Oliveto Pastry Chef Jenny Raven talking nectatrines

If you’ve been hitting the Farmers’ Markets recently, you know that stone fruit, particularly peaches and nectarines are going OFF right now.

As always, our friends at Blossom Bluff Orchards have some incredible offerings in this department, and if you’ve been to the Blossom Bluff stand you know that they have an uncanny ability to pick out fruit for you depending on when you would like to eat it or what you are going to do with it. How do they DO that?

Thankfully, we have our own in-house expert, Pastry Chef Jenny Raven, who just happens to have two out-of-this-world nectarine desserts on the current menu:

Carine white nectarines with Moscato zabaglione and sesame seed tuile

Spring Bright yellow nectarines-almond frangipane tart with red wine swirl ice cream

So we posed the question of how to pick a good nectarine to Jenny & here’s what she told us:

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1. Smell it.
It should have an attractive, fruity aroma bordering on butterscotch. It should be fragrant & sweet. BUT the secret thing that not a lot of people know is…

2. Pick fruit that looks most like the night sky.
Uh…whaaaaat? Can you say that again?

Pick fruit that looks like the cosmos. That looks like outer-space.

Once she showed us some examples, we got it. Ah yes. An intergalatic star-scape, of course! We’ve seen that before. In that strange sequence at the end of 2001.

In these photos of Carine white nectarines (above) and Spring Bright yellow nectarines (below), in both cases the example on the left gets at what she is describing. The appearance of such heavy, contrasted dappling indicates the presence of sugars rising to the surface of the skin; always a good thing when it comes to fruit.

And that’s how you pick a good nectarine! It should smell fragrant, it should look like outer-space, and when you bite into it you should think:

My god. It’s full of stars.