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Romancing The Stone

With patience and a little care, it's easy to love an apricot

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BARRY WONG Intense, exotic flavors distinguish the apricot from other stone fruits such as plums, peaches and cherries.

WHEN THE APRICOT got its botanical name, Prunus armeniaca, Europeans believed erroneously that the fruit came from Armenia. In fact, it came from China, where it has been cultivated for some 4,000 years. For centuries, connoisseurs have held that the best apricots are grown in Turkey, but they've got it wrong again; the best apricots are grown in Eastern Washington.

Technically, apricots grow anywhere between latitudes 25 and 45, where winters are cold enough to prompt a dormant period and summers are hot and dry enough to allow the fruit to ripen. In Eastern Washington, at the northern end of the apricot zone, volcanically enriched soil and long hours of sunlight tempered by cool, dry nights add up to magically correct growing conditions for this romantic little fruit. And from the second week of June through the third week of August, between 5,000 and 6,000 tons of apricots are harvested here.

Although they're closely related to the other stone fruits — plums, cherries, peaches — apricots have a character all their own. An apricot is more intensely flavored than a peach, and the musk in its perfume suggests something more exotic than innocent plums and cherries. Unfortunately, most of this disappears when apricots are dried or processed, as so many are. And even those of us lucky enough to find fresh apricots in our markets are unlikely to have tasted specimens properly ripened on the tree.

Fortunately, a few growers ripen their fruit a little longer on the tree, allowing the flavors to develop more fully. One of those growers is Bert Pence from Wapato. Pence grows the Tomcot, a variety he thinks is specifically geared for eating fresh and not for processing or drying. But what makes Pence's fruit different is not so much the variety as the way it's handled.

"We're small growers;" he says. "So we can do things differently."

His farm is on Lateral A, a road that runs through the heart of Washington fruit country, where on a three-mile stretch you can buy any fruit that's in season. "We have a little fruit stand out there. About 20 years ago, Dad had been selling our number twos — the over-ripes or ones that couldn't stand up to shipping. And people from Seattle would come in and taste them and say, 'How come we can't get 'em like this at home?' "

"You can't get 'em that way because the way most soft fruit is harvested is, it's picked and dropped in a bin, then it goes to the warehouse and gets dumped on a packing line. It has to be firm enough to withstand the packing procedures. It has to be hard. So Dad said there's got to be a better way. If we can figure out how to pack these things in the field and put them directly in the box as they come off the tree. And that's what we've been doing for 17 or 18 years."

Even if you don't get tree-ripened Pence apricots (they represent less than 1 percent of all the apricots grown in Washington), any apricot will be at its peak of flavor if it's served warm. Sometimes, I'll gently poach fresh 'cots in a little simple syrup with a piece of vanilla bean or a spoonful of vanilla bean paste. But if I have time and especially if I have company to help me eat it, I'll bake my Apricot Almond Crumbcake.

I modeled my crumb cake after one in "How to Bake," by Nick Malgieri. Former executive pastry chef of Windows on the World, Malgieri now directs the baking program at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. He didn't exactly invent crumb cake but his are so rich and good that he might as well have.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.