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This summer has been truly wonderful. Our first summer with the baby, watching her grow, develop and share her personality, her interactions with our extended family and friends have brought us a lot of joy and blessings! 

A lot of you know that I enjoy baking different desserts and my repertoire evolves and usually follows each season. Winter baking brings layers, oozing, coziness and warmth, where in the summer the process dances around different fruit and tends to be lighter. I thought this baby would stop me from baking as much as I usually do, but luckily she hasn’t slowed me down! 

In this blog post I would love to share with you a recipe I love. I tried the summer fruit crostata recipe for the first time when we put together a cooking camp and ran it in my home town of Zolotonosha, Ukraine in July of 2012. By that time, I already moved to Minnesota and continued volunteering with an American Christian non-profit that did a lot of mission work in Ukraine. 

My friend Kristi and I decided to split the week into different country cuisines and one of the days was an Italian day. We put simple cookbooks together, printed them for all the middle and high school students and taught them how to make a lot of delicious recipes.

On that Italian day we focused on spaghetti carbonara, panzanella and apple crostata was my choice for dessert. It looked good, but I had no experience making it. It ended up so delicious that I continued perfecting the recipe, and testing out different fillings for it.

So it was peach crostata, plum crostata, apple crostata and berry crostata and my advice for you to decide for yourself what fruit is your family’s favorite and go with that. I keep my pastry recipe the same every time, it is really tasty and one recipe makes 2 full crostatas, one ball of dough could stay in the fridge and wait for when you are ready to roll it out and conquer again. 

Let’s start: 

Here is what you will need to make this unforgettable Summer Fruit Crostata!  

Ingredients:

For pastry: 

2 cups unbleached flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 sticks cold unsalted butter, diced
6 tablespoons (3 ounces) ice water 

For the filling:

1 pound firm ripe plums 
1/2 pint fresh blueberries
(1 pound of peaches if making peach crostata instead)

1 tablespoon flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon grated orange zest
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice (to coat fruit) 

For crumbly mixture:

4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) cold unsalted butter, diced
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup granulated sugar

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F and line your baking sheet with parchment paper.

Directions to make dough for your summer fruit crostata:

Sift your flour, add sugar, and salt in the bowl and mix well. After adding diced butter you can either mix it in with a fork or use food processor fitted with a steel blade. Pulse carefully to combine or until the butter is fully coated with flour and is the size of peas. Add the ice water all at once at the end.

Stop mixing once your dough comes together. Remove the dough from the mixing bowl and place it on the well-floured surface. Roll it into a bigger ball, cut in half, and form into 2 balls, flatten them into disks, wrap each one in plastic and refrigerate for an 1 hour. 

You will only need one of your discs to make you summer fruit crostata, so the second one could stay in the fridge. 

Flour the surface well, unwrap your disk and roll it with a rolling pin. Now your crust is ready.  

Let’s move to the filling part of your plum crostata.

Cut your plums ( or peaches if you are making a peach crostata) in wedges and mix them with blueberries.

Mix together: 

• 1 tablespoon flour
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon grated orange zest
• 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice

And then coat your choice of fruit before laying it out on the dough.

Once plums and blueberries are placed in the middle of your crostata and you left 1 1/2 inch to the border, you need to  prepare your crumble mixture. 

Combine and mix well: 

• 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) cold unsalted butter, diced
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar

Sprinkle over your fruit and carefully fold the border of pastry over fruit. 

Bake for 20-25 minutes at 450 F. In my experience, 20 minutes is usually enough. 

Once your remove your crostata from the oven, try to quickly put it on a plate while it’s hot and flexible. This will prevent you from breaking it in the process. 

Your delicious summer fruit crostata is ready. I love serving it warm. And I have noticed that when I bring it to people’s homes they pull ice-cream from the fridge and add it on a side.