Peach Cobbler With Cookie Dough Topping

My wife and I moved to Georgia, the Peach State, during the Covid pandemic, and already I have been itching to find a few ways to get some peaches into my cooking, but something beyond salsa, which I may have overdone a few years ago.

Peach season for locally grown fresh peaches doesn’t start until late April or early May and runs all summer into the fall. And I didn’t feel like waiting that long, so I found myself a recipe that works well with organic frozen peaches. Why organic? Because year after year, conventionally grown peaches show up as one of the most pesticide covered crops in the entire country, ranking #8 in the 2021 EWG Dirty Dozen!

**Don’t really care why I decided to make peach cobbler? Here’s the recipe!**

I know it is a little discordant to go on and on about the benefits of eating organic fruit vs conventional fruit in a blog post about a peach cobbler which I will top with ice cream, which really won’t qualify as a health food by anyone’s standards.

But when I make the conscious decision to stray outside of my normal eating boundaries, I still want to make the best decisions I can about what I am putting into my body. So yes to full fat ice cream, yes to using pastured butter and yes to using frozen organic peaches, which might very well as nutritious or even more so than the “fresh” peaches we are used to picking up at the grocery store, which might be several days or even weeks from having been picked.

If your concern with using frozen peaches vs fresh peaches is taste, I can assure you there are plenty of great tasting frozen options. In fact, peaches that are processed quickly to be frozen, peeled and pitted, will often taste better than the bland cardboard peaches that you will find at the grocery, because it is likely they were left to ripen on the tree, which is often, though not always, not an option for fresh peach providers and grocery stores.

So frozen peaches are tasty, nutritious, and have I mentioned, come out of the bag ready to go! No peeling, no pitting, no slicing for the home chef, simply dump them all in a bowl and it’s go-time!

If you are really thinking ahead, moving the frozen peaches from the freezer to the fridge the day before you plan on using them really helps make this recipe come together shockingly quickly.

It is important to give the fruit some cooking time without the topping, as that will allow some of the juices to be released and will allow the cornstarch to really do it’s magic and bind the whole cobbler in that smooth syrupy gel that is so tasty.

After just fifteen or twenty minutes of prepping the fruit in the oven without the topping should be enough. At that point, you can drop on the cookie dough topping by the spoonful, trying to cover most of the fruit filling, while realizing that there will be small pockets of uncovered fruit bubbling up all around baked cookie crust, and that is a beautiful sight!

I have found, through some serious testing, that this dessert pairs pretty well with my oven roasted pulled pork recipe, in my humble opinion. It’s also pretty awesome the next day, cold, right out of the refrigerator!