Half a bushel of peaches weighs about 25 pounds and makes a closed van smell like a candle store. We came home from our week in Tyler with ours on the floor behind my seat, bought from a roadside stand outside town for $32, and Rosie announced "peach" every time she woke up for the whole hour and a half.
Twenty-five pounds of ripe fruit and a family of five is a race. I didn't want to spend a weekend at the sink, and it turns out I didn't have to.
Sorting before anything else
The first job, the night we got home, was sorting, because peaches in a half bushel don't ripen together. I lined the island with dish towels and made three groups:
- Ripe now: soft at the stem end and smelling like peach. About a third of what was left.
- Almost: a little give, a little blush. These went into two brown H-E-B paper bags, folded shut, on the counter.
- Bruised or split: cut up that night and eaten over oatmeal and yogurt the next morning.
For two days we ate peaches at every meal and sent a bag across the street to the Nguyens. By Thursday the paper bags had done their work and nearly everything was ripe at once. That's the day you freeze. My work hours are light in July, so I did it Thursday afternoon, and it took about three hours from the first pot of water to the last labeled bag.
Setting up the station
If the station is right, the work is easy. That's the one thing a catering kitchen drills into you. Mine went left to right:
- The big stockpot on the back burner, two-thirds full of water at a rolling boil.
- The left side of the sink full of ice water.
- A cutting board, a paring knife and a bowl for pits and skins.
- A big bowl of cold water with 1/4 cup of bottled lemon juice stirred in.
- Four half-sheet pans lined with parchment.
Then it's a rhythm. Cut a shallow X in the bottom of six peaches, lower them into the boiling water for about 45 seconds, then move them to the ice water. The skins slip right off under your thumb. These were freestones, so a cut around the middle and a twist popped the pits right out. Slice each half into four wedges, give the wedges a minute in the lemon water, and lay them on a sheet pan in a single layer, not touching.
Wyatt ran skins and pits. Eli was in charge of "testing," which meant eating every fourth slice. Rosie stood on the learning tower with her own bowl and narrated. The pits went straight to the outdoor trash, because Biscuit was paying very close attention, and a peach pit is not something I want a dog to get hold of.
My confession: I tried skipping the blanching on the first dozen and using a vegetable peeler instead, thinking it would be faster. It wasn't. Ripe peaches turn to mush under a peeler, and I lost about a quarter of each one to the bowl. Forty-five seconds in boiling water is faster, even counting the time it takes the pot to boil.
The sugar question
Most instructions for freezing peaches call for a sugar or syrup pack, and the extension service guides explain why: sugar helps slices hold their color and texture in the freezer. I split the difference. About two-thirds of the slices went in plain, with nothing but the lemon water, because those are for smoothies, oatmeal and Rosie, who eats them frozen like candy. The other third I tossed with sugar, about 1/2 cup for every 6 cups of slices, for cobblers and baking, where I'd be adding sugar anyway. For the details on packs and storage times, the extension guides are the place to look, not my kitchen.
The sheet pans went into the chest freezer for about three hours. Once the slices were frozen hard, I bagged them: the plain ones in quart zip bags, the sugared ones vacuum sealed, which works perfectly on fruit that's already frozen solid and can't get crushed.
What half a bushel turns into
After the eating, the sharing and the testing, I froze about 17 pounds of whole peaches, which came out to roughly 12 pounds of slices: nine quart bags of plain and five sealed bags of sugared, each labeled with painter's tape and a marker. Where they're headed:
- Smoothie packs for August afternoons
- Peach oatmeal on school mornings
- Peach pancakes on the griddle
- A cobbler for Labor Day, if I can keep Wyatt out of the sugared bags
- Popsicles blended with yogurt
The money is honest but not dramatic. The 17 pounds I froze were about $21.76 of the $32, plus roughly $4 in lemon juice, sugar and bags, so a little over $2 a pound for frozen slices. A pound bag of frozen peaches at Aldi runs a little under $3. Across a year, I'll save maybe $10. The real difference shows up in January, when I open a bag and the kitchen smells like that van.
