Homemade Peach Preserves

The perfect spoonful of sweet summer, these homemade peach preserves are a family favorite, on toast, biscuits and cornbread or stirred through yogurt.

Peaches were my mother’s favorite fruit so their rich fragrance always brings me good memories of her. I often made peach preserves just for her, so she’d have jars to enjoy all year round. 

Homemade Peach Preserves

If you don’t have peaches, this recipe works with most stone fruit, for instance, nectarines, apricot and plums. 

Ingredients

2 lbs or 910g fresh peaches

3 1/2 cups or 700g sugar, divided

Half pack pectin - Just less than 1 oz or about 25g (I use the Sure-Jell brand and the box says 1.75oz or 49g.)

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

1/4 cup or 60ml lemon juice

4-5 clean, sterilized jam jars

Wide-mouth funnel for filling jars

 

N.B. Make sure your jars and lids are thoroughly sterilized because this quick canning method does not require a hot water bath or pressure cooking. If you have any doubts whatsoever, store the jam in the refrigerator once cooled.

 

Method

Halve your peaches and remove the pits. Cut them into thick slices.

In a large pot, add your peaches with 3 cups or 600g of the sugar, the sea salt and the lemon juice and give it a good stir.

 

Cook over a low to medium heat for about 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally and skimming any white foam that forms around the top. The peaches should start falling apart and turning to pulp.

Get your sterilized jars ready for filling by lining them up on some paper towels (to catch the inevitable drips onto your countertop) and inserting a metal teaspoon into each one. A wide-mouth funnel will make this so much easier! Put the funnel into the first jar, at the ready.

 

Meanwhile, mix your pectin with the remaining half cup or 100g of sugar.

 

Remove the pot from the heat and allow it to cool for just a few minutes. Use your hand blender to puree the mixture to your desired consistency. I like to blend half and leave the other half as it is. If you don’t have a hand blender, you can use a blender/liquidizer or leave the peaches as they are. 

Return the pot to the heat and add in the sugar/pectin mixture. Mix well and bring the pot to a full rolling bowl for at least a minute.

Ladle the boiling hot jam into the clean jars, moving the funnel along as you go. Do be careful not to splash jam on yourself.

 

Remove the teaspoons and screw the lids on the jars very tightly, using a towel to hold the jars and turn the lids, starting with jar one. When you get to jar three or four, start over at number one, trying to tighten them all just a little more.

 

Turn the jars upside down so that the hot jam further sterilizes the insides of your clean lids.

Leave the jars upside down until the jam has completely cooled, which could take several hours. Turn the jars upright and check that the center button on the lids have popped in, if your lids have those. 

Any jars whose buttons have not popped in should be stored in the refrigerator as this means the seal is not good and bacteria could get in. If the jam lasts that long. :) 

Enjoy!

It’s Sunday FunDay and today we are celebrating National Peach Month by sharing recipes with peaches! Many thanks to our host, Wendy of A Day of the Life on the Farm. Check out the links below. 

• A Day in the life on the Farm: Fresh Peach Salsa 
• Food Lust People Love: Homemade Peach Preserves 
• Sneha's Recipe: Keto Peach Iced Tea 
• Karen's Kitchen Stories: Peaches and Cream Mini Cheesecakes 
• Our Good Life: Peach and Prosciutto Flatbread 
• Mayuri's Jikoni: Peach Baked Oatmeal 
• Culinary Cam: Roasted Peach-Tomato Gazpacho with Crème Fraîche

 

We are a group of food bloggers who believe that Sunday should be a family fun day, so every Sunday we share recipes that will help you to enjoy your day. If you're a blogger interested in joining us, just visit our Facebook group and request to join.

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Wild Pear Lemon Preserves

Juicy pears cooked down with a Meyer lemon and just the right amount of sugar make the best Wild Pear Lemon Preserves! They are a wonderful topping for buttered toast, stir them into yogurt, or warm and spoon them over vanilla ice cream. 

Last summer I got a text from a friend asking me if I had any interest in some wild pears that were growing on her property in the country. Free fruit? Yes, PLEASE! If there is one thing I absolutely love, it’s making jam or preserves out of fruit that might otherwise go to waste. 

The best part was that I didn’t even have to pick the pears! We were all social distancing, like everyone worldwide last summer so my friend dropped the basket of pears on another friend’s porch for me. I duly collected them with much appreciation. 

I brought the basket of pears home and got busy peeling and slicing and cooking them down with sugar. If you’ve never tried a wild pear, I’m here to tell you that they are quite sour with a thicker skin than normal eating pears. But they are fabulous in preserves and, like quince, they turn the most wonderful shade of pink. 

Bonus advice: If you do not yet have a digital scale, please buy one. They are so useful! Using cups to measure sliced fruit is such a challenge because of air pockets. That said, I tried my best to measure the sliced pears so you don’t have to. Each cup of sliced pears is about 150g, in case you need to convert from the amounts below. It’s just a ballpark figure so you’ll see that the sugar doesn’t work out exactly in cups. If you'd just get a scale, you could save us all a lot of grief. 

Wild Pear Lemon Preserves 

I followed the guidance on a post from Digging Food to figure out the ratio of pears to sugar. One batch of my pears (1880g whole) weighed 1252g after being peeled, cored and sliced so I put 626g of sugar. If you don’t have wild pears, use firm green ones instead. These quantities of pear and sugar require one whole lemon. Adjust accordingly if you are cooking more or less pears.

Ingredients

For peeling the pears:

2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice or 2 teaspoons citric acid

For the preserves (my second batch! Those two trees just kept on giving!):

4 lbs 2 1/3 oz or 1880g wild pears

3 1/8 cups or 626g sugar

1 Meyer lemon (or sub a regular lemon) 

Method

Fill a large bowl about to about halfway with cool water. Add the juice or citric acid and stir well. Peel all the pears.

As you peel them, put them in your bowl with the acidic water.  This will stop the oxidation so they don’t turn brown. 

Cut all of the pears in half and use a the paring knife to remove the stem and bottom of each half, dropping them back into the acidic water as you do. Finally use a melon scoop to remove the core, again putting the pear halves back in the water.

Initially I tried performing each action on one pear at a time but it was tedious to continually switch tools and went much faster when I halved them all, then took the stem and bottom out of each, then cored them. It does mean you have to fish around in the acidic water to get them to do the next step but that’s quickly accomplished.

Peel and slice the pears 1/8 in or 3 1/2mm thick, again, popping them back in the water. 

When they are all sliced, drain off the acidic water and weigh the pears. Add in 1 part sugar for 2 parts pears. Cover the bowl and leave them to macerate overnight. 

Sitting around overnight in the sugar, the pears will create their own syrup and be ready to cook into preserves by morning. 

Just before cooking thinly slice your lemon (peel and all) but remove any seeds. 

Add the lemons to the pear pot. 

Bring the mixture to a high simmer or low boil over medium heat. Stir often! If the simmer is too low, it will take you 4 hours to cook them. A large batch usually takes at least 2 1/2 hours.

Start checking for desired consistency after 1 1/2 hours. Stir and check them every 15-20 minutes. The preserves are finished when the pears have turned rose, then to light garnet colored and the slices are transparent. 

The amount of cooking time varies depending on the size of your batch, diameter of your pot, the heat retention of your pot (Le Creuset are great for this) and the thickness of your pear slices.  

Wash canning jars and have them ready and hot. I put teaspoons in each jar and then fill them with boiling water. Pour a little boiling water over the lids while you are at it. Use a pair of canning tongs to tip the water out of the jars when the preserves are ready. 

When the preserves are done, use a wide mouth funnel and ladle the hot pears and syrup into the hot jars. Try not to get any on you as the pears and their syrup will burn you. 

Remove the spoons from the canning jars and fit the lids on as tightly as you can. Turn the jars upside down and leave to cool. Occasionally, as you randomly pass by, tighten the lids a little more.

Once the jars are cool, turn them right side up. The lids should pop down firmly. If any jar lids don’t suck down, store them in the refrigerator and use them first. 

Enjoy! 

August is National Canning Month so my Festive Foodie group are all sharing way to preserve Summer's bounty! Check out the links below. Many thanks to our host, Wendy of A Day in the Life on the Farm. 

• Homemade Sauerkraut  by Palatable Pastime
• How to Freeze Basil in Olive Oil  by Savory Moments
• Indian Style Refrigerator Bread and Butter Pickle by Magical Ingredients
• Tart Cherry Preserves  by A Day in the Life on the Farm
• Wild Pear Lemon Preserves by Food Lust People Love

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