Blackberry Slump

I made this an even easier weeknight celebration of berry season by baking a few Cappello's GF buttermilk biscuits. I placed half a biscuit in each bowl and covered it with the berry deliciousness—3 small boxes of blackberries+1 blueberry box simmered in 1/2 cup sugar and tapioca flour water mixture in a 9" skillet for about 30 minutes, while we ate dinner (no tending required). Vanilla ice cream topped it all. Slump, grunt, whatev ... it was yummy!

Made with raspberries instead and no ginger. Added egg to the batter on accident (whoops), and baked in the oven at 400 for about 18 minutes (covered for the first half). Yummy! I hate babysitting dishes on the stove.

Does anyone else have issues with the amount of seeds when whole blackberries are used? I might just have exceptionally seedy yard berries but, while they taste wonderful, they make for some unpleasantly crunchy desserts...

My mother used to make this with slippery dumplings that cooked in the berries. She called it "Blackberry Dumplings" and I haven't had it in over 60 years We used the canned blackberries we'd picked that prior summer. After cooking the berries with the dumplings on top in a lidded enameled cast iron Dutch Oven, I then sank the dumplings in the berries for the last 5 minutes. It took me home to winter in rural East Tennessee. Thanks for resurrecting this recipe. BTW, I've adapted it to peaches.

There is a classic simple German dessert that is similar to this--it's called "Dampfnudel" however, the dough is usually yeast-risen. We would make cinnamon rolls and place the raw cinnamon rolls into blackberry juice, cover and bake in the oven. We used to scrounge roadsides for the wild blackberries. I'll have to try this.

I used frozen blackberries for this recipe and it came out way more watery than I liked. I added more cornstarch but it still didn’t get to that thick, jammy consistency I wanted. It still tasted good and was a big hit with the family. I made it in a 12” cast iron skillet since some people reported overflow. It worked well.

I cut the sugar by a third. More blackberrries.

My mother made her dumplings by a different recipe but she did make a really delicious blackberry slump.

I did some math to keep the same proportions of flour and heavy cream as the original recipe, and came up with 100 grams of fully hydrated starter; 140 grams of unbleached flour; 181 grams of heavy cream (based on the density of cream, etc.). The best order of additions is to start with the starter, stir in everything (including the egg) except the flour, and then add the flour last. The recipe was otherwise unchanged. The resulting dumplings were very light and fluffy.

This recipe is an adaptation of a Native American recipe. Before cultivated flour they used ground corn and acorn for the dumpling to soak up the sweet and tart blueberries.

Really unfortunate recipe. The dumplings didn’t cook through, the berries boiled over onto the stovetop and the whole mess had a metallic flavor from cooking in the recommended cast iron pan. What a waste of $25 worth of lovely summer berries. And now I have to re-season my skillet.

This looks so good! Adding this to my list to cook before summer is officially over!

My biscuits didn’t cook through, and I’m trying to figure out how to make that happen. I don’t think the recipe specified what heat setting to use while they were cooking. I thought medium might burn the berries, so I used medium low.

Used a shallow, 2.5-qt stainless pan, marionberries filled half when cooked. Continued heating with dumplings on top, which rose along w/berries up to lid, began to stick to & lift lid, berries about to spill over onto the stove. Turned off stove, put pan/no lid in 350º oven, reduced to warm, ate dinner in front of one episode of Slow Horses (45 min), took pan out, still liquidy (used 2 tbsp cornstarch, should have used 3-4 in a 5-qt pan). Will taste good once cool enough. SOP for me;-)