Fresh Picks: Peaches 101
Welcome to Fresh Picks, where we celebrate the seasonal ingredients we can't stop cooking. This month we're getting warm and fuzzy with one of summer's best fruits: peaches.
Few fruits capture the height of summer quite like a ripe peach. Floral, dripping with juice and soft enough to yield under a thumb, peaches move easily from sweet to savoury, turning up in everything from herb-laced salads to jammy puddings.
Prunus persica are believed to have been cultivated in China thousands of years ago, long before they travelled west along trade routes to Persia and then on to Europe.
Botanically speaking, peaches are drupes: fruits with a single hard stone at the centre of soft flesh. (Nectarines are just peaches without the five o'clock shadow.) It's a broad, overachieving category that takes in olives, walnuts and even almonds, which explains why peaches sit so happily with nutty, floral and savoury flavours.
Beyond that, they shine alongside tomatoes, fennel and sweetcorn. When pairing peaches, use a bit of seasonal common sense. What grows together tends to taste good together. A little acid and salt sharpen their appeal further, which is why peaches are just as convincing next to burrata or barbecued pork as they are under a blanket of whipped cream.
How to Buy & Store Peaches
For fruit that comes cleanly away from the stone, look for freestone peaches. Clingstone varieties, as the name suggests, hold fast to the flesh, which makes them better suited to cooking or preserving than casual slicing over the sink. If you're putting them on the barbecue, choose peaches that are ripe but still firm. The surface takes on char and the middle keeps enough structure to avoid collapse.
To ripen, put peaches in a closed brown paper bag at room temperature until the flesh gives under gentle pressure. Once ripe, store them in a single layer on a plate or baking tray lined with kitchen paper in the fridge for five to seven days. Cold dulls their flavour, so let them sit out for a bit before eating if you can.
Ways to Cook with Peaches
Here are four recipes that make the most of this spectacular summer star.
1. Pork Chops with Peach and Fennel Salad
Yes, peaches are sublime in a pie or eaten standing over the sink. They're just as good at the dinner table. Here they mingle with crisp fennel in a mint-flecked salad that balances juicy sweetness with sharp, herbal freshness. Fennel seeds and crushed peppercorns on the pork echo the salad's cool aniseed notes while giving the chops a deeply savoury crust. It makes a striking main, though the salad holds its own alongside almost any summer spread.
2. Summer Peach Crumble
Show off ripe peach wedges in a simple crumble baked straight in the pan. Marinate the fruit in soft brown sugar and lemon juice, then top it with a quick batter that bakes up with crisp, golden edges. Baking it in a pan encourages deeply caramelised edges and keeps the fruit bubbling and jammy underneath. Worth keeping to hand for whatever fruit is in season, though peaches are especially suited to it. Serve with vanilla ice cream, obviously.
3. Tomato, Peach and Burrata Salad With Chilli-Lime Vinaigrette
Little did you know the classic caprese was due an upgrade, courtesy of stone fruit. Peaches join tomatoes and burrata – mozzarella's creamy cousin – in an easy starter or side dish, ready for garden barbecues, summer dinner parties or any time you fancy giving peaches a savoury twist. Save the chilli-lime dressing for future salads, because the combination of fish sauce, lime juice and sugar is beyond brilliant. P.S. Any ripe tomatoes will do, but heritage tomatoes have the flavour to hold their own against everything else in the bowl.
4. Grilled Summer Peaches
Heat coaxes out the natural almond and vanilla notes in peaches, while a bit of char pushes them towards proper caramelisation. Sear the halved peaches in your Hybrid BBQ Grill Pan, then pair them with vanilla gelato, crumbled ice cream cones, basil leaves and a glossy rosé syrup that ties it all together with floral sweetness and bright acidity. Warm fruit, cold gelato and crisp shards of cone: equal parts dinner party pudding and shameless summer showing off.
At their best, peaches manage to be both delicate and excessive. (Which may explain why peach season persuades otherwise sensible people to buy them by the crate.) Here's to all the good ways to cook them.
