Peach Preserves

I've written about dehydrating peaches and making peach butter, but there are a few other things I do with peaches:  can them (as-is, with syrup), pickle them, and make peach preserves.  The latter is actually one of the most common.  As I have noted before, I do make things other than sugar-laden treats with fruit, but peach preserves are easy, and a little bit of peaches go a long way.  I get twice as much preserves as butter for the same amount of peaches, at least partly because the extra sugar in preserves (twice as much) increases the bulk.

Making peach preserves is pretty easy and I have (so far) not screwed it up so it must also be nearly fool-proof.  I start off doing something that is recommended against:  I double the recipe in the Ball Blue Book (BBB).  Pickyourown.org has a recipe, too, that is heavier on the fruit, lighter on the sugar--but I still use more peaches than they recommend.

I use eight cups (actually more like nine) of chopped, peeled peaches.   To peel, float them in simmering (not boiling) water for a few minutes; then the skins come off pretty easily.  You can just pull them off and don't need to cut, except in a few places.  Then I quarter them and chop them into relatively small pieces.  I probably divide each peach into 160 small chunks, which is not as slow as it sounds.  I can peel and chop a peach in about two minutes (or less).  According to the weight/volume on pickyourown.org, nine cups should come to a little more than five pounds fresh (you may need more if you need to cut around plum curculio larvae or other things).  The full recipe is:

8-9 cups chopped peaches
4 tablespoons lemon juice
14 cups sugar
2 packages of pectin.

I add the peaches to the pot and dump a proportionate amount of lemon juice in as I'm filling it; I don't treat separately to prevent browning.  Once the peaches are in the pot, I mash them up with the potato masher, much as I noted with the blueberry preserves.

 I then add the pectin--so everything is in the pot except for the sugar--and start heating it on low/medium heat.  When it boils, I dump in the sugar, mix it up, and turn the heat up a bit to boil it again.  Once it boils for the second time (which can take 15 minutes or so), I let it go for about a minute--during which it will be starting to foam a lot--then turn the heat off.  After that, it's just a matter of filling the jars and canning them.  I use pint jars and get about eight pints from the nine cups of peaches (I usually have a little left over that I just refrigerate).  These steps are straight from the BBB.

The jars seal quickly and I have never had any trouble with them setting up, but once I think it was somewhat thin; tilting a jar would make the contents shift a bit, albeit stiffly.

As you can see in the picture below, the jam is brightly colored and doesn't have any issues with turning brown.  After a couple of years the jam will be darker in color, but still is good.  I've used preserves up to about four years old and they are still fine.

This is an easy and very tasty way to preserve fruit. It probably shouldn't be a mainstay for obvious reasons; each jar has about one cup of fruit and almost two cups of sugar in it.  However, in small increments it's fine.  I go through maybe five or six jars per year.

Although Whey Low says that its product can be used 1:1 in place of sugar for preserves, I haven't tried it.  That'd be very expensive (although I use almost as much in my annual cranberry canner load, that yields seven or eight quarts vs. eight pints).

Although I'm somewhat less than fully objective, I like my peach preserves better than any I've ever tried--even ones made with sugar and Belle of Georgia peaches, which are what I have usually used (off my trees in the back yard, which now have expired).  I don't know what it is about them that makes them better, but they really do have a good flavor.  Making them is well worth the time.