A couple of weeks ago I took the girls to a local orchard to pick peaches and blackberries. I have been doing a lot of canning and that weekend I made 8 pints of peach jam and canned about 8 pints of sliced peaches before I ran out of canning steam that week.
Last week I did a lot ofsoap batching and kind of never really got around to finishing the rest of the peaches. I really needed to deal with them, so last night I sat down with my ceramic peeler and watched some stuff that was on my DVR. Yes, yes, yes, blanch and blah blah blah. Yes, you can peel peaches that way, but you can also just peel them. I have a ceramic peeler so I just sat down and started peeling. I caught the skins in a bowl for the chickens.
After I was done, it looked like this.
I still had half a movie left, so the girls got the peach peels, the bowl got washed and I started cutting them into slices like this.
My original plan was to try out a recipe for peach BBQ Sauce and can some pie filling with the rest. Well…. me trying out recipes means that I kinda look at one for inspiration, and then I just do my own thing. The net result was that instead of using 6 cups of chopped peaches, I used 12. Certain people also kept taking bowls of peach slices and stuffing them in their faces, so in the end, all I was left with was enough peach slices for lunch. So much for pie filling but the summer isn’t over yet, and there are still fall peaches.
When I cook, I throw all of the basic ingredients into a pot and then taste and add things. I did the same thing this time. I have more or less reconstructed the recipe I used, but please note that the measurements are pretty approximate. If you are one of those people who needs exact measurements and specific instructions…. You should probably just move along now. I’m not your gal.
Recipe:
- 12 cups chopped, pitted, and peeled peaches
- 1 finely chopped onion
- 2 Tbsp chopped garlic (consider roasted)
- 2 cups maple syrup (use the real thing! no brown corn syrup!)
- .75 cup apple cider vinigar
- .66cupsoy sauce
- .33 cup A-1
- .33 Blackstrap molassis
- .33 Real lemon juice
- .5 Tbsp vanilla
- 10 drops sesame oil (optional)
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 tsp mustard powder (don’t use prepared mustard)
- 4 tsp sea salt
- .5 tsp cumin
- .5 tsp cloves
- .5 tsp ginger
- .25 tsp tumeric
- .25 allsprice
- .5 hickory seasoning
The basic ingredients went into a pot like this:
I simmered it a good long while. Then I got impatient (shocking, right?) and took out my handy dandy immersion blender and liquefied it.
I let it cook down a little and the random tasting started. Monkeygirl thought it needed sugar (no surprise there) and Pavan thought Cumin (she criminally abuses cumin) and the hubby said more salt and peaches. All I could taste is the raw garlic and sesame oil flavors. If you decide to make this, you should definitely sauté the garlic first, use roasted or powdered. I made the mistake of putting the raw garlic in with everything else and it was not only strong, it tasted raw. I put about 20 drops of sesame oil in. It was clearly at least 10 drops too many.
There are no pepper products in my batch, and I’m sure that you could get a much different flavor profile with the inclusion of some bell peppers, some paprika, pepper flakes or even some jalapenos.
When it finally got to the point it was cooked down, I put it in clean, hot jars (it yielded 4 quarts and a pint) left 1 inch headspace (prolly more than it needed). Given the acidity of the peaches, lemon juice and vinegar, I had zero doubt the acid was high enough to process in a waterbath canner. I processed them for 25 minutes (which was overkill for the pint, but meh) and this is the final product.
Feel free to wing it and modify as needed! It is kind of a hybrid sauce; halfway between a sweet and smoky, thick and sticky St. Louis Style and a tangy vinegar based Carolina style. Next time, like I said, I will use roasted garlic rather than fresh and cut way back on the sesame oil. It added a great flavor, but is just too strong.
