Cooking with BC Stone Fruit in a Restaurant Kitchen

Every July, the Okanagan stone fruit starts arriving and the kitchen at Sugar Summit Drive shifts into a different gear. Peaches, nectarines, sour cherries, Italian prunes: they come in fast, they are at their best for about two weeks, and then they are gone. Cooking with them well means paying attention to that window and not trying to stretch it.

Why the timing matters more than the variety ¶

Stone fruit in BC has a short, staggered season that runs roughly from mid-July through early September. Sour cherries come first, usually around the third week of July. White peaches follow in early August. Italian prunes close things out in late August and into September. Each variety has about a ten-to-fourteen day window when it is genuinely worth cooking with, and outside that window the flavour drops off quickly.

In a restaurant kitchen, this means you are constantly adjusting. You cannot write a stone fruit dish in June and expect it to hold through September. The dish has to follow the fruit, not the other way around. This summer, the galette on the dessert menu has changed three times already: sour cherry in late July, white peach and sour cherry together in early August, and now moving toward nectarine as the peaches wind down.

Sourcing: what we look for and where we find it ¶

We source stone fruit from a small number of farms in the Okanagan and Similkameen valleys. We do not name them publicly because the relationships are informal and we do not want to create demand they cannot meet. What we look for is fruit that has been picked ripe rather than picked for travel. Commercially grown stone fruit is often harvested a few days early so it survives the truck. Fruit picked ripe is softer, bruises more easily, and tastes completely different.

We receive deliveries twice a week in summer and go through the boxes the same day they arrive. Anything that is not going on the menu that week gets processed immediately: halved and frozen for winter compotes, or macerated in a small amount of sugar and used within two days for a sauce or a garnish.

Three ways we use stone fruit on the current menu ¶

The galette is the most visible use, but stone fruit shows up in a few other places. A white peach gastrique has been finishing the duck breast on the current tasting menu. Sour cherries went into a compote that ran alongside the cheese course for about three weeks in late July. And Claire has been testing a nectarine and almond cream tart for the pastry counter that may appear in the next week or two.

The key with stone fruit in savoury applications is restraint. A gastrique works because it is tart and concentrated, not sweet. If you push the sugar too far, it reads as dessert and throws off the balance of the plate. The fruit should be recognisable but not dominant.

What home cooks can take from this ¶

The main thing is to buy fruit that is ripe now, not fruit that will ripen on your counter. Farmers markets in Victoria and across BC are the best place to find this in summer. Ask the grower when it was picked. If the answer is yesterday or this morning, buy it. If the answer is vague, it probably travelled.

Stone fruit does not need much done to it. A galette with rough-puff pastry, a little sugar, and a knob of butter is genuinely one of the better things you can make in August. The fruit does the work.

The stone fruit window closes faster than you expect. If you have not made something with Okanagan peaches yet this summer, this week is probably the week.