Peach is definitely a classic summer pie and I have tried a few peach pies over the last few months, but none of them quite worked out. The first one, which in retrospect was my favorite, was kind of a jammy pie. I had decided I wanted to try a peach pie in the style of the plum pie I like so much, but it wasn’t quite peach season yet, so I went with frozen peaches. I think they worked really well for this type of pie. But, the bag wasn’t big enough, so I made a berry filling and went with peach blackberry pie. The peach filling was my favorite, but the combination was quite good. You can see it was still a little underfilled even with the berry center. It was a fun, impromptu experiment.
Since it wasn’t exactly what I was going for, I tried again a couple of days later with a bigger bag of frozen peaches. This one wasn’t jammy or very good. I was going for a ginger peach pie and I didn’t dice the ginger small enough and the frozen peaches ended up tasting more like canned peaches, which I didn’t like.
Finally, I made a peach pie a couple of weeks ago for a family gathering. I was going for a more traditional peach pie, but I also decided at the last minute to do peach. When I went to the farmer’s market for peaches, the yellow peaches were all hard as rocks and not very sweet. I ended up using a combination of white peaches and white nectarines because both were ripe and sweet. I ended up doing a White Peach and Nectarine Ginger Pie. It was good, but not great. I think one of the issues is that while the white peaches and white nectarines are sweeter than their yellow friends, they have less complexity, so the filling felt a bit flat to me. As usual, my family didn’t seem to notice.
With Labor Day fast approaching, I’m thinking that I may give it one more try, but instead of a pie, I’ll try a galette. We have a busy weekend and I think a galette may work better with time constraints. Hopefully I will have a success story to share! I hope you have a good Labor Day Weekend, filled with delicious baked goods.