How To: Freeze Fresh Peaches

My dear DH acquired a bushel of beautiful local peaches for me late last week. I gave half to another baker-friend at work, but I still had 25 peaches to deal with!

After peach ice cream Friday night, peach milkshakes Saturday, and a peach cobbler on Sunday, I knew I had to find some way to store the remainder of my peaches before they went bad.

As I’m still in a teeny apartment, canning was out. No place to store it.

But I could freeze them!

I did some research on the proper way to freeze peaches, because I wanted to make sure they’d be useful in more than just smoothies when I defrosted them.

I came across a fabulous set of directions here — and decided that if I didn’t know the proper way to freeze peaches, other people probably didn’t either — so here ya go!

Freezing Peaches *

*This process is also recommended for plums, cherries, or nectarines

Step 1: Select Your Fruit

– Fruit should be sweet, and ripe, but not overly-ripe and mushy

Step 2: How Many Peaches?

– It takes 5-6 good-sized peaches (or 10 plums) to produce 1 quart of frozen fruit

Step 3: Prepare the Sugar (or other sweetener) Solution

– You can store your peaches in simple syrup, peach, white grape, or apple juice — your choice!

– This sugar-y solution/fruit juice is added to help improve flavor and keep the fruit from turning nasty shades of brown while frozen

– This handy table came from the http://www.pickyourown.org website. It’s handy if you’re making a simple syrup to use for this process. 

– Choose your level of sweetness by how sweet your fruit is.

– To make the syrup: Heat the water on the stove, and slowly stir in the sugar/Splenda, until completely dissolved. Remove from heat, and let the syrup cool completely before adding to the peaches.

– You’ll need about 1 cup of simple syrup per quart of peaches

Type of Syrup	Sugar	Water	Yield
Fruit juice (peach, apple or white grape)	0	0	4 cups
Splenda (2 cups)	0	6 cups	6 cups
Light sugar	2 cups	6 cups	7 cups
Medium sugar	3 cups	6 cups	6 1/2 cups
Heavy sugar	4 cups	6 cups	7 cups

Step 4: Wash the Peaches

– Seriously…you can handle this step on your own.

Step 5: Peeling the Peaches

– Don’t do this by hand — it’s a pain!

– Bring to a boil a large pot of water, add the washed peaches for 20-45 seconds. Then remove with a slotted spoon and immediately place in an ice water bath for several minutes.

– When you remove the peaches from their ice water bath, the skins will be easy to peel off.

Step 6: Cut Up the Peaches

– Remove the pits and slice the peaches however you prefer — slices, quarters, whatever

– Be sure to remove any brown or mushy spots

Step 7: Prevent the Fruit From Darkening

– You can use 1/4 cup lemon juice, or Fruit-Fresh to help preserve the peaches color

– Add your lemon juice or fruit fresh, and gently mix with your hands to make sure all your peaches are covered

Step 8: Mix the Peaches with the Sweetener Solution

– In a large bowl, mix your sliced peaches, and 1 cup of the completely-cooled simple syrup (or fruit juice) 

– Fill Ziploc bags (use the freezer style!) or Tupperware containers with peaches and simple syrup (Quart ziploc’s work perfectly, but all I had was Gallon!)

Step 9: Freeze

– Place containers of peaches in the freezer to harden up. 

To Use:

– Set them in the fridge overnight, or on the counter for a couple of hours to thaw.