Peach Season Is Upon Us!

The beginning of August marks the peak of the fruit growing season around here.  All of the orchards are heavy with fruit and the local farmers market has been inundated with fresh peaches.  This last weekend I bought a twenty pound box of peaches for $35.  Not a bad deal at $1.75/lb.  Since there is no way that I could eat twenty pounds of peaches in the next few days, a canning bonanza became the order of the day.  I started with making some jam.  I tried to use the blemished or bruised peaches for the jam since they get finely chopped anyways.

I mixed four cups of chopped peaches with a box of powdered pectin and two tablespoons of lemon juice.  I brought the mix to a boil on the stove and then added five cups of sugar and stirred it in well.  After it came back to a good boil, I let it go for another minute or two, then turned off the burner and skimmed off all the foam that had formed on the surface.  I carefully poured the jam into my half pint jars that had been prepared in the canner, wiped the rims, set the lids and set them back in the canner.  Once the canner came back to a boil, I let them go for twenty minutes before turning off the heat and letting them cool for five minutes.  After the cooling period, I let them rest on the counter overnight to set properly.

The next thing I worked on was the sliced peaches.  I knew I wanted to can about seven or eight pints of slices, so I choose eighteen of the prettiest peaches in the box.  In small batches I set them in boiling water for a minute or two, then set them in an ice bath to loosen their skins.  It usually helps to use the freshest, ripest fruit possible to make it easy to peel them.  Once they were peeled, I pitted and sliced them and threw them in a pre-treatment dip of lemon juice and water to prevent browning.  While I was slicing all the peaches, I made a batch of light syrup to add to the jars of peach slices.  I let the slices drain for a bit before I started packing them into jars.  All the peach slices packed nicely into eight pint jars that I topped off with the syrup. One by one the filled jars went back into the canner and once it was full I brought it back to a hard boil.  I boiled the peaches for thirty minutes, then allowed them the cool down time of five minutes.  They joined the jam on the counter to cool overnight before then were labeled for storage.  The pantry is filling fast at this time of year.  A few more weeks and I think I will be adding jars of salsa to my stores as well.