Poaching Peaches

The amount of times I look at a pack of peaches, they can look so attractive with dark peachy colour, fooling you into a sense of ripeness and of course they’re not.  If you’re lucky enough and they ripen at home they still won’t have the natural sugar they should have if they were tree ripen.  So what do you do when you get a packet of lemons disguised as peaches?  You poach them, that’s what.

I have great respect for the chef Raymond Blanc and have been lucky enough to eat in his Oxfordshire restaurant a few times, and ok a little smitten when I met him, he’s incredibly charming…in a French accent kind of way.  In one of his books he has a recipe for poaching peaches in white wine, sugar, vanilla, orange slices and lemon slices.  I’ve followed this recipe twice a few years ago and came to the conclusion that adding the lemon slices gave the syrup too much bitterness and it didn’t result in the sweetness I wanted in a poached peach.  I use a very simple vanilla syrup to bring out as much of the peach taste as possible.  One of the wonderful things about the resulting syrup is the tinge of pink it takes on.

Follow the instructions as for the poached pears, adding a vanilla bean if you have one.  You can make up some of the liquid out of white wine, or just use water.  You can make the syrup one part of sugar to one part water, this gives a very sweet syrup.  Or a less sweeter syrup of one part sugar to two parts waters.