Produce News For The Week of June 21, 2010

PEACHES AND NECTARINES (PART I) (Monday, June 21): Hey, happy first day of summer. Today is the official first day of summer. If just walk in the produce department or down the farmer’s market, you know it’s summer because you see all the beautiful joys of summer…peaches and nectarines. Oh, my goodness! Take a look at those beautiful peaches and nectarines. You will first notice all of the red blush on the fruit. Americans are suckers for red. You would think you would go up to this nectarine and say, “Look, that’s like 95% red blush,” and you’re going to buy it. No! It’s not the red blush you should be looking for. You’ve got to turn it over and look at the stem end. Look at the color behind the red blush. We call it the background color of the fruit. Is it yellow? Now that is the color you’re looking for. The darker the yellow, the riper that fruit is going to get. If you find some peaches and nectarines with more green than yellow as the background color, that’s fruit that won’t be nearly as sweet. So don’t look at the red blush. Look at the background color.
PEACHES AND NECTARINES (PART II) (Tuesday, June 22): All right. So you’ve bought the best peaches and nectarines you can find, right? Not just with red blush, but you’ve looked at the background color. You’re really happy with what you see with the background color. Now you get them home. What are you going to do? You need to still let them ripen. Do you set them on the countertop to ripen? Heavens no. Get out your Nike shoe box. Oh, I guess you can use your Sketchers shoe box. It doesn’t matter to me. Just get out a nice clean shoebox. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to take that shoebox and are going to gently place a layer of peaches and nectarines in it. Just one layer. Do not stack them. Close up the shoebox and put it in the warmest spot in your house, which is usually is the laundry room in my home. That way it’s a little bit more humid, more moisture in the air. Now every day you pass that box, lift up the lid. It will tell you when they’re ripe and ready to go. You’ll smell it. It’ll be so good. Get ready to roll up your sleeves.
PERLETTE SEEDLESS GRAPES (Wednesday, June 23): You’re my little pearl. Claire Marks, you know, she’s not little any more. She’s 14 years old now, but I still call her my little pearl. Now if I was French, I would call her my Perlette. That’s right. Perlette seedless grapes – actually a French word that means “little pearl”. And why would they call it “little pearl”? Because Perlette seedless grapes are the round grape. Now the Thompson seedless grapes or some of the other green seedless varieties…they’re a bit more oblong, but these Perlettes – they’re perfectly round just like cute little pearls. When I come up to a pile of Grapes, the first thing I look at are the stems. Are they green, velvety? That’s a sign of freshness. Then I take a look at how big the clusters are. When I see a huge cluster of grapes, this tells me the growers are going through the vineyard and they are finding an absolutely gorgeous crop with very little rain damage, very little wind damage. Just absolutely gorgeous. Ooh la la!
WATERMELONS (Thursday, June 24): Hey, Luling, Texas, is the place to be for the 57th annual watermelon thump festival and watermelon seed spitting contents – a huge festival for watermelon. Now the big deal in watermelon over the past five years have been these little tiny personal size watermelons. This is like really the big deal for a lot of people. Five to eight pounds – that’s like as big as they get. Now it took scientists about 10 years to develop these little tiny watermelons. Now you think, “Why did they develop them?” Well, our families are getting smaller. We’re having older Americans – a husband and wife. What are they going to do with like a big 25-30 pound watermelon, right? But a little 7 pound watermelon they can deal with. Plus, you don’t…you know, you open up the refrigerator. You’ve got a big watermelon, you’ve got to clear out like all your leftovers but this one goes right where the milk goes, you know. But thankfully this fills up that space perfectly. So if you like watermelon, have you tried the little tiny personal watermelons? They’re the big deal.
STRAWBERRIES (Friday, June 25): Tomorrow is the strawberry moon. What? You’ve never heard of that phrase? Yeah. It’s an old, old phrase. Old farmers used to call it strawberry moon because it’s the first full moon in June, and that’s when you have the ripening of the strawberries when you have the full moon. That’s why we call it a strawberry moon. Now there’s a couple things…we talked about strawberries last week and I was talking about crushing the strawberries, and I had a letter from a viewer that wrote in and asked, “I brought them home. I washed them. I put them in the refrigerator. Then when I took them out to crush them, there were a lot of moldy ones in there.” What happened? Oh, please! Never in a million years should you wash your strawberries until just before you use them. Let me actually tell you exactly what happens. See all that shine? That shine means that strawberry is fully ripe. If you put water on here, it begins breaking down that outer shine and it actually begins that strawberry to decay. So wash the strawberries just before you use them.