Peach assembly line
Sudden summer temperatures (high in the mid
nineties) made the
peaches I picked on Monday ripen up fast. They turned out to be the most
delectable peaches I've ever eaten, and I spent hours with sticky
juices rolling down my chin. At long last, though, I admitted
that we couldn't consume every one --- time to process the bounty.
Earlier in the week,
I had figured out the best thing to do with peaches that develop a
rotten spot while still too hard to gnaw on. I cut off the
good flesh and cooked it up in water over gentle heat, producing
the most richly-flavored peach sauce ever. It turns out that
those peaches were plenty ripe to eat without additional
sweetening --- it was just the rock-hard flesh that was turning us
away.
With ripe peaches,
though, we prefer the flavor of uncooked fruit, so I made fruit
leather. Previously, I've skinned our peaches during
the preparation stage, but that doesn't seem to be necessary,
although it's (obviously) essential to hack away any rotten bits
and to remove the maggots in the center of two-thirds of our
peaches. (No, chickens
under the trees didn't seem to lower our Oriental fruit moth
pressure this spring. If anything, the tree our chicks
spent the most time under had the most moths.)
Despite ripening our
peaches inside, perhaps 10% of them still came down with brown
rot before they softened, so I experimented with adding the
good parts of these unripe peaches into the leather mix.
Although the result is a little chunkier than when using ripe
peaches, at a ratio of about 20% unripe flesh to 80% ripe flesh,
the resulting leather is even tastier than without. (I
understand this is how people make peach jam too, by including a
certain percent of unripe fruit.)
All of the peaches that were ripe by
Wednesday afternoon filled up the dehydrator to capacity, but more
were ready to go Thursday, and yet more will ripen over the
weekend. I'm carefully managing my peach stores, segregating
each day's pickings in one zone on the table so they're easy to
tell apart from their cohorts, then plucking out fruits that
develop the least sign of rot. Oh, and breathing in the
astonishing scent of a bushel of ripening peaches.
Delectable!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Anna how blessed you are to have so much peach produce. Peaches do not grow well in our area but apples and pears do. Just a little too cold a spring/fall weather I guess. That said I do not envy you having to work in a hot kitchen.
Our raspberries are coming off in droves right now. I will make jam out of some of it but will be canning in the garage ( hot plates)as the heat is unbearable this week.