How To Store Peaches Properly

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Fragrant fluffy peaches can delight anyone! They are good not only by themselves, but also able to decorate any dish with their wonderful taste with a bright fruity aftertaste. And thanks to the vitamins and antioxidants they contain, peaches have long ago gained fame as the fruit of longevity - in the East, they are generally considered a divine gift. How can you keep this delightful gift of nature longer?

How Do I Pick Good Peaches?

First of all, when choosing peaches, it is important to try to determine their ripeness. This can be done by feeling and pressing. Good peaches should be velvety and soft enough, yet firm at the same time. And for greater confidence, you can smell these beautiful fruits - they should emit a strong enough sweetish aroma. By the way, large peaches are often harsh and less sweet than their smaller peaches. Therefore, lovers of sweets should first of all pay attention to small fruits and medium-sized peaches. But large fruits are great for freezing and canning!

It is not at all forbidden to acquire slightly unripe fruits - they may well ripen at home (they ripen especially quickly in the company of other fruits). The most important thing is that there are no green spots on the selected fruits - this indicates that the peaches have not reached the minimum ripening threshold.

As for the quality of the purchased peaches, it will not be difficult to determine it by the bones. Loose or shriveled seeds indicate that peaches have been treated with a variety of chemicals for best storage.

Going home from the market with a bag of fragrant peaches, it is important to make sure that the fruits are not crumpled along the way - these delicate fruits do not tolerate transportation very well and begin to deteriorate quickly at the slightest mechanical damage. Ideally, it is better to take a basket, not a bag, for peaches. If, nevertheless, some fruits are damaged, then they must be used first of all - to eat or cook jam or compote from them.

How to store?

In rooms with room temperature, strong ripe peaches can be stored for several days. To increase their shelf life, you can put them in the refrigerator, then they will be stored for about a week longer.

It is strongly not recommended to store peaches in polyethylene bags - inside such packaging the humidity constantly rises, and this is extremely undesirable for delicate fruits. The most ideal packaging option would be paper bags.

As for the temperature regime, peaches are best stored at a temperature of about zero degrees Celsius. At higher temperatures, the aromatic fruit will last less. By the way, the most ordinary cellar is quite suitable for storing them.

To avoid crushing pliable peaches, they should not be stacked on top of each other. And if you need to keep a sufficiently large number of peaches, then it is recommended to either wrap them in paper (each fruit separately), or pack them in special honeycomb trays.

Some summer residents store peaches in the sand - for this, slightly unripe, strong fruits of late varieties are selected in advance. First, they are laid out for three or four days in a well-ventilated dark room - this is done so that excess moisture comes out of the fruits. Then each fruit is wrapped in paper and peaches are placed in a box in layers, alternating each layer of fruit with a layer of dry and clean river sand. As a result, the entire space between the fruits should be filled with sand. The most ideal storage for this method will be low drawers, containing no more than four layers of peaches. If there are more layers, the fruits can easily be crumpled under the pressure of each other.

There is another way to store peaches - using salicylic acid solution. Each fruit is coated with this solution separately. And it will not be difficult to prepare it: 10 g of salicylic acid are taken for one liter of ninety-degree alcohol.