At the end of summer, many of the southern United States brace for a bountiful peach harvest. Peaches were introduced to the Americas by the Spanish who settled in and around Florida. The fruit quickly acclimatised to American soil and as a result, Florida’s next door neighbour Georgia became the ‘Peach State’ and a leading producer of quality peaches. Peaches ripen in the afterglow of summer, and are ripe for the picking, eating and pie-making around September. This particular fruit pie is a creature of its own. Peaches are loaded with flavourful juice which presents a few challenges for making a crispy-crust fruit pie. This recipe uses a few tricks, including macerating the peaches in sugar to extract their juice. We then boil down this juice to make an intensely flavourful peach syrup which is returned to the filling before baking. This pie use a lattice crust lid, which allows any excess moisture from the peaches to vent during baking. Don’t worry if you’re not a whizz at making a perfect, cross-cross lattice, you are welcome to throw on a ‘lazy lattice’ to achieve the exact same job. Let’s go!
