How to make peach butter

My peach trees are heavy with fruit.  It’s been a mad dash to preserve them before they go bad (why is it that peaches seem to go off in like a day?)

Most peach recipes call for peeling the fruit first, a potentially burdensome task if you’re putting up 10-15 pounds of the stuff.

Here is the fastest and easiest way I have found to perform this critical task.  This method also works great with tomatoes.

I just learned that produce loses nearly half its nutrients within a few days of being picked, unless it’s preserved or cooled, according to the USDA. Preserving peaches the day they’re picked ensures optimum nutrient retention.  Try to use ripe, not under ripe, peaches since this peeling method doesn’t work well, otherwise.

First, make an X in the bottom of each peach with a knife.

Add the peach to a pot of boiling water….

….and boil 10-15 seconds to loosen the skin. Any longer will cook the peach, which you may not want.

Do a bunch simultaneously if you’re a “canner on-the-go.” Or is that a contradiction?

Voila — the skin is sufficiently loosened for easy peeling.

I followed a Ball recipe for peach butter, but the problem with the Ball book is that fruit recipes tend to be so stinking sweet. The peach butter recipe, for example, called for 4 cups of sugar to 4 1/2 cups of peaches, tarted up with the zest and juice from one lemon. That combination seemed rather cloying, so I took liberties with their recipe — which isn’t recommended by the canning police (USDA, Ball, etc), by the way  — by reducing the amount of sugar to 2 cups, and adding the juice/zest of 2 lemons, plus the juice of 1 lime. I likes my fruit butter tart with a touch of sweet!

Two cups of sugar, not four.

Because I added more liquid and less sugar, the butter was considerably runnier and therefore had to cook down a lot longer than what the recipe called for. I ended up letting the peaches cook down for an hour and a half. I also made sure to cook it in very wide-bottomed pan. Exposing the fruit to a greater surface area condenses the butter faster.

Testing for consistency by using a chilled plate or spoon: If the juice separates from the fruit, it needs to cook down more. Mine needed to cook down more.

After it reached the proper consistency — that is, looked like it could be spread on a piece of toast without dribbling — I packed the butter into pint jars, leaving a 1/4-inch headspace, and processed them in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

This stuff will go down smooove come January.