Make the Most of Peach Season

Peaches and nectarines just might be the most luscious of all fruits. Here’s some inspiration for how to make the most of (and stretch) the season.

July 10, 2020 | By Leah Sikora Moore

Peaches, oh peaches! Juicy, fragrant, sweet, bursting with flavor and summer memories—I can’t think about them without wanting to write poetry or burst into song. And, at last! Peach season is upon us. Whether you’re into canning and food pres, or just like to take advantage of a good thing while it lasts (or both), here are some peach recipes, tips, and ideas to try this summer. We recently tried several of the suggested preparations below in an epic, multi-course peach feast at home. 

Preparing fresh peaches

How to cut a peach
I’m a person who likes to bite right into a peach like an apple, but I inevitably end up with sticky hands, sticky chin, sticky peach juice on the floor. If you can contain your excitement, slicing is probably a better idea. And you’ll need a good foundation of slicing skills to prepare most of the recipes below anyway. I like this simple guide from Delish.com. If you prefer them without the fuzzy skin, here’s a nice video tutorial from Southern Living Magazine. 

Enjoy a summer peach salad
Yes, the salad recipe we posted last month was technically designed for berries, but we think peaches work just as well, especially sliced or cubed. In fact, that’s just what we did for one of the courses in our peach feast, but with grilled peaches (more on that below) rather than fresh. It’s super simple with just five ingredients: greens/lettuce, nuts/seeds, cheese, vinaigrette, and fruit. We used our red leaf lettuce as the base and sliced up some salad turnips for added crunch. Find the recipe on our blog.

Oysters with peach mignonette
If you’re like me and obsessed with oysters (which let’s be honest, most people aren’t), then you’ll understand that a good mignonette recipe is gold. But even if you’re not “obsessed” and just like to eat oysters, this mignonette recipe is for you, too! When tasting a new oyster variety for the first time, I like to eat a few of them “naked”—raw and freshly shucked without any topping—but after the initial tasting, I love to dress them up. A delicious mignonette can really enhance the experience of eating fresh, raw oysters on the half shell. Which is exactly what this peach, ginger, and mint mignonette from In A Half Shell did for the Disco Hama, Hammersly, and Summerstone oysters I got from Hama Hama.

Peaches ‘n cream, anyone?

The combo is famous for a reason! Peaches are sublime paired with almost anything creamy—yogurt, ice cream, rice pudding, you name it! The dairy-free alternatives to these products work great as well. (Can you imagine peaches with coconut cream? Yum! My mouth is watering.) We heaped them on some vanilla bean ice cream and added a drizzle of thyme-infused simple syrup over the top.

Shake (or stir) things up with a peach cocktail
When you Google peach cocktail recipes, be sure to type (and look for) the word “fresh” or you’ll end up with peach-flavored or peach preserve cocktails (which is fine, I suppose, if you don’t have farm-to-you ME & Moore peaches available). We tried a couple of different drinks (on different days, we don’t get too crazy): a Peach Rum Sunrise with our homemade black currant grenadine and a Peachy Delight Cider Bellini. The recipes are below:

Peach Rum Sunrise

Ingredients:

• 3 parts (or 1 ½ oz) Rum

• 1 part (or ½ oz) Shochu (Or a liqueur of your choice. The purpose of this is to cut the thickness of the peach juice a bit, so what you use is really up to you and your taste preferences.)

• 6 parts (or 3 oz) fresh-squeezed peach juice

• 1 part (or ½ oz) grenadine (We made our black currant grenadine with two parts currants, one part water, and one part sugar.)

Instructions:

• Shake the rum, shochu (or other liqueur), and peach juice in a cocktail shaker.

• Strain into a glass with ice. 

• Float the grenadine over the back of a spoon or drip it down the sides of the glass.

• Garnish with an herb sprig (we used lemon balm) or a citrus wheel.

Peachy Delight Cider Bellini

This one’s easy! It’s just cider or perry and fresh peach puree. We followed this bellini recipe from Cookie+Kate and tested it with Verdure Cucumber & Herb Cider as well as Arising Perry —both were delicious! If you follow that recipe and use our smaller bottles of cider or perry, you may only need 2-3 peaches since they aren’t as large as the typical prosecco bottle.

Cooking and grilling peaches

I don’t know what magic occurs when you hit peaches with some heat, but it is just that: magic. Grill them with just a touch of olive oil, pair them with some citrus or herbs for a glaze or marinade, dice them into some wild rice (we recommend the locally-grown rice from Oregon Wild Rice that we sell at our farm stand), or bake them into your favorite dessert. The recipes we used for our peach feast are below, as well as a curated list of some we have bookmarked to try in the future.

Grilled peaches
We followed this simple guide from Kitchn and topped our salad with them. The combination of the warm peaches with the other ingredients, particularly the goat cheese and mild, tender red lettuce was divine. 

Shrimp in peach lime sauce topped with peach-cucumber salsa

For the sauce
For this dish, I mostly improvised. I actually diverted some of the peach puree (maybe one peach worth) that I made for the bellinis to this sauce and added a tablespoon of lime juice, three garlic cloves, and salt and a drizzle of honey to taste. 

Cooking the shrimp
Your best bet here is to Google a recipe for cooking shrimp as everyone has their own preferred method, including us! Though ours is pretty intuitive and hard to translate into a traditional recipe. Basically we just saute them with some oil and add the sauce toward the end. Once they’ve finished cooking in the sauce, we remove the shrimp and cook the sauce down just a little longer. 

For the salsa
I chopped up an equal amount of peaches and cucumbers, half a small onion, and some cilantro and salt to taste. You could take it up a notch with some jalapeño or another hot pepper if you’re feeling spicy. Once the shrimp were plated in the sauce, we just topped it with the salsa.

Here are some other recipes that look awesome and we’re going to try

Peaches & Cream Fruit Leather
Rosemary-Roasted Peaches with Salted Caramel Sauce
Grilled Chicken Breasts with Spicy Peach Glaze
Fresh Ricotta and Peach Pizza with Honey Drizzle

Preserving peaches

Do your future self a favor and preserve some peaches for the next time you find yourself yearning for summer on a cold, dark winter’s day. There are so many ways to bottle up (metaphorically and literally) the sunshiney goodness of in-season peaches: freezing, drying, or canning as slices, jam, syrup, relish, salsa, and many more than I can think of, I’m sure! When processing a large amount of peaches, you’ll have an easier time if you get a freestone variety rather than a clingstone or semi-clingstone. This designation refers to the pit and how easily it can be removed from the flesh. We have all three kinds of pits among our varieties, so be sure to ask us if this is an important factor for you.

We haven’t done too much preservation ourselves (maybe this year?), so I can’t speak from experience, but we definitely plan to try the two recipes below, at least. Not much of a home preserver, yourself? Well, you can always stock up on our Lumina Peach Cider when it becomes available later this season. Sign up for our newsletter to receive product updates.

Freezing fresh peaches: We love these in smoothies or to cook down with sugar into some freezer jam. We like to make it as we need it rather than can. 

Lacto-fermented peach salsa: Our resident fermentation nerd, Brian, can’t wait to try this one. 

How are the peaches at ME & Moore this year?

Some varieties of our peaches are doing great, others are a little less plentiful than usual. You can find a full list of the varieties we grow on our Fruits & Vegetables page. The first variety that we have is a clingstone yellow peach called Candor, which we hope will last about a week or so. Then there will be a lull until the next variety, Red Haven, comes on toward the end of July. We’ll send updates as we have them to subscribers on our email newsletter list or you’re welcome to call us to check in at 541-741-4790.