Ingredient

Peach

A peach ripens after picking, but only up to a point: it will soften, sweeten a little and become aromatic, and it will never gain the sugar it did not have on the tree. Learning to tell the difference between a peach that will come good and one that will merely go soft is most of what there is to know.

What ripening does and does not do

After picking, a peach converts starch to sugar, breaks down pectin so the flesh softens, and generates the volatile compounds that make it smell of peach. All three continue off the tree.

What does not continue is the accumulation of sugar from the leaves, which stops at the moment of picking. A peach harvested too green has a fixed and inadequate sugar content, and it will soften into something bland rather than becoming good.

The tell is smell. A peach that will ripen well already smells faintly of peach at the stem end, even while hard. One that smells of nothing will still smell of nothing in four days.

The distinctions that matter

Freestone

The stone falls away cleanly when the fruit is halved. Mid and late season. What you want for anything where the fruit is halved, grilled, poached or bottled.

Clingstone

The flesh grips the stone and has to be cut away. Early season, usually juicier and more intensely flavoured. Fine for eating over a sink, awkward for cooking.

Yellow flesh

More acidic, more assertive, holds up better to heat. The standard cooking peach.

White flesh

Lower acid, floral, delicate. Best raw; the flavour thins out when cooked.

Flat peaches

Doughnut or Saturn peaches. Usually white-fleshed, very sweet, low acid, and almost always freestone. Excellent raw.

Ripening and peeling

1. Keep hard peaches at room temperature, stem end down, not touching each other.
2. To speed it up, put them in a paper bag. They produce ethylene and the bag holds it around them. A banana in the bag speeds it further.
3. Never refrigerate an unripe peach. Cold below about five degrees causes the flesh to go mealy and it never recovers — this is the main cause of woolly peaches.
4. They are ready when they give to gentle pressure at the shoulder, near the stem, and smell strongly. Once ripe, the fridge is fine for a couple of days.
5. To peel: cut a shallow cross in the base, drop into boiling water for thirty seconds or so, then into cold. The skin slips off. Use this only for ripe fruit — on a hard peach it does not work.

What to do with disappointing ones

Which is most shop peaches, most of the time.

• Grill or griddle them. Halved, cut side down, on a hot dry pan. Heat concentrates what sugar there is and caramelises the surface.
• Roast with a little honey and a bay leaf, twenty minutes, and serve with cream.
• Poach in a light syrup with vanilla or a strip of lemon peel. The classic and the most forgiving.
• Into a chutney with onion, vinegar and warm spice, where the fruit is a texture rather than a flavour.
• Peach jam, which needs added acid — peaches are low in both pectin and acid, so lemon juice and jam sugar are usually required.
• With something salty. Prosciutto, feta, an anchovy dressing. Salt makes an underpowered peach taste sweeter than it is.

Common questions