Bananabella and I were back at it again the weekend of the eclipse (which was so cool. So cool. It was sunny and muggy and then vaguely thinking about being cloudy and then it was ever so slightly dimmer and then it was sunset all the way around. We also had a squadron of vultures sail over us just as the sun shrank to a hair-thin sliver, so if you read portents and that's good, let me know! Otherwise keep the bad news to yourself). This time we decided to try peach preserves, cherry preserves, and have another go at the tooth-achingly sweet strawberry preserves from our last jamming adventure.
The peach preserves recipe I found called for 11 pounds of peaches. I didn't have my brain turned on when I went to the store, so I just...bought 11 pounds of peaches. Spoiler alert: that is Many Peaches. It is, in fact, an unnecessary quantity of peaches for two people making jam for themselves and maybe to share.
That's a standard six-quart pot. It's only holding about a quarter of the peaches.
Being the kind of people we are, we went ahead and cooked all the peaches. The first step was blanching them to pull the skins off. There were many skeptical raised eyebrows while the first batch boiled away, and after dunking them in cold water, even more skepticism. These skins aren't sliding off! we said. They are not even pretending to slide—hey, check it out, this just peeled away. And then we were converts, and we also figured out that the time of boiling/temperature and coverage of cold water after are crucial factors. We may have burnt our fingers a bit on slippery peaches...the more fuzzy skin you remove, the harder you have to grip the now-screaming-hot-and-slippery peach.
Smooooooooooooth. Also, James and the Giant Peach is a horror story and no one can tell me differently.
Piles and piles of skinned peaches smell amazing, if you were wondering.
Maybe a third of the carnage?
I used a sharp knife to pit peaches, Bananabella started with a butter knife and progressed (regressed? The sequence is unclear) to just tearing chunks of peach off the pits. Honestly, both methods worked quite well, but tearing into the peaches was viscerally satisfying.
Note how little peach juice has been spilled.
The peaches only just fit in the biggest pot we had handy, and mixing in the sugar was...challenging. And then we simmered the pot for about five hours to cook down the peaches and remove the water. The recipe actually called for simmering and cooling the pot over the course of two or three days, but we looked at the instructions and looked at each other and decided we could modify that step.
We reduced the volume by somewhere between a third and a half, and could have gone a little further. The preserves are delicious (and there are 12 jars of them, which is perhaps slightly too many, but I love peaches so I traded most of my portion of the strawberry for more peach) and a little loose. For a no-pectin recipe where we only mostly followed the instructions, I think they're lovely.
Temptation incarnate.
While the peaches were doing their thing on the stove, I pitted cherries with a paring knife and stained my fingertips this charming dead color with the juice. Bananabella hulled strawberries, and then we poured the sugar on and left the fruit to marinate for a while. We reduced the sugar a little bit in the strawberry preserves recipe—our first try was almost too sweet to eat.
And that's the point I stopped taking photos, but the cherries and strawberries mostly generate a lot of cotton-candy foam as they cook, and don't look like much. We ended up with five jars of each, and both are quite tasty. I think we caramelized the sugar in the cherry preserves; they taste almost chocolatey and are extremely thick.
Sorry for the wobbles. I was vibrating in anticipation of jam.
Clearly further testing is needed, once we empty some jars. The cherry candy goo is delicious with a slice of Brie on crackers. The others are magnificent on crepes. And muffins. And stirred into yogurt.
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