Putting Up Peaches! Freezing.

 

For the past several years, I have bought fresh peaches from a Mennonite friend I know who travels with a truck and trailer to peach orchards in several states and sells peaches from his home in Crockett, Kentucky, in the Mennonite community in which I have so many friends and connections.  We freeze the peaches and use them during the winters for cobblers which are wonderful in cold weather.  We have also begun in the last year to fry peaches just as you would fried apples and they are also a great addition to a country breakfast and a nice flavor break from always eating apples.  Due to both the loss of quite a bit of food value and the extra labor involved, this year we decided to try freezing one half bushel box of peaches with the skins on instead of peeling them.  As a test, we made one cobbler with the first box of peaches we bought a few weeks ago without peeling them and it worked quite well.  I have always eaten fresh peaches skin and all and the idea of eating the skin has absolutely no negative connotations for me.   So yesterday, July 31, 2021, we decided to freeze our second half bushel of peaches with the skin intact.  The amount of waste, especially without hogs or chickens to eat the peelings, is incredibly smaller.  Where we usually have gotten seven bags of peaches, minus the few we eat, cook into a fresh cobbler, and a few to give to an elderly neighbor.  Without peeling the peaches, we got the same amount of eating, fresh cobbler peaches, and give away peaches, but had nine bags for the freezer.  That math makes a lot of sense.  I have to admit that we did not do any research about freezing peaches with the skin on before we attempted this which is not usually our first action.  This morning, after having already frozen the peaches, I have read a few articles on the internet from people who have regularly frozen them with the skin on and they all agree that they like it that way.  But one person said that peaches frozen with the skin on will shed the skin when they are thawed.  We will have to see how that turns out in a month or so when we eat our first bag of frozen peaches.  My niece in Kendallville, Indiana, who has frozen, dried, canned, and preserved food for many years in any way possible says that she uses a hot water bath with peaches to cause them to shed the skins before she freezes them.  We considered doing it that way but decided the extra labor with the hot water made it more attractive to just remove the pits, slice them, and freeze them.  Plus, there were two jobs when I was growing up which I hated with a passion and they were helping can beets and tomatoes because my mother used the hot water bath method to get the skins off the beets and tomatoes and that hot water in a three bushel tub was something that I never came to accept willingly.  I just did not want to repeat the experience with peaches.  

I can't wait until that first fall morning when we have fried peaches as a part of our breakfast.