If you stop at a barbecue joint or at a catfish shack in small towns across Texas, more than likely one of your dessert options will be pecan cobbler. Its appeal is wide yet you don’t see it often offered on larger city menus, which for me makes it all the more of a down-home dessert.
Now, you may be asking yourself, “What exactly is pecan cobbler?” I was wondering the same thing myself recently when a reader asked me for my best recipe. See, as much as my family loves its cobblers and our pecans, we’ve never served pecan cobbler. Nope, our pecan dessert of choice is a gooey custardy slice of pecan pie.
A little research was obviously in order. First, let’s talk about cobbler. When I think of cobbler I think of a filling, usually fruit, that has a crust on top. It can be a pie-like crust, a cake-like crust or a biscuit-like crust. But the key to a cobbler is that the crust and the filling intermingle usually with an equal ratio of crust to filling.
The majority of the pecan cobbler recipes I saw, however, had a pecan-pie filling on top of a piecrust. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I failed to see how this was any different from pecan pie, except perhaps that the cobbler was baked in a square baking pan instead of a pie pan.
My search continued. I then spoke to a friend who has eaten much pecan cobbler and he assured me that that those recipes appeared to be wrong—the crust should indeed be soft and fluffy, like a biscuit. After a little more digging, at last I discovered a recipe on Texas Monthly’s recipe swap. It was there that I found a woman who did make hers with a biscuit base and so I used that as a starting point for my adaptation.
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