Peaches I Had This Year

When June came, I was already starting to dream about the seasonal produce summer would bring. All the lovely berries and stone fruits especially: strawberries, blueberries, apricots, nectarines... and peaches. After I started making my first homemade ice cream, I was hooked. Not so much of the eating part, but the making part. Well, ok, of course I enjoyed eating the ice cream too.




So I was getting ready for my repertoire of ice creams, bookmarking recipes from books, magazines and other food blogs, and I found myself returning to this post by Chika, a lot. Looking at the beautiful photographs and thinking of white peaches that the Japanese affectionately call momo. So much so that I actually started dreaming of peaches, literally.

You can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to find white peaches on sale in July. Yes! I thought, I could finally get my hands on some white peaches, albeit from China. Nevertheless, I was happy to be able to tot the punnet back home. They didn't taste all so good though, probably the first of the peaches to be available, undersized and under-ripened. Although not quite sweet, they were quite juicy and had the light, refreshing fragrance of peaches. Since I didn't plan on eating them as they were, it was good enough for me.

Although the ice cream book I had also had a recipe for frozen yogurt, I decided to give Chika's method a try first since it used less ingredients and I thought was more straightforward. Basically, it was just yogurt and whatever you wanted to flavour it with and in this case I used peaches, honey and a peach-flavoured liquor or momo-shu that I bought some time ago and had wanted very much to try using it in a dessert.

The result: a light and refreshing frozen yogurt that actually showed the tang of the yogurt, flavour of the peaches, the floral notes of the honey with slight aftertaste of the liquor. Not bad! My mother commented that it was a little bland but considering the very not flavourful peaches I had, I was happy. I would have added more honey, but then again, the honey I had on had had quite a strong flavour and would probably have masked any of the faint peach fragrance present. I had mine with more peaches, peeled and sliced, to further assert the presence of peaches, but it was also good as it is. Now, maybe one day I will decide to burn a large hole in my pocket and fork out a premium for some momo to try this again.

White Peach Frozen Yogurt (adapted from Chika's recipe at SheWhoEats)
(Makes about 350ml)

250g plain yogurt
300-400g white peaches (about 4-5 smallish ones)
3 tbsp honey
4 tbsp peach-flavoured wine (optional)


- Line a fine meshed sieve with double layers of paper towel or muslin and set it over a bowl. Pour in the yogurt to strain and leave overnight in the refrigerator to make Greek-style yogurt. For me, 500g of plain yogurt gave me 2 cups of Greek-style yogurt, of which I used 1 cup for this recipe.*
- Peel (optional) and remove the pits of the peaches and quarter them. Puree the peaches in a blender and add the honey and wine if using. Mix well and freeze the peach puree mixture.*
- Break the frozen peach puree into small pieces and process in the blender. Add the Greek-style yogurt and process until smooth.
- Pour into a freezer-safe container (I usually use a metal loaf tin so that it freezes more quickly) and  freeze until almost firm, about 4 hours. Process again until smooth and freeze once more before serving. You might have to repeat the process a couple more times if the ice crystals are still too large after processing the second time.

* The process is ideally split into at least 2 days, and the frozen yogurt should be ready to serve the earliest by the evening of Day 2. The first 2 steps should be done the night before, so that you have both puree and Greek-style yogurt the next day.