The Easy Trick That Keeps Peaches From Browning

It's a peachy time to incorporate peaches into your cooking. According to Lane Southern Orchards, summer is peak season to enjoy this stone fruit, and with the United States producing 690,000 tons each year, peaches are easy to find at grocery stores or roadside stands. While Georgia might be synonymous with this fruit, it may surprise you to learn that peaches originally come from China, per Clemson University. This sweet, juicy fruit didn't find its way to Georgia until 1571, when Franciscan monks brought it to the state's coastal islands (via New Georgia Encyclopedia). Today, we love to eat peach pie and peach cobbler, peach salsa, and peach preserves. We love them in our salads, grilled up with meat, and in our sangria. Peaches are amazing.

However, if you love peaches then you know once you cut into this fruit, you either need to eat it or watch it turn brown. The blog Mrs. Wages explains that this unsightly change in color is simply a result of enzymes oxidizing. The most common way to stop this from happening is to squeeze a little lemon juice over your fruit, according to Our Everyday Life. Unfortunately, your peaches will also absorb that lemony flavor. But thanks to social media, we have a trick for you that will keep your peaches looking bright, fresh, and tasting like a peach.

Nicole Modic, also known as Kale Junkie on Instagram, revealed that club soda may hold the secret to keeping your peaches pristine, and gave a hat tip to Cortney LaCorte, known as Cheese Gal, for inspiring the trick. Modic demonstrated the hack for ABC News, explaining that if you soak your cut-up peaches in club soda for just 5 minutes, you can store them in a covered container for up to five days without the beautiful fruit turning brown.

Modic's post has received more than 10,000 likes and lots of chatter. One follower humorously wrote, "What the heck!!! Amazing! And I thought let's just soak them in red wine as we Italians do!!" While another asked, "Will regular sparkling water work for this, or does it have to be club soda?" Modic shared that, "It has to be club soda! Bc of the sodium bicarbonate!" This prompted another follower to ask if a "mild baking soda solution" would work, to which the IGer replied, "Perhaps."

Sounds like it might be time for a science experiment! If you do soak your peaches in club soda, Modic notes that you will also be left with a peach-infused drink to enjoy.