Blackberry and Apple Crumble

Ingredients

Equipment Needed

• •1.5-litre baking dish (ceramic or stoneware)
• •Large mixing bowl
• •Baking tray to catch drips

Instructions

1. 1

   Heat the oven and prepare the fruit

   Set the oven to 190C/170C fan. Tip the chopped Bramleys into a bowl with the blackberries, the two tablespoons of caster sugar, the tablespoon of flour, and the lemon zest. Turn it all through with your hands. The flour is there to catch the juice the fruit will throw out in the oven, so the bottom doesn't turn to a puddle. Tip everything into a baking dish of about 1.5 litres. A dish you like the look of. It's going to the table.

   Bramleys collapse in the oven, which is what you want. A dessert apple holds its shape and stays firm, which is not what you want here. This is a pudding about softness and juice.
2. 2

   Rub the crumble together

   Put the 200g of plain flour and the pinch of salt into a big bowl. Add the cold butter. Rub it in with your fingertips, lifting the mixture high out of the bowl as you go, letting it fall back through your hands. You want it to look like rough, sandy breadcrumbs with a few larger lumps left in. Those lumps become the best bits, the crunchy bouldery pieces on top.

   Cold hands help. If the butter starts to soften and smear, put the whole bowl in the fridge for ten minutes and come back to it. A crumble made with soft butter goes dense and biscuit-like instead of sandy.
3. 3

   Stir in sugar and oats

   Stir in the demerara, the 75g of caster sugar, and the rolled oats. The demerara gives you the crunch and the slight caramel edge. The oats give you texture, a bit of chew, something to hold against the soft fruit underneath. Mix it through with a spoon until it's evenly distributed.

4. 4

   Top the fruit generously

   Scatter the crumble over the fruit in a thick, uneven layer. Don't press it down. Don't smooth it. You want peaks and valleys, because the juice will bubble up through the low spots and catch on the high ones, going dark and sticky where it touches. Take it right to the edge of the dish.

5. 5

   Bake until golden and bubbling

   Put the dish on a baking tray, because it will bubble over, and the bubbling over is part of the point. Bake for forty to forty-five minutes. It's ready when the top is a deep, even golden brown, when you can see dark purple juice pushing up around the edges and bubbling thickly, and when the kitchen smells of warm apple and something faintly caramel. Trust your nose. It knows before the timer does.

   If the top is browning faster than the fruit is cooking, lay a sheet of foil loosely over it for the last ten minutes. The fruit underneath needs to actually soften, not just warm through.
6. 6

   Rest, then serve

   Let it sit for ten minutes out of the oven. This is not optional. Straight from the oven, the juices are molten and will burn your tongue and run everywhere on the plate. Ten minutes of rest and they thicken into something dark and jammy. Serve in generous spoonfuls with cold double cream or warm custard. Both, if the company deserves it.

Chef Tips

• •Wild blackberries are worth the scratches. They're smaller and more intense than the cultivated ones, with a slight wine note that supermarket berries never quite manage. Go picking if you can. If you can't, frozen blackberries work, straight from the freezer, no need to defrost.
• •Don't skip the flour tossed through the fruit. It seems fussy, but without it you get a thin, watery layer at the bottom of the dish. With it, the juice thickens into something jammy and deep that clings to the apple.
• •A little ground cinnamon or a scrap of vanilla pod in the fruit is fine if the mood is on you, but honestly, blackberry and apple don't need much. The fruit is doing the heavy lifting. Let it.
• •Leftovers for breakfast, cold from the fridge with a spoon of Greek yoghurt, is one of the better secrets of September. Don't tell anyone it wasn't meant that way.

Advance Preparation

• •The crumble topping can be rubbed together and kept in a sealed box in the fridge for up to three days, or frozen for a month. Scatter it over the fruit straight from cold.
• •The whole thing can be assembled in the dish, unbaked, a few hours ahead and kept in the fridge. Add five minutes to the baking time if it's going in cold.
• •Leftovers keep covered in the fridge for three days. Reheat in a medium oven until the fruit is warmed through and the topping has crisped again. The microwave will make the crumble go soft, which is a small tragedy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Nutrition Information

1 serving (about 240g)