Thank you all! Due to this being a last minute problem, I went the sauce route and poured it over ice cream. This is a dessert I've made dozens of times and I have to think it was one of those flukes where the weather, ingredients and kitchen elves lined up to turn this crisp into soup. Oh well, it tasted nice anyway...
These are really good answers-- I actually like my topping crunchy and my bottom soupy, so this might be fine by me. Some tricks I use for avoiding way too liquidy: serve crumble 4-6+ hours after it comes out of oven, don't "macerate" fruit more than 5min before getting pan in oven, use less sugar, toss fruit with a little flour or cornstarch.
You may also try cooking fruit a little first, draining fruit of liquid, reducing fruit liquid until super thick, add back to fruit and don't leave crumble in oven as long. Mostly we're baking crumble because the topping needs to cook, but fruit is delicious raw, so the balance/proportion of top & bottom can change to accommodate various baking times.
Also try baking your crumble in a shallower baking vessel. This helps with the above suggestion and faster evaporation, as Quinciferous suggests.
In my family we have a very tried and true cranberry-apple crisp that we make at least twice a year. A few years ago, when someone else baked it, it was as you described: wet and runny. Later we realized it had been baked covered with foil, which hadn't allowed enough of the juices to evaporate during baking.
You might be able to cook your crumble down further to make it less wet -- even if the crumb topping is well browned, you could tent it with foil to prevent further browning, but make sure that there's ample room for steam to escape on the sides, and bake it longer.
Alternatively, the next time you make it, if you have very wet fruits (berries, for instance) you can toss them with a very small amount of cornstarch to help it all set.
As long as the crumb is baked, I'd agree with boulangere: serve over ice cream or greek yogurt. There's nothing to my knowledge that you could do to thicken the sauce from the fruit at this point. Though you could drain some of it if it bothers you a lot.
5 Comments
You may also try cooking fruit a little first, draining fruit of liquid, reducing fruit liquid until super thick, add back to fruit and don't leave crumble in oven as long. Mostly we're baking crumble because the topping needs to cook, but fruit is delicious raw, so the balance/proportion of top & bottom can change to accommodate various baking times.
Also try baking your crumble in a shallower baking vessel. This helps with the above suggestion and faster evaporation, as Quinciferous suggests.
You might be able to cook your crumble down further to make it less wet -- even if the crumb topping is well browned, you could tent it with foil to prevent further browning, but make sure that there's ample room for steam to escape on the sides, and bake it longer.
Alternatively, the next time you make it, if you have very wet fruits (berries, for instance) you can toss them with a very small amount of cornstarch to help it all set.