It’s been the summer of peaches. If you’ve picked up a food magazine anytime in the past three months, you’ve surely seen them all: the white ones, the flat ones, the clingstones and freestones, peaches in salads, salsas, cocktails… It was a stellar year for peaches here. Climate change has had its way with our peach crop in the past couple of years, producing fruit with mealy flesh and stingey flavour. We hadn’t had that iconic peach-juice-to-your-elbows experience for a really long time. But this year was a glorious peach year from Georgia to Niagara in the East, and we discovered a place along the West coast where perfect peaches are born. It’s called Peachland.

Peachland is an area of the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada, just north of a place called Summerland. It’s funny to see these names on a Google map, but it all makes perfect sense once you’re on the ground. The whole region is studded with roadside farm stands where you can wander back into an orchard and eat warm fruit right off the tree. Hard to imagine an experience more emblematic of nature’s ridiculous perfection.

Conversely, there are few things more disappointing than a bad peach. There are two main issues: like avocados, peaches can be under-ripe for days on end, and then suddenly turn to rotten mush. They have a narrow window of opportunity. Second, mealy-ness. (Yuck.) This is a function of temperature; peaches that travel long distances need to be refrigerated to prevent them from ‘peaking’ too soon. The temperature ups and downs they undergo in transport damage the structure of the fruit’s flesh, and well, you’ve tasted the result. Your best strategy against this is buying local.

Hard to imagine
an experience more
emblematic of nature’s
ridiculous perfection.

To judge the ripeness of a peach, consider the depth of its background yellowness rather than its alluring red cast. Redness was once a sign of ripeness, but peaches are now bred to be red even when unripe. Look also for a slight wrinkle in the skin around the stem. Like greying hair at the temples, it’s a sign of optimal maturity.

The Okanagan Valley is dotted with hundreds of wineries, and one of them (called Tinhorn Creek Vineyards, a stone’s throw from Peachland) makes an incredible pizza of peach, corn, pancetta, and chanterelle mushrooms. As soon as it landed on our table, we knew we would be making it at home, and sharing it on the blog. We’ve done the peach Caprese salad, the peach salsa, the Bellinis, and even the roasted peach salad with buttermilk and bacon. But this pizza was the dish that most perfectly captured for us the lush, meaty, sun-roasted character of the perfect late-summer peach.