Caramelised Peaches

Doneness

Cut faces are deep golden brown with caramelised sugar pooling in the pit cavity; flesh is fork-tender but still holds its shape; skin has started to wrinkle at the edges. The brown-sugar topping should have melted into a syrup, not blackened — pull the basket the moment the topping starts to bubble darker than caramel.

Oil & seasoning

Brush 1 tablespoon melted butter or refined coconut oil on each cut face just before loading. The fat carries the brown-sugar topping into the flesh and accelerates the Maillard browning the bare peach would not reach in 8 minutes.

Season with: light brown sugar (1 tsp per half, in the pit cavity), ground cinnamon, vanilla extract (a few drops on top after cooking), flaky sea salt to finish, vanilla ice cream or Greek yogurt to serve.

Watch out for

• !Use ripe but FIRM peaches — they should give slightly to thumb pressure but not feel soft. Soft, overripe peaches collapse into mush in 8 minutes at 380 °F. The skin-spot test: bright fragrant skin with no dark bruises, slight give at the stem end.
• !Cut-side UP, not down. Cut-side-down peaches pool their juices on the basket grate and the sugars scorch onto the metal; cut-side-up holds the rendered juices in the pit cavity where the brown sugar dissolves into a syrup.
• !Brown sugar can burn in the last 90 seconds — check at 6 minutes and pull early if the pit-cavity topping has darkened past caramel toward black. The sugar transitions from amber to bitter in under a minute at this temperature.
• !Don't flip. Flipping spills the rendered syrup out of the pit cavity and the topping bakes onto the basket grate instead of caramelising the fruit. This entry is intentionally `flipKind: "none"` — the 8-minute cut-side-up cook is the whole technique.