Compare prices for fresh peaches across Edmonton retailers.
Peaches are climacteric: once picked they keep softening, growing juicier, and turning more fragrant, but they do not gain any sugar after harvest, so a peach is only ever as sweet as it was when it left the tree, and ripening at home improves texture and aroma alone. The single most reliable sign of a well-harvested peach is the background colour — the underlying skin tone beneath any red blush — which shifts from green toward a warm creamy yellow or gold as the fruit matures; pass over any peach with green still in the background, because it was picked too early and will turn leathery rather than lush. To have ripe fruit later in the week, buy firm peaches with a good golden background and leave them stem-end down at room temperature for one to three days, or speed things up in a loosely closed paper bag with a banana or apple, whose ethylene hastens ripening. In Edmonton the peaches most worth ripening this way are the BC Okanagan fruit that arrives in late summer, picked closer to ripe than the firmer long-haul imports sold earlier in the year.
A peach is ready to eat when it is fragrant and gives slightly to gentle pressure cradled in the whole palm rather than pushed with a fingertip, which only bruises it; test along the shoulders near the stem, where ripeness shows first, and trust your nose, since a strong sweet perfume at the stem end is a better guide than appearance. Ignore the red blush as a ripeness cue — it reflects how much sun the fruit caught, not how mature it is. Once a peach is ripe, eat it within a day or two; it can go in the refrigerator to buy a little time, but cold is for ripe fruit only. A firm, underripe peach put in the fridge to "save it" is the classic way to ruin one: stone fruit held in the 2 to 8 °C range — which spans an ordinary refrigerator — develops chilling injury and ripens dry, mealy, and woolly, with browning flesh and little flavour, so let firm peaches finish on the counter first.
A peach is past its window when the gentle give has turned to mush, the skin wrinkles or the flesh leaks, or a sweet smell sours toward fermentation; tan or brown fuzzy patches are brown rot, which spreads quickly between touching fruit, so a spoiled peach should be pulled from the bowl promptly rather than left among the others. Internal browning or a dry, cottony texture in a peach that looked fine on the outside is chilling injury carried over from earlier cold storage rather than fresh spoilage, and it cannot be reversed. Peaches that have only gone slightly soft but remain sound, with no mould or off smell, need not be wasted — they bake, grill, and purée well for sauces and smoothies.
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