I love summer fruit, especially peaches. But if you’ve eaten a locally-grown peach, you know it’s nearly impossible to find a good peach in the grocery store. Utah peaches are now in season, and we’ve been eating them up– fresh and in pies, by themselves and with apples and rhubarb.
Here’s the dilemma: we can only eat so many peaches. But when winter comes, we’ll be wishing we had more.
Here’s the solution: preserve the peaches while they’re ripe. They can be canned, but that’s a lot of work and we don’t bother. Instead, we freeze or dehydrate them.
Peaches are easily frozen: just wash them, pit them, and cut them into slices, sprinkle them with ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), citric acid, or even orange or lemon juice as a preservative. Then gently pack them into a quart freezer bag and pop them in the deep freeze. When the bitter winds of February blow in, you can thaw out a bag, make a peach pie, and think of summer! We froze 6 quarts last night, enough for 6 pies.
Then there’s the food dehyrdator, another way of preserving fruits. Once again, slice the peaches and sprinkle them with ascorbic acide, citric acid, or orange juice. Then arrange them on the tray and dry them. On our dehydrator, it takes about 12 hours. The result: a great tasting snack that’s easy to store, easy to carry, and not messy when you eat it. They keep best in the freezer, but they’ll also store okay in any cool, dark place. That means you won’t lose them if the power goes out and the deep freeze thaws.
The dehydrating doesn’t stop at peaches, either. In the last batch, I dried 6 pounds of peaches, 1-1/2 pounds of locally-grown plums, and a couple of pounds of our nighbors’ apples– not to mention three peach-apple fruit rolls!
