Freezing Peaches

After I posted about my $10 box of peaches and mentioned I was freezing some of them, many of you wrote to ask how I do that. I’ve been trying to keep up with responding to your emails, but then I thought it might just make more sense to post about it!

I don’t do anything earth-shattering…I just quarter and peel the peaches, and then lay them on a greased baking sheet. Then I put the sheet into the freezer and leave it there until the peaches are totally frozen.

If the sheet is greased, the peaches should come off pretty easily.

If they don’t, my super-duper fancy method involves sort of gently dropping the pan right side up onto the floor to shake them loose (my concrete laundry room floor is so good for this! 😉 ).

Or if you are more patient than I am, you can just wait a few minutes for the peaches to thaw a bit.

I put the frozen peaches into bags and put them back into the freezer.

(I usually freeze things like this in reused bags…this one is a heavy-duty plastic bag that used to hold rolls from a warehouse club. They were left over from a church event, and I brought them home so as not to waste the rolls, and then I saved the bag.)

Frozen peaches, like most frozen fruit, aren’t very good to eat raw once they’re totally thawed (Hello, Mushville.) But they’re perfect for throwing into smoothies.

The main reason I freeze them, though, is so that I can stir them into bowls of oatmeal, with a little cream and brown sugar. The hot oatmeal thaws them just enough to leave them with a pleasant texture, and it’s a little taste of summer heaven at a time of year when juicy peaches are a distant memory.

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P.S. I also think that frozen peaches would work pretty well in a peach pie or peach cobbler, but I’m not basing that on experience. I’m usually too busy eating mine in oatmeal to stop and bake a cobbler.