Peach purée

Five years ago, we planted four peach trees.

Peaches are, hands down, my all-time favorite fruit, so I was anxious to get some trees established as early as possible here in our current home. We chose four different varieties that are resistant to peach curl.

Despite cages and fencing, it's been a battle against the deer, who want nothing more than to consume these poor little trees down to nubbins. As a result, they are misshapen and a few branches are dead from the times the deer won.

Despite that, these brave trees are producing fruit. Last year, I harvested about ten pounds. This year ... yowza. One tree in particular came into its own, and its branches were heavy with peaches.

It's the first time we've had anything akin to a decent crop, and I was giddy with delight.

A couple weeks ago, I went and cleaned out the one tree whose peaches were ready to pick. (The other trees, being different varieties, are lagging behind and will be ready to harvest in early September.)

I filled a 30-gallon tub about half-full of fruit just off this one tree.

Curious, I weighed them. Forty pounds. Forty. Pounds. Off one tree. Remember, last year I only got a combined harvest of ten pounds from all four trees.

The next step was to let them ripen. I put down a towel and spread the peaches out on the surface of the woodstove.

They didn't all fit, so I put overflow peaches on a couple of cookie sheets lined with dish towels.

I covered all the fruit with netting to keep the fruit flies off. That prevented a huge source of spoilage.

After a week, the peaches were ripe enough to process. I pulled aside a bowl of the best ones for fresh eating.

I decided to turn the rest into peach purée, since I still had plenty of sliced canned peaches in the pantry. I use peach purée a lot to flavor yogurt and ice cream.

The first step is to scald the peaches in hot water for a few minutes so the skins will slip easily. I completely forgot to get a photo of this step. By the time I remembered to document my progress, I was elbow-deep in the process. Cooling peaches on the left, debris (including small unripe peaches) on the right.

Since I was pureeing the bunch, I didn't bother trying to make tidy slices. I just gutted the peeled peaches and tossed them in a bowl.

As each batch  got processed, I ran the peaches through the blender.

Then I poured the purée into gallon jugs. By this point it was late enough in the day that canning would interfere with our evening chores. After all that work, the volume was reduced to two full gallons of purée. I put these in the refrigerator overnight.

Here's the debris, ready to go into the compost tumbler.

The next morning, I assembled lids, rings, and clean jars.

Filling the jars.

Final tally: 18 pints.

In a tremendously exciting turn of events, my birthday water-bath canners held all 18 pints at once! How wonderful is that? Honestly, why did I wait so many decades to get these canners?

I set two timers, one for each pot, for 35 minutes. I only started the timers when the pots reached a rolling boil.

Out of the canner. This is plenty of purée to last the entire year. And I can't forget, I have three other peach trees still to harvest!

Canning frenzy

The trouble with canning, I've found, is once I start, it's hard to stop.

It began with peas. While cleaning out and inventorying our chest freezer, I came across two gallons of peas from the garden in our last place. At the time I harvested them, we were selling the house. It was a busy summer and I didn't have time to can anything, so I put them in the freezer ... and forgot about them.  Those were the first things to get canned.

Then, a couple days later, Don and I were driving through a nearby town when we saw one of those traveling fruit vendors. Instantly we pulled over and purchased two boxes of peaches (which, let the record show, had fewer quantity and higher prices than past purchases; but yowza they were delicious!). We had been trying to chase down this fruit vendor for several weeks, but didn't know his schedule. (Now we have his business card.) From this bounty, I canned up 15 quarts of peaches; the rest we ate fresh. Peaches are – hands down and by a wide margin – my all-time favorite fruit.

Lastly, of course, I canned the blueberries.

I'm also washing and selling some surplus canning jars that didn't sell at the yard sale. Most of these are half-pint jam and jelly jars, which I simply don't use.

Have I mentioned how much I love fall? Canning and autumn are forever entwined in my mind.

Hmm .... what can I can up next? Hopefully by this time next year, our garden will be up and running, and I'll have lots more ways to celebrate fall.

Sunshine in a jar

It's peach-canning season.

Someone from a friend's church makes a run to Yakima every year for peaches. At $15 for a 20-lb. box, it's hard to beat the prices. This year I ordered five boxes -- one box for fresh eating (I love LOVE LOVE peaches!), four boxes for canning.

Canning 80 lbs. of peaches is a serious, day-long affair. I've found it's easiest if I set up "stations" in the kitchen. This is my scalding station:

My cooling station:

My peeling station:

My peeled fruit station:

My jar station:

and my syrup station:

This allows me to get into a rhythm. Some peaches are scalding, others are cooling, while I peel yet another batch. When I have a full bowl, I stop and slice, and fill jars...

...then top them with syrup.

Before capping the jars, I wipe the rims to get any spilled syrup or peach pulp off. This also allows me to check for any nicks I may have missed.

When the jars are all filled, the stove is then free to start processing. First I scalded my Tattler lids.

Peaches are processed in a water-bath, so I got my two biggest pots (using racks on the bottom, of course). The bigger pot held seven quarts, the smaller one five, so I could process 12 quarts at a time.

Quarts are processed at a rolling boil for 30 minutes. I set two kitchen timers up to monitor both pots separately.

After removing a batch but before putting in another batch, I pre-warmed the jars in hot water so they wouldn't break when I immersed them in the water-bath.

Batch by batch, I got the jars processed until by the end of a long and exhausting day, 35 quarts were cooling on the counter.

By the next morning, I was in more of a position to admire my handiwork.

However I didn't want to put the peaches away into the pantry until I washed the jars. There's always a bit of overflow which causes stickiness.

Then I washed the rings, a boring but necessary task.

Canned peaches are like sunshine in a jar.

Canning peaches

If I've been rather quiet on the blog lately, it's because I've been up to my elbows in peaches.

A week or two ago, I called a friend who has a family member who makes an annual run to Yakima for peaches for their church. It's not unusual for these folks to bring back hundreds of twenty-pound boxes at the extraordinary price of $16/box. I asked if I could put in an order for four boxes (80 lbs.).

To my surprise, my friend called on Monday and said the peaches were in. That was quick!

Peaches are my flat-out, hands-down, out-of-the-ballpark favorite fruit by an order of magnitude even over strawberries. They are things of great and artistic beauty.

But even things of great and artistic beauty must be preserved before they go bad. Yesterday the peaches had ripened to their optimal sweetness, and it was time to buckle down and can them.

Older Daughter, of course, is at school in Ohio, and Younger Daughter was at a book convention, so it was up to me to get these babies in jars.

So I set up a sort of production line. The pot on the stove is for dipping peaches in near (but not quite) boiling water to slip the skins; the white bowl is for cooling the peaches once they've been dipped.

Cooling peaches. I worked in batches of ten at a time.

Peaches with the skins slipped off.

Making syrup. I use a two:one ratio of water:sugar.

Once a batch of fruit was peeled, I sliced and filled jars...

...then filled the jar with syrup and put it aside.

I got a fairly smooth rhythm going: peaches heating, cooling, peeling, slicing, filling jars, and topping with syrup.

I turned the last few batches into purée since there's nothing finer for flavoring ice cream or yogurt.

I ended with four and a half quarts of purée, which I froze.

Gradually the boxes emptied.

I left the fourth box half-full for fresh eating.

Besides the purée, I ended up with 29 quarts of sliced peaches.

I thought they looked lovely in the sunshine.

I water-bathed them for 25 minutes. I could only fit twelve jars between my two largest pots, so I did them in batches. During the third batch, one of the jars broke. It happens.

28 quarts and a bit over a gallon of purée -- not a bad haul for winter indulgence.