Making Peach Jam

A little while ago, I wrote about how we were starting to harvest our peaches. They were our first few peaches of the season. We noticed that they were starting to fall of the tree and we thought that we still had a couple of days before the rest got ready. Boy, were we wrong!

Just within the last day or two, they have begun falling at an increasing rate. Every day, we go out and put up another couple of dozen that have fallen from the trees. Needless to say, over the last couple of days we have accumulated a good amount of peaches. So, what did we do with them? We decided to try some recipes for making peach jam.

We did not want to start canning a bunch of jam without knowing what it taste like. Often, we alter recipes to reduce the amount of sugar and add more fruit than what the recipe suggests. So, we made about a quart jar of jam to try it.

It was a success! While this will be good to have on hand during the winter, we do not want to can only jam. We are also thinking about canning sliced peaches. In the next few days, we will be cleaning our trees and turning the rest into either jam or canned peaches.

This is the recipe we used to make our peach jam.

First, we peeled, pitted, and then cut the peaches into chunks. We used about 14-to-16 medium sized peaches. To save time, we put the chunks in a food processor until we got our desired consistency or size of the pieces of peaches you want in your jam. This is not required, but the alternative is cooking the peach chunks in a sauce pan and mashing them to desired chunks size you prefer with a spatula or strainer, which we find to be a little bit more of a hassle. Then, we added about 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and put it on the stove on medium to high heat. Once it was brought to a boil, we reduced the heat to medium and added the sugar. This particular recipe called for 2½ cups of sugar, but our peaches are very ripe and sweet tasting on their own. So,we only added about a cup of sugar and it came out tasting great (we don’t like our jam too sweet). When adding the sugar I always advise people to pour a little in to taste and then add more if needed, but once you put too much in, it cannot be taken out. After the sugar is added and stirred in, it needs to be brought to a boil again. You need to making sure, the whole time, that the jam is being stirred frequently so it does not stick on the bottom of the pan and burn. It should continue to boil until the jam has cooked down and resembles the jam like consistency you like (usually it takes about 30-45 minutes, sometimes longer). You will for sure know it is ready when it sticks to the back of a chilled spoon. From there, we give it enough time to cool to the point where it can be put into a ball jar and chilled in the fridge (chilling in the fridge will also help it “set up” better and resemble store bought jam). A couple of hours later, you will have the best peach jam you have ever tasted.

Thanks for reading!