Preserving peaches

I heard the peach harvest this year was exceptional, and from what I saw at the orchards it was not a lie or a marketing ploy. I made the drive to a local orchard my grandmother favored for peaches and brought home a half-bushel of Bounty. They were huge! 

This local orchard has been family-owned and operated for a few generations. I like to see that sort of stability. Anyway, I went and bought peaches. 

These peaches were, no lie, bigger than my fist. I'd never heard of Bounty peaches, but they looked and smelled wonderful, plus they're a freestone variety. I've since learned they were developed at the USDA peach breeding program at Kearneysville, West Virginia, which is just a tad more than half an hour from the manor. 

Once I had the peaches home, I immediately began to process them, canning them in pint jars. I got twenty-four pints of canned peaches and one batch of peach jelly. It was an intense two days but very much worth it.

With so many pints on the shelf, I won't need to can peaches again next year. I suspect it will take two pints to make a pie, but that's okay. I didn't want to process them in quarts and risk opening a jar to have peaches for dessert and not using the entire contents over the course of a few days. 

Home-canned fruit is good in the sealed jar on the shelf for at least eighteen months. I personally am not worried about fruit that is jarred longer so long as the seal is intact. 

And that's the key to safe consumption. The seal must remain intact. If you take a jar off the shelf and the lid falls or lifts off in your hand, throw the food out and sterilize the jar. Don't risk eating it. It rarely happens, but a seal can fail so be mindful of it. 

I'm looking forward to canning apples, but that won't be such as intense process. Apples keep longer than peaches so I won't need to do them all at once. I'll also be putting apples in quart jars. Some of the newer varieties such as Gala are available now, but I want Stayman or Winesap which are older varieties and will, I hope, capture the flavor of my grandmother's pies. 

Summer fruit and winter pies and cobblers. It's worth the work. 

If you want to learn more about canning, please visit the National Center for Home Food Preservation at https://nchfp.uga.edu/. This is your preserving bible. 

The Lady of The Hideaway

Peaches anyone?

It's decision time. Do I get a bushel of peaches, or do I pass on them until next year? I'm definitely on the fence about peaches. 

My grandmother always canned peaches. It didn't matter if she still had a few jars left over from the previous year, when the peach harvest was happening, peaches were processed. My grandfather had a couple of dwarf peach trees, but there were problems when he'd only bring in a few peaches at a time. Processing just two or three quarts of anything at a time is labor and time-intensive. I don't like to preserve anything if I can't fill the canner. 

That's a problem I won't have. Having been an eyewitness to what the deer can do to fruit trees, I never planted any. Nor will I. If you'd like to read The Apple Tree Story, it's over at Between the Keys. True story, too, and it explains why I won't bother with fruit trees. 

But back to the question of the day. Do I go to the orchard and get a bushel of peaches? I can make a batch of peach jam, peach pepper jam, maybe a peach chutney, peach pie filling, and plain peaches. If I do it this year, I'm likely set for peaches for the next two, possibly three years. We're told that home-canned foods are good for eighteen months, but the truth is it lasts longer if the seal is intact. Would I stretch it past three years? Probably not, but two years isn't a problem for me. 

I'm leaning towards doing peaches. It'll add variety to our winter menu, something we desperately need. We're like most people in that we gravitate toward the "easiest to cook" menu. I want to do better and better needs to include peaches. 

The good news is I won't need to try to do everything today. There's time to join Himself for a cup of coffee before I head out to the orchard. I want to make a few phone calls to see which storefront has what variety and for how much. I know I want a freestone variety and not a cling. I think my grandmother preferred Red Haven, but there are newer varieties out there. 

Home food preservation is a brave new world to me. My grandmother would be amazed at the changes in our foods and the shortcuts we now have to "putting up" canned goods. 

For better or worse, peaches, here we come!

The Lady of The Hideaway