Fishing for a Perfect Peach

Imagine for a moment what it would be like if you could walk into a supermarket--any supermarket--and feel reasonably assured of finding delicious ripe fruit in season. No apricots in September, no cottony tomatoes in December.

Perhaps that’s asking too much. So let’s settle on peaches. Their prime time is right now.

Imagine, if you can, buying in a supermarket a peach that seemingly moments before fell off the tree into your waiting palm. Impossible?

Well, food consultant Jon Rowley started with 11 pallets of just that kind of California peach and this summer surprised the unwitting public of Seattle, if only to prove that the seemingly impossible can happen.

The plan, two years in the making, was ambitious: to move 50 tons of peaches through three supermarkets over several weeks, truly tree-ripened fruit trucked in from two sources: Frog Hollow Farm in Northern California and Pence Farms in Eastern Washington.

It worked. Three weeks into the season sales are way ahead of schedule. One store alone sold 39,000 pounds of Frog Hollow peaches in two weeks and had customers lined up and waiting for the next shipment to arrive. So successful has the experiment been that store management has asked Rowley to turn his attention to two other impossibilities--ripe cantaloupe and ripe tomatoes.

You might call this anarchy in its active state, dripping with peach juice and flying in the face of the stone fruit establishment, those fine folks who bring to market baseball-hard peaches the color of Red Delicious apples.

It’s the Rowley style. In the early 1980s he showed a supermarket in Seattle how to provide its customers with the best imaginable seafood--fresh fish, for God’s sakes, in a city that thrived on the image of terrific seafood but hadn’t seen the like in generations.

Rowley proved it was possible to develop sources among people who understood seafood harvesting and handling and storage and shipping to arrive at market with the optimum experience intact, not some old piece of bewildered-looking fish embarrassed by its own smell. He started working with people who respected the product and got retailers to learn how to respect the product too.

That Rowley’s branched out into peaches may seem something of a stretch at first blush. But the man likes to eat. It’s something of a bottom line. He likes his food, and he has made good food his business. He is, in his own peculiar way, the ultimate boat-rocking food consultant.

The day it dawned on Rowley that you simply couldn’t find a decent peach worth cobbling in a Seattle supermarket or at a roadside stand or at a fruit market, he started paying closer attention. Either the peaches just weren’t there any longer, or they just weren’t making it to market. He had to know which it was.

The answers started coming a good five years back, when Rowley stopped off at a U-Pick peach orchard in Oregon.

“I was on my way to Amity Vineyards for the Pinot Noir festival,” Rowley explains. “I hadn’t had a really good peach since I was a college kid bumming around Europe. I bought that peach in the Genoa train station from an old woman with a basket of fruit. When I spotted this Oregon orchard on a country road, I figured I had found my chance to search out the perfect peach.”

He wandered from tree to tree and experimented with the fruit by holding his palm beneath a likely prospect, then flicking at the stem with his middle finger. If the fruit fell into his palm it was, in fishing terms, a keeper. Otherwise it stayed on the tree.

At first tasting Rowley was transported back to the Genoa quay. The great peaches of Taoist mysticism descended on him, leaving him somewhat addled and feeble-minded, if but for a moment. The juice and flavor and perfume and texture all combined to far exceed in sensual experience the size of the packaging.

These were peaches with heft, with density greater than what seemed possible--an experience, in other words, of all 10 dimensions of hyperspace in one bite. Never mind the mess he made of his face in the orchard. Never mind the juice cupping down his arms and off his elbows. In the face of the ecstatic, what’s a little sticky peach juice?

Rowley filled some boxes with ripe peaches that met his drop test, took them to the wine gathering, laid them out in the grass, stood back and watched all manner of perfectly reasonable adults go nuts. “I knew I was on to something,” he says.

So he began to study the situation. Wherever his travels took him, if it was peach country, he stopped to ask questions. Over a couple of seasons he surrounded himself in his office with boxes of peaches and watched them age, which may sound a bit odd. But among his observations was that the level of sugar (a measurement called brix, taken with a pocket tool called a refractometer) in a peach doesn’t change from the beginning of ripening to rotting. The higher the brix the better the peach--18 brix for that classic sweet peach taste.

More observations:

A peach picked ripe doesn’t dissolve into a puddle of goo over time. It wrinkles up and softens.

When a peach with a high brix count is ripe, the fuzz falls off.

Refrigerated peaches lose a lot of their perfume, so fruit flies pay no attention to them.

A red peach is not necessarily a ripe peach.

“I learned that there are natural ripening chemistries in peaches that result in a much greater impact,” Rowley explains through moistening lips, his train of thought getting the better of him. “I learned that when those gentle and mysterious things can happen inside a peach, you will be rewarded.” He learned never to leave home without his refractometer.

Rowley also learned the obvious. That the system, the commercial fruit machine, was structured on picked-green fruit that could survive washing, defuzzing, waxing, refrigeration and the trip by truck to market, where the fruit would be piled into high mounds for customer delectation or for the suggestion thereof.

It all makes sense if you’re not looking for or expecting the essence of the peach experience. When fruit is picked green, commercial orchardists can simply strip their trees. It’s more efficient that way, and you don’t have to hire the most talented harvest crew in the neighborhood. Also, one good wind would put the truly ripe fruit of a commercial orchard on the ground, which would be, of course, a disaster.

To harvest peaches as they ripen, the pickers have to return to the same trees time and time again until all the fruit has been picked. The individual picker has to decide which individual peach is ready. It takes 10 to 14 days to pick a ripening variety, orchardists plant 30 varieties to stretch from the early through the late season. When to pick: That’s the question.

Both Frog Hollow Farm and Pence Farms hire the same crews every year to pick their fruit, and they both pay top dollar. These harvesters don’t grab the peach like a baseball and drop it into a deep 5-gallon pickle bucket. To do so is to invite brown spots as the fruit softens, a fact Rowley learned when he purposefully picked some peaches this “wrong” way, then watched them “ripen” and soften. As if by magic, brown spots appeared where his fingertips had squeezed when he picked the hard fruit days before.

To tell if a peach with a high brix count is ripe, just look at it. The golden glow of the ripe peach will have so invaded the initial deeper color that the red becomes but tiny islands and atolls on a peach-colored sea. And the peach fuzz has fallen off. To touch this fruit is to bruise this fruit. To squeeze is to sully.

The harvesters at Pence Farms pick peaches into shallow cherry buckets lined with foam padding. They palm the peach from below and flick the stem for release. A flat-bed truck follows them through the orchard and single-layer boxes are assembled on its bed. Individual peaches are slipped into individual compartments. No fruit on top. No fruit below.

“Ideally,” Rowley says, “you’d wrap each peach in tissue like Satsuma oranges. This protects the fruit from molds. And if a mold does start, it keeps it separated, isolated. When you layer peaches, there’s always trouble with molds and brown spotting on the bottom layer. So single layer boxes are a must. You can always see what’s going on.”

This carries through to the market, where the boxes are laid out, not stacked, and customers are encouraged with signage and ongoing demonstrations not to touch or squeeze the fruit.

So the question remains: Is there enough of a market for magnificent peaches out there to make all this jumping through hoops worth the bother? Time will tell on that one. After all, at $1.99 a pound these peaches aren’t cheap.

Which brings up the next question: What’s the value (as opposed to cost) of having the opportunity to taste the true essence of what a peach should be--and of having that opportunity right in your own home?

In Southern California, it is possible to answer that question for yourself because a man who speaks Jon Rowley’s language takes his goods to farmers markets in Santa Monica, Westwood, Encino, Corona del Mar, Laguna Beach, Laguna Niguel and San Clemente. If you look for the “Honey Crisp” sign, beneath it you will find fruit from Art Lange, retired agronomy professor from Reedley, Calif., and fruit grower extraordinaire.

“I like to sell Reginas, a yellow peach, as well as Dabab Cock, a fragile, old-fashioned white peach of high quality. I wait so long to pick my peaches,” Lange explains, “that we lose a lot to the ground. Any old breeze. When they’re getting ready to drop, there’s a final swell on the last couple of days that makes for the best peach taste and quality.”

Lange picks his fruit into individual wax paper cups, boxes them in a single layer and cools them down. Then, as evening approaches, he loads his truck and drives south.

“I like to go where the demand is, and where the competition is less,” he says. Over the next two weeks, that won’t be Seattle.

But there’s a certain pleasure in imagining a meeting of Jon Rowley and Art Lange, their peaches spread out in the grass before them. The casual passerby would see two fools with their arms over each other’s shoulders laughing at a rising full moon the shape and color of a ripe peach.

But then, with one bite of a peach that’s a peach the way it’s meant to be, you might find yourself laughing at the full moon too.

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More Peaches

FOOD TALK: On the KITCHEN TABLE Laurie Ochoa interviews California farmer David Mas Masumoto, author of “Epitaph for a Peach,” about his once-obsolete, now-fashionable Sun Crest peaches and the promising changes in the peach industry. H8

COOKING: There’s more than one way to eat a peach. Shoshana Goldberg describes several juicy ways to enjoy a peach without cooking it.

HARVEST: The Peach year so far? It’s looking good. Russ Parsons talks to farmers and retailers and finds low prices, abundant fruit and, best of all, good quality in the supermarkets.