Salted Caramel Peach Crisp

Consider this the summer flip of one of my favorite recipes — the apple butterscotch crisp.

Its story begins, as so many of my headnotes do, with a grievance, which is that fruit crisp recipes often don’t work as well as they should, because the nutty oat and brown sugar toppings often overcook or burn before the fruit underneath them has a chance to cook to bubbly pie-like perfection. Many recipes will tell you to simply cover the dish with foil if the crisp is getting too dark too soon, because who wouldn’t want to press a sheet of highly conductive metal over a hot pan in a 400-degree oven? So appealing! My preferred solution is to give the fruit a little lead time by cooking it first, and I often do this on the stove. But as I was sautéing my fruit with some butter and sugar, I realized I was almost making a caramel sauce. So why not actually make one? Once I did that, I was ruined for other crisps — forever.

In this summer version, we’re making a simple salted butter caramel sauce on the stove, and using it two ways: to parcook the peaches, deeply infusing them with that fragrant caramel, and at the end, as a final decadent drizzle over the top. If you’re picturing treacly sweetness, you’re in for a a wonderful surprise as real caramel has a depth of flavor and fragrance that a crisp sweetened with straight sugar could never.

Ingredients:

• 4 pounds (1.8 kg) fresh firm-ripe, juicy peaches
• Juice of half of a lemon
• 1/4 cup cornstarch or 3 tablespoons tapioca flour/starch
• 1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup (60 ml) water
• 6 tablespoons (85 grams or 3 ounces) salted butter
• 2/3 cup (155 ml) heavy cream
• 1/2 teaspoon flaky salt, plus more to taste

• 12 tablespoons (170 grams or 6 ounces) salted butter, melted
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 6 tablespoons (80 grams) packed dark brown sugar
• 6 tablespoons (75 grams) granulated sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 1/4 cups (125 grams) old-fashioned rolled oats
• 1 cup (110 grams or 4 ounces) chopped pecans
• 1 1/3 cups (170 grams) all-purpose flour
• Vanilla ice cream, to serve (not optional, sorry)