Peaches are in!

Peaches are ripe in our neck of the woods so Johanna and I took the chance to make peach jam while I was at her house last week. If you remember we made strawberry jam at my house in Virginia in June so I won’t give you the entire process again. But here are a few pics to whet your appetite.

Start with fresh peaches – if you’re using the Sure-jell recipe, you’ll need 4 cups crushed peaches per batch. A good estimate is about 6 or 7 large peaches per cup.

We got ‘seconds’ from a local farmer. Seconds are fruit that is too small or too large for shipping to the grocery chains. Grocery stores try to sell fruit that is all the same size. Second may also have funny shapes or slight bruising, but are still in good, edible condition. Buying seconds for jam is a great way to save money. We paid $10 for a half-bushel which gave enough peaches for 3 batches of jam (21 8 oz jars) and 4 6-cup fruit pies, and one 12ish cup cobbler.

If you are canning the fruit, you want to make sure there isn’t any bruising. Some people can and make jam the same day. That way as you sort, you can used the bruised fruit for jam and the perfect ones for canning.

Here are our beautiful seconds.

Cut the peaches in half, remove the pit…

Peel and finely chop.

If the skins are hard to remove, you can blanch the peaches (place in boiling water for 1- 2 minutes and then put immediately in an ice bath). The skin will then easily come away from the fruit. Our skins were coming off easily so we skipped blanching them.

Then we followed the same recipe from Sure-jell like we did for strawberry jam and ended up with almost a dozen jars of jam each.

Anyone else putting up fruits and veggies this summer?

p.s. I know there was some controversy when I posted about not using a canner with the strawberry jam. I have since learned that due to the high content of acid in jams and jellies, it is safe to go without a water bath. However when canning vegetables, it is critical to use a water bath.