind of bad about that, so this post is dedicated to my sister, and all the other college students who would like to take a stab at baking. Thinking back to my college days, I realized that this meant I needed to make a recipe that was idiot-proof and didn't require a mixer. With this goal in mind, I created something affordable, easy, and (most importantly) delicious. Since raspberries are in season right now, you can probably get them very cheap--I got mine for $1 a carton. If fresh berries are out of your budget, frozen ones will do just fine. This recipe also only requires 10 minutes of active time, so you can cram 30 minutes of studying in while it bakes. Nothing motivates a good study session like the reward of raspberry cobbler!

The Science.

    Since raspberries have a high water content, the filling in this recipe calls for tapioca. I have to admit, before I made my first fruit dessert I thought tapioca was just a type of pudding. In reality, tapioca is a starchy root that is derived from the cassava plant, and is used as a thickening agent in baked goods. Tapioca is ideal for thickening because it is a type 3 starch, which means it has long chains of sugars that intertwine with each other when they are heated [1]. This interaction between the sugar chains gives tapioca its gelatinous properties. In fact, the cassava plants that we harvest tapioca from today contain very high levels of the enzymes that produce starches, called starch synthases. This is partly due to human selection as we domesticated the plant, but also because of a natural mutation that occurred evolutionarily in cassava, duplicating the gene that encodes starch synthase [2].

 

The Recipe.

Filling:
24oz fresh raspberries
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon tapioca

Crust:
1 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
6 tablespoons butter, cut into pieces
1/4 cup buttermilk
zest from 1 lemon

      Preaheat oven to 425°F. Mix filling ingredients and pour into an 8x6in. or 8x8in. glass dish, then set aside. In a medium bowl, combine flour and sugar. Add butter, and crumble with fingers until the mixture is uniform and similar to cornmeal. Stir in buttermilk and lemon zest. Drop dough by spoonfuls over the raspberry mixture, and bake on center rack for 30 minutes, until crust is golden brown. Allow to cool 10 minutes before serving. 

1. Vamadevan, V et al. "Impact on molecular organization of amylopectin in starch granules upon annealing." Carbohydr. Polym, 2013. Vol. 98 (1), pp1045-55.

2.  Yang, Z et al. "Molecular evolution and functional divergence of soluble starch synthase genes in cassava (manihot esculenta crantz)." Evol. Bioinform. Online, 2013. Vol. 9, pp239-49.