A California stone fruit road trip

Little did I know that when I headed home from Paradise, CA last week I’d be heading into a whole new road trip. I was sun-dipped and properly exhausted after an outdoor adventure on Lake Oroville, and I had already driven back and forth from the Chico area, but each time in a different shade of dark or twilight. It was the ability to see out the window that slowed everything down and turned the ride home into a series of stops at farms of all kinds. The fatigue faded into the background when I realized we were in the heart of Calfornia’s stone fruit county, well, one of California’s stone fruit counties at least.

The part of route 70 that runs from Sacramento towards Chico is a farm stand gold mine.

I certainly appreciate the farms that are closer to home, but most farms that are near cities are more closely tied to farm stand income or local farmers markets, i.e. direct sales, for businesses. This is a huge generalization, but it is safe to say that the more remote farms tend to be larger, and deal more in quantity and shipping produce around and out of state.

One of my favorite peach farms close-in to the Bay Area even has a cafe inside the SF Ferry Building selling tarts and cobbler. This isn’t the bread and butter of these route 70 farms, and the prices they offer when they do sell directly to customers are a fraction of what you pay for fruit closer to urban areas. I will always be a fan of eating locally – and paying to do that – but I may well add a couple hours to my drive next time I have need for 30 pounds of fruit, which is what we ended up with after a day of farm stand-ing.

There are stands of all sizes – the largest ones with the most signs we avoided with the exception of Bocks, which even had bus parking. The gal was extra sweet and offered me a flat of ‘seconds’ after I had bought up most of her white lady peaches. (Seconds is the term commonly used to refer to slightly damaged, bruised, or over-ripe fruit that can’t be sold as is.)

There were cling peaches and freestone peaches – an indication that the season is reaching its height. Freestone peaches are later to ripen, but easier to eat and cook with since the pit pops out easily. Cling peaches tend to have meatier flesh, they ripen earlier, hold their shape better for longer cooking times, and are a pain to free from their pit. They also have more peach fuzz, so when I handle cling peaches I get that Diana Krall song in my head where she asks her lover to “save the fuzz for her pillow.”

My favorite stands were the poorly-marked ones. One in particular was all organic and everything was grown by a Chinese couple who’d lived in the area for generations. (I’ve just been reading about the Chinese worker strike in 1867 in the Sierras nearby, and I wonder if they descended from those brave souls…) We bought O’Henrys, Snow Kings, and a few gorgeous Summer Zees, nectarines, plus the most delicious tomatoes I have yet had this summer.

We met many farmers and learned a lot about stone fruit, but we also saw epic wildlife (my first condor sighting in the wild), birds loving the rice patties (many rice farms have sustainable practices and host migrating birds), and compared the machine-harvested arbequina olives with the airy Mission, Manzanillo, and Frantoios that aren’t grown in tight rows.

Here are a few delicious stone fruit to look out for whether or not you can make it to this dense, picturesque, and hot growing region. And remember, along with berries and tomatoes, organic stone fruit should always be purchased – the porous skin soaks in a lot more pesticides than oranges and bananas with their peels.

I always say that finding good stone fruit is the hard part – once you find it there’s nothing you can do to it to make it taste better. It’s at its best when naked. But with 30 pounds and only so many mouths I did put up 11 cans of super low-supar peach-nectarine sauce, which will serve as a mouthful of memory later on when the peach trees are bare.