How to use your leftovers to make ‘compost’ fruit crisp

Dear friends,

If you’ve been following along, and you’re anything like me, you probably made way too much fruit salad. Not to worry! Last week’s excess begets this week’s lesson:

How to reuse leftovers

Repurposing leftovers is one of the joys of home cooking. Turning leftover spaghetti sauce into Sunday morning shakshuka or stale blueberry muffins into French toast always makes me feel crafty, and like I’m making the most of my ingredients and time.

When I ended up with way too much fruit salad to eat, I marinated on what I could make with the extras. Popsicles … would be easy. Just slide spoonfuls into a mold and place them in the freezer.

Agua fresca … I imagine I might blend the fruit salad a bit, squeeze in some lime, thin it out with water and serve over ice.

Then, it hit me: I would bake with my leftover fruit salad! I didn’t have the time at that particular moment, so I popped a glass containerful in the freezer to save for later. The day before I was ready to bake, I moved my container of fruit salad to the refrigerator. I decided I would turn my fruit salad into a summer crisp. The only problem was actually three problems:

#1 My fruit salad had way too much liquid. Not to worry — I poured it into a fine-meshed strainer, and was left with my fruit mixture and about ½ cup reserved liquid. I used half of that liquid to make a little fruit salad spritz, mixing three parts of sparkling white wine with two parts of fruit salad liquor with one part soda water, serving it over ice with a squeeze and garnish of lime. It was delicious! A little treat for the cook …

#2 My fruit salad had melon and mango in it, which I feared might taste a little funky when baked. I spread my fruit salad mixture on a sheet tray (you could use a big plate) and picked both of them out piece by piece (just a small pain in the tush …).

#3 I had no idea how to make a crisp. I had a sense of what a crisp was — fruit that’s been sweetened and thickened into a filling then baked under an oaten streusel topping — but I didn’t know how to go about it. I wanted to learn the principles and ratios of crisp making so that I could “throw one together” in any season with what I had on hand. So I reached out for help from two experts: Roxana Jullapat (baker-owner of Friends & Family) and Michelle Rabin (baker extraordinaire).

I’ve collected some of the lessons I learned from these conversations below:

Crisp (or crumble, or buckle, or cobbler) is an opportunity to capture the season’s produce in a simple dessert. Get whatever fruit looks and sounds good to you at your local market. Treat your crisp as a celebration of the fruit’s natural sweetness, acidity and deliciousness.

To make the filling, make the fruit taste awesome, then add a thickener. To complement my melange, I added some maple syrup for sweetness; some lime zest for a bit of zazz; crème fraîche for its creamy, lactic tang; vanilla paste for its irresistible perfume; and a bit of fig leaf liquor to swirl in yet another summer fragrance. Substitute your favorite additions, and once the mixture tastes good to you, make a slurry using your reserved fruit salad liquid and cornstarch (this seemed to be everyone’s preferred thickening agent).

Make the crisp topping using a mixture of flours, considering what might complement your fruit. A crisp topping uses oats in its streusel (a mixture of sugar, fat and flour). Use whatever sweetener sounds good to you in a large enough quantity to help the topping brown, without it tasting overly sweet. For fat, both of my experts preferred butter, though you could use other saturated fats (such as coconut oil) that fit your diet. Jullapat recommended using mixed flours at a ratio of three parts all-purpose to one part alternative flour (for example rye, buckwheat or whole wheat) that sounds delicious with your filling.

A sandy topping is a sign of a lazy cook. Here I’m paraphrasing something Jullapat said on our call, by which I believe she meant: If you don’t spend enough time working your fat into your dry ingredients, you’ll likely end up with cold, buttery nuggets surrounded by dry-ish (“sandy”) flour, which is not so pleasant to eat. While under-working is a common mistake, there are a few ways for your topping to go off course, so here’s what I’d recommend: work the cold butter into the sugar and flour (and in my case, blitzed oats and chopped nuts for added flavor and texture) mixture just until you achieve a varied, bouldery texture. Imagine the top of a classic coffee cake. I found it helpful to squeeze big handfuls into large streusel loaves before breaking them into smaller pieces. I also added a bit too much topping to my crisp, and in the future I’d try and let the fruit filling shine a bit more.

Bake until the filling is jammy and the topping is a deep golden brown. In a home oven, you might need to adapt as you bake, perhaps covering your dish with foil if the topping is cooking too fast, or popping it under the broiler if the filling reduces before the streusel is golden.

With that, you now have a lot of the tools that I had going into making this crisp! The main takeaway was, as always: to be mindful as you cook. Your thoughtfulness throughout the prep and cooking process will be greatly rewarded. If you’re ready to cook, check out my compost crisp recipe here, and I’ll be back next week with … I don’t know what, yet!

Yours,
Cody

Chaos Fruit Salad

Time 20 minutes

Yields Serves 8 to 10

Turn leftover fruit into the perfect summer dessert