Bite into a peach and as the juice of summer trickles down your chin, you’ll likely see dancing cobblers, pies and tarts leap through your mind. But why not salads, chilled soups and salsas?

With their sweet flesh, bracing acidity and peak-of-season abundance, a ripe peach, plum or other stone fruit is the perfect vehicle to give your home-spun meals that summer makeover we’re all craving right about now, whether it’s a peach panzanella, stone fruit gazpacho or plum and cucumber salad.

Mario Hernandez of Frog Hollow Farm knows a lot about making savory dishes with stone fruits. Hernandez is the culinary coordinator for the Brentwood organic fruit farm, which is currently open for pick-up only. Hernandez, 53, grew up in Japan with an almost spiritual appreciation for peaches and other fruits as symbols of health. His favorite treat as a kid was umeboshi, or pickled plums, inside balls of rice.

“Americans enjoy very juicy, sweet and ripe fruit,” says Hernandez, who is half Japanese and half Mexican. “Don’t get me wrong, I do too. I love baking. But in Japan they don’t add sugar to fruit. And they appreciate (the other aspects like) a perfect appearance, great aroma and interesting or harder textures. Even at high level restaurants, ending a meal with a perfect fruit is very common.”

With summer in full swing, his ideal dessert is fruit crudite sprinkled with taijin, the mouth-puckering Mexican seasoning salt. Another favorite: Grilled stone fruits with mascarpone, honey and lime. Just don’t use plums or nectarines.

“They contain too much water,” says Hernandez, who is teaching a virtual cooking class on stone fruits for Frog Hollow CSA members on July 31. “A charred peach or apricot works perfectly.”

But it is the immediacy of savory food that gets Hernandez particularly jazzed, because of its ease and accessibility. He starts with salads, dressing an Early Summer Salad of Santa Rosa Plums and Japanese Cucumbers with cream, vinegar and olive oil to balance the fruit’s acidity and the tiniest bit of quick-pickled shallots, for zing.

And he delves into the sweet-savory traditions of Italian cooking with Peach Panzanella, the bread salad typically made with tomatoes. “Choose a firm yellow peach that isn’t too ripe, has good skin color and will keep its hold, like a Zee Lady,” Hernandez says.

Crimson Lady peaches play a starring role in this summer panzanella from Frog Hollow Farm. (Courtesy Pearl Driver) 

Best part? You can transform some of those same ingredients — basil, mint, bread and peaches — into gazpacho, the refreshing Andalusian chilled soup. Hernandez’s gazpacho gets its stunning sunset-orange color from the addition of tomato juice and red bell pepper, which are added to the other coarsely chopped ingredients and left at room temperature for a few hours to let the flavors meld.

A final pulse in the blender and a few shakes of Tabasco yields a pureed explosion of taste. Hernandez only has one request. “When your dish is only made with five or six ingredients, you really gotta use the good stuff,” he says. “A sweet baguette from a local baker you really like. Basil from the garden.”

Plus, of course, a ripe, fragrant stone fruit picked at the peak of summer.

And if you still have leftover stone fruit and long to cover and bake it in swaths of butter, flour and sugar, try this Plum Buckle from Berkeley’s Sweet Adeline Bakeshop or Los Angeles bakery Republique’s famous pastry cream-filled Brioche Fruit Tarts with peaches. In her cookbook, pastry chef and co-owner Margarita Manzke says that the not-too-sweet brioche really highlights the fruit. Peaches look beautiful in this preparation because they hold their shape well.

“When baked,” she writes in the book, “the peaches come out even more beautiful than the raw fruit, and the flavor becomes more concentrated.”

Ferry Building cafe

Need a Frog Hollow fix? The Ferry Building farm-to-table cafe is currently open on Saturdays only, from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., for coffee, espresso and pastries through July 31. For more information, contact the shop at 415-445-0990.