Summer Chicken Thighs with Peaches and Thyme

These summertime chicken thighs with peaches and thyme are cooked on the stove – no oven required! They’re naturally sweetened with caramelized onions and currants and braised in sherry. Bonus: they’re a great way to use up hard or mealy peaches!

Peach Season

One of the best parts of June every year is that it’s the official start of peach season! The second peaches go on sale in the store, I know the good peaches have begun to arrive, and I start buying loads of them. Probably 30-50 a week. Why so many?

1. The whole family loves fresh peaches. Plain, on shortcake, with fresh mozzarella and basil – honestly there is no wrong way to eat a fresh peach.
2. Peaches have a very high fail rate. Probably the highest of any fruit we buy. I think about 30% of all the peaches we buy here even in peak peach season are mealy or just fail to ripen properly for some reason or another. Which leaves us with a lot of subpar or mealy peaches! So what can I do with mealy peaches?

What to do with mealy peaches?

I’ve asked myself this many times over the years. The answer is that you have to transform the mealy texture. Often the flavor is there, just obscured by the nasty texture. Which means you need to either puree or cook those hard or mealy peaches.

When it comes to cooking peaches, the first thing that comes to mind for many people (myself included) is to put them in dessert. Peach pie! Peach tarts!

The problem is that I don’t really like cooked peaches in dessert. They can still taste alright, don’t get me wrong – but they lose that delicious, fresh peach flavor. And they lose their tartness and become just too sweet. Kind of sickly. In my opinion, they no longer stand alone as a highlight to a dish. They need other flavors in order to taste good again.

There are two good ways I’ve found to eat cooked peaches. First, on a tart where they are a complementary flavor (recipe to come). Second, to make them savory – with chicken!

Peaches are absolutely delicious when cooked with chicken! Especially if you can get that sweet peach flavor to really shine. Which is exactly what this recipe does – it lets the peaches shine, and it gives them a bit of help in developing that sweet flavor without making it overwhelming. So we add caramelized onions, currants, and sherry. And you get an absolutely delicious sweet and peachy chicken sauce.

So, at long last, my answer to the question of what to do with mealy peaches? Make a summer chicken and peaches recipe!

The Chicken and Peaches Recipe Obsession

I’ve been trying to make a chicken and peach dish work for about three years now. I started with the New York Times recipe for Roasted Chicken Thighs with Peaches. It had so much promise! Ginger, peaches, sherry, and chicken thighs? What could go wrong? But for some reason it always felt like something was missing.

I tried the recipe as written and many variations of that recipe – I tried adding more acid (vinegar, lemon juice), adding plums, adding onions, etc. And eventually I came to the conclusion that it just needed more sweetness. I think that when you use hard peaches like that recipe calls for, the peaches only tease a sweet juicy flavor. They fall a bit short and leave you craving a flavor that isn’t quite there.

Skillet Chicken Thighs and Peaches

I have more theories on how to make that sheet pan recipe work a bit better, and I’m going to keep trying. But one evening I was staring at several sad mealy peaches and also happened to have a bunch of bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs. It was also a hot day, and I did not particularly want to turn on the oven.

So I decided to give my sweetness theory a try, and also to just change most of the flavors except the peach and chicken. Lol. And to cook the recipe entirely in a skillet rather than the oven.

It worked out great! Will definitely be making this again. Kids loved it – my 5-year old ate 3 chicken thighs in about 10 minutes and was complaining that there wasn’t more chicken (I only made 8 thighs!)

This skillet chicken thighs and peaches recipe has a delicious peach sherry sauce that goes great over rice or pasta. Plus, the alcohol gets thoroughly cooked out (because it cooks for 30 minutes and you spend about 10 minutes reducing the sauce at the end). Which was a relief because my 3-year-old son requested that he be given additional peach sauce in a cup.

So here’s the recipe for summertime peach chicken thighs!

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