O’Henry Summer Peaches
{nothing fuzzy about the flavor}
O’Henry is a late summer variety known as a freestone peach since its pit is easily removed from the juicy flesh. With its characteristic red streak near the pit, this colorful fruit holds its shape even when dead ripe, making it a perfect element in an easy baked dessert. To be good, a peach must ripen on the tree. The hard and flavorless varieties which have plucked from the tree before much flavor and sweetness develops make it intact to supermarket produce bins. As in all things, don’t be beguiled by surface beauty since often times the cosmetically perfect fruit hides an interior that is mealy, bland and tasteless. Truly ripe fruit requires special gentle handling to survive a journey far from the place it was grown so the best bet to find peaches worth eating is at your local farmer’s market, where the best vendors sell fruit picked hours or at most a half day before being sold. After that, flavor and texture go downhill rapidly. Caveat emptor: taste before you buy and plan to use what you have bought the same day.
With the cream cheese and butter pastry dough made at least two hours in advance of serving the dessert (chilled dough is easiest to work with), preparation is simple and quick. The slight acidity of the dough marries beautifully with the honeyed sweetness of the fruit, and the rosemary, a friend from the savory kitchen, serves to underline, in an unexpected way, the fruity intensity of the ripe fruit.
A note about peeling peaches: The skin of perfectly ripe fruit peels off with little effort. Starting at the bottom of the fruit (the end opposite the stem end), make a small cut with a paring knife to loosen the skin from the fruit. Then only using your fingers, gently pull the skin off of the fruit in large pieces, bearing careful not to bruise the peaches. Repeat the process until all of the skin has been removed. Sprinkle or brush the surface of the fruit with a bit of lemon juice, diluted in water (the juice of 1 lemon mixed with approximately 1 T. water should do).
