Salad Smackdown: Nectarine and Cherry Salad

Ginger Rapport's newsletters for the Beaverton Farmers Market are worth getting for the information and recipes she shares (click here to subscribe). Her deep knowledge of produce shines through, helped by her passion for cooking and education. Here she talks about the luscious Northwest peaches and nectarines tumbling into midsummer markets.

What is the difference between a peach and a nectarine? They are genetically almost the same with the exception of one gene, the one that determines if it will have a fuzzy or smooth skin. A nectarine is basically a bald peach. They may be used interchangeably in recipes but as far as fresh eating goes, people can have strong opinions about which is best. Many people prefer nectarines because they don’t like the fuzz on a peach. It is more of a textural thing than it is about taste. However, nectarines tend to be firmer, sweeter and more aromatic than their fuzzy cousins.

To peel or not to peel?

Both peaches and nectarines come in “freestone” varieties, which means that the fruit separates easily from the pit and “clingstone” varieties where the flesh clings tightly to the pit. Freestones are better for freezing while clingstones are better for canning.

If you are making a recipe that calls for removing the skin of a peach or nectarine, we recommend the following method:

With a paring knife, make a small "X" in the skin on the bottom of the fruit. Then drop it into a large pot of boiling water for 10-20 seconds. You may do multiple fruits at a time as long as you are able to get them all out of the boiling water within a few seconds of one another. You want to loosen the skin, not cook the fruit.

Roasted nectarines, anyone?

Immediately place fruit in a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking. Starting at the X on the bottom, lift the skin away from the fruit. It should peel easily if your fruit is ripe. If your fruit is under-ripe, peeling will be more difficult and may require a paring knife. (This is also how you peel tomatoes.)

Peach and nectarine season has a very small window where it overlaps with cherry season. One of our favorite—and totally easy—recipes that features both is this nectarine and cherry salad with roasted hazelnuts featuring Baird Family Orchards nectarines, Kiyokawa Family Orchards Bing cherries, and Ken and June's dry roasted hazelnuts.

Nectarine and Cherry Salad with Roasted Hazelnuts

1 1/2 lbs. nectarines (yellow or white) sliced
1 1/2 c. Bing cherries, pitted and halved
1/2 c. roasted hazelnuts, roughly chopped

Combine all ingredients (reserving some chopped nuts) in a bowl and toss. Garnish with remaining hazelnuts.

Click here to get more fabulous peach (or nectarine) recipes for desserts, jams, salads and even cocktails! The Beaverton Farmers Market is an advertiser and supporter of Good Stuff NW.

In Season NW: Cherry, Corn & Poblano Salsa

Ripe, round, luscious Northwest cherries. An ear of sweet corn. A melon at the peak of ripeness. Add a little heat from a roasted chile and the zing from citrus, and you've got one of the great bites of summer.

My friend Michel put these brilliant ingredients together a few years ago, and it's become one of our go-to summer salsas with backyard grilled salmon. It just so happened that I stopped by Providore on Sandy, and Lyf Gildersleeve of Flying Fish was featuring bright orange Kenai salmon filets. Then I noticed Josh Alsberg of Rubinette Produce had just brought in some juicy dark cherries from Baird Orchards, so dinner was basically planned for me.

I might just have to stop by the farmers' market this weekend and get the makings for another batch!

Cherry, Corn and Poblano Salsa

1 c. corn kernels (about 1 ear)
1 pt. cherries, pitted and halved
1 mango, melon or ripe pear, cut in small dice
1 roasted poblano or ancho chile, chopped
1 serrano chile, seeded and chopped
2 green onions, chopped
Juice of 1 lime
2 Tbsp. chopped cilantro
Salt to taste

Combine ingredients and serve. Amounts and ingredients can be varied depending on what you have on hand.

For more super summer recipes, check out my recipe for Pulled Pork with Cherries and Apricots or this Grilled Corn Salad with Cherry Tomatoes.

Farm Bulletin: Life's A Bowl of…Sour Cherries? Pt. 1

Fruit season is in full swing in the Northwest, and contributor Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm takes the opportunity to elucidate the matter of cherries. In Part Two he takes on the much-maligned prune.

Sour Cherries

Among these cherries, there are varieties with dark juice, generally classified as Morellos, and varieties with clear juice, classified as Amarelles. We grow the Amarelle called Montmorency. Equally satisfying, but a distinct flavor from the dark-juiced Hungarians. In our preserves, we also include about 15% English Morello with its pleasing bitterness, along with Montmorency and the Hungarians.

The Amarelle cherries are particularly popular in France and England, as well as the United States. The Traverse City area in Michigan and Oregon's Willamette Valley are the two important American tart cherry regions. It is commonly asserted that Montmorency cherries are too sour to eat out hand. That is largely a matter of growers picking them when they are still on the acidic side of ripening. Though they have a tannic edge, the cherries this week are running over 16° BRIX, which higher than any of the cane fruit. 

One of the benefits of growing sour cherries is the fact that birds have a tough time pulling them off the tree. Moreover, the limbs are so willowy they cannot peck away at the fruit as they do with Prunus avium, bird (sweet) cherries. Robins, starlings and orioles like them but only as an occasional treat; they soon tire of the task and go back to eating insects. So they are an avian dessert, rather than a main course.

The spotted-winged drosophila or vinegar fly thrives on Montmorency cherries so we have to be careful harvesting the fruit. We have been working with staff on harvesting so we avoid the cherries with larvae. If you all run into a larva, and it is likely, the only thing we can say is that it is natural verification of our gentle approach towards other creatures on the farm. For the most part, the spiders in the orchard, along with the dragon flies, keep the vinegar fly populations at bay. And our restraint keeps the native bee populations and other interesting insect populations robust because we don't use neonicotinoids and the rest of the arsenal of insecticides recommended for control of the fruit fly. The neonicotinoids are particularly nasty because they are generally applied to the soil and are absorbed into the plant tissues. The fruit is never sprayed, allowing for a plausible "no spray" claim. Many of our native bees are ground nesters, so they get it coming and going. An occasional fruit fly larva among the cherries means there is a bumble bee larva also developing safely underneath the tree.

* * *

We made our deliveries Friday and walked into a restaurant with the wrong invoice. When the staff saw it was for Lovely's 50/50 [on N Mississippi], they regaled us with how delicious Sarah [Minnick]'s tart cherry ice cream is and how she uses the cherry pits to flavor it, giving it hint of bitter almond essence. The next stop was at Lovely's, and Sarah's mother greeted us with a tub of the ice cream. The ice cream is made from the Balatons. The next batch will use the Montmorency cherries. If you are in Mississippi area, more specifically 4039 N Mississippi Avenue, stop in and try the Balaton cherry ice cream. It is worth a trek across town. Then return to try the Montmorency flavor when that's ready.

Top photo from the Agricultural Research Service, the research agency of the United States Department of Agriculture.

Impromptu: Pork Tacos At Our House!

The plan had been in place for weeks, and we were looking forward to having a Saturday night dinner on the deck at the home of good friends. We'd even been given the menu, the better to whet our appetites in advance of the evening: cocktails and tomato-basil bruschetta to start, then grilled pork ribs, corn salad and the hostess's gramma's green beans. Boysenberry pie for dessert.

Yeah, we were drooling, too.

Pork before.

Saturday morning dawned warm and sunny, with the promise of a beautiful, not-too-warm Portland evening for the dinner. Then around mid-morning we got a call. A painting project had run over schedule, an unexpected memorial service had come up for that afternoon. Could we reschedule the deck dinner and go out instead? Maybe margaritas and Mexican at a place with outdoor seating?

Pork after.

Though there are several great places in town that fit that bill, I'd really been looking forward to spending time with our friends without the distractions and constraints of a restaurant meal. Why not just change locations and come over to our house? Dave's margaritas are as good, if not better, than any I've had out and, sticking with the Mexican theme, I could throw some pork on to braise for tacos and we could pot luck the condiments.

After hanging up I looked around, realizing the house was a complete shambles. Ack! Good thing we were eating outside…and we could clean up enough that, in the dim evening light, it might not look too awful.

Ready to go…take a seat!

On the way to the store I ran into my neighbor Susana, who waxed poetic about the dinner she'd made the night before featuring short ribs braised in apricots and cherries. We agreed it would be perfect for the pulled pork I needed for the tacos so, armed with her inspiration, I bought the necessary ingredients, came home, threw it all together and three hours later had the most luscious pulled pork ever.

And our dinner that evening? Perfection…just like we'd planned it all along.

Pork Tacos with Apricot, Cherry and White Wine Pulled Pork

For the pulled pork:
2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1-2 medium yellow onions, chopped fine
3 large cloves garlic
2 c. cherries, pitted and halved (I used yellow Rainiers)
2 c. apricots, pitted and quartered
5 lbs. pork shoulder, cut into large chunks
2 1/2 c. dry white wine (I used a dry Pinot Grigio)
3 bay leaves
Salt and pepper to taste

For the tacos:
Corn tortillas (order them in advance from Por Que No…awesome!)
Cabbage slaw with lime vinaigrette
Guacamole
Corn or cherry salsa
Tomato salsa
Cotilla cheese, crumbled
Sour cream
Limes, quartered
Assorted bottled chile sauces

Preheat oven to 325°.

Heat the oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. When it shimmers, add onions and garlic and sauté till translucent. Add remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Cover and place pot in oven for 3 hours until pork is falling apart.

Remove pot from oven, and transfer the chunks of pork to a large platter, leaving cooking liquid in pot. Bring liquid in pot to a boil, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking, and reduce until most of liquid has evaporated and it is a syrupy consistency. While liquid is reducing, smash pork with back of spoon or pull apart with a fork. When liquid in pot has finished reducing, add pork back to pot and combine.

Serve with condiments.

This pulled pork would be amazing with any recipe calling for pulled pork, and is infinitely variable with any seasonal fruit…think plums, peaches, apples, etc. You could also add whole chiles like ancho or poblano to give it some heat.

Cherry Bomb

You just never know, when you open it, which door will dump a bucket o' learnin' on your head.

Peeling garlic was an exercise in frustration till Julia Child taught me that crushing the cloves under the flat blade of a kitchen knife was so much easier (and satisfying). And I used to think that I had to lay out raspberries on cookie sheets to freeze them, a hideously tedious task, until Anthony Boutard told me that all I had to do was to put the hallocks from the flat directly into the freezer, then the next day take them out, give them a squeeze into a zip-lock bag and throw them back into the freezer.

So when I was talking with Nate Albrecht, the young fellow manning the Baird Family Orchards booth on opening day at the St. Johns Farmers' Market, and he said he couldn't wait to get home to make cherry whiskey, I saw that bucket coming and got out my notebook. He said that he likes bings because of the color they lend to the brew and that, while ripe cherries will work just fine, it's also a great use for those left over that you hate to waste.

Maresh Family Farm's Cherry Whiskey

Take a one-gallon glass jar with a lid and fill it 3/4 full of stemmed (but not seeded) whole cherries. Pour in 2 cups of sugar, then fill with whiskey. Cover with lid and shake to partially dissolve the sugar, then set in a cool, dark place. Shake every day or so, and after 2 to 3 months you'll have fabulous cherry whiskey.

In Season: Cherries

The Northwest is famous for its sweet cherries and, while it's still a little early for Oregon cherries, Yakima's warmer and drier climate is giving us bunches of Bings and Rainiers (photo, above) right now. Fabulous cooked with brandy and sugar and served over cheesecake or ice cream, they're also great in salads and with meats. My friend Michel made a startlingly luscious cherry salsa and shared her recipe with me.

Cherry Salsa

1 c. fresh or canned corn kernels
1 pt. cherries, pitted and halved
1 mango, cut in small dice
1 roasted poblano or ancho chile, chopped
1 serrano chile, seeded and chopped
2 green onions, chopped
1/4-1/3 c. lime juice
Cilantro

Combine ingredients and serve. Amounts and ingredients can be varied depending on what you have on hand.