Peaches

Howdy,
Canning peaches this week. I got 9 qts, sliced peaches. I make a wicked good Peach Cobbler!

I also made Peach Salsa. First time, got 7 3/4 pts. 98% of veggies used came from our Local Farmers Market. Samples tasted "wicked good"...heard that before?

No photos yet, no cell phone and new tech is beyond me

Super tasty!

Well done - that's a lot of peaches to contend with.  My peach is a late ripening variety, which grew itself from a stray pit - the flesh is fairly dense, but makes an excellent chutney.

Peach salsa is something I keep meaning to try. Those 9 quarts of sliced peaches will be good come winter, and the chutney idea is solid too - peaches with a bit of ginger make a great one.

I processed mine yesterday. Two quarts of peach pie filling in the freezer, 9 pints of canned peaches, and 1/2 gallon for peach lemonade concentrate.

If you've the patience, you could make a peach wine.

From there, you could -hypothetically- make a peach brandy.

If you wanted to get rustic, you could make a peach-jack by freezing off the water, but that does leave behind methanol, acetone, and fusel oils which can make for a crazy drunk, wicked hangover, and long-term problems if you drink too much. You can filter it through activated charcoal and have a much cleaner, but less fruity product.

If you wanted to get really crazy, you could make a port with your hypothetical brandy and some partially fermented peach wine, and then age it an oak barrel. You'd want to educate yourself on this process, because it's not a "wingin' it" kind of situation.

Snarl. Can you tell I have a chip on my shoulder? I just want to say that if it ever happens that my three peach trees all bear heavily, and I have to COPE WITH an overabundance of peaches, I will manage somehow. I will can peaches till I run out of quart jars, can peach jam till I run out of pint jars, and then put peach halves in my dehydrator. Not to mention pigging out on peach pie and peach cobbler and giving away more of that mountain of imaginary peaches. For most of us, a year when you have an overabundance of any crop is a good time to preserve that crop if at all possible, because leaner times are coming. When late frosts kill your peach crop the next two years, you'll be glad you spent all those sweaty hours canning. And even the ones you gave away tend to return in some other form, as people like to reciprocate.

Yes, here on the East Coast we have a Peach Galore year, the branches are bending down to the ground...
Thanks for all the shared ideas for cobblers, sugared peach canning and so on.
I freeze a lot of vitamixed peach sauce for later smoothies or desserts.
However, I was wondering if anybody ever tried to just cook peaches down on low heat like we would do with plums or apples?
Might try that, if anybody has experience with something like this, I'd be happy to hear...
Peach on🍑 everything is peachy😀

After waiting seven years...which is a very long time given that peach trees aren't known for their longevity, my tree finally produced for the first time last year, and boy, did they ever!  I canned 24 quarts of sliced peaches, another 24 pints of peach salsa (The recipe didn't call for any salt, and it took about 6 months to settle in with the right flavor, but it was worth it. I often used it as my side vegetable dish!) I made quite a few jars of peach mustard, but I need to find a better recipe as this one is too runny. It was wonderful in the crockpot with pork loin, though. Talk about an easy meal! I made peach wine, which also takes a while to age.  It tastes stronger than other varieties I've made, but it is really good. Maybe with time it will mellow more. I also gave away a ton of peaches to friends and neighbors.  I'm looking out at my tree and realizing that I will be very busy again this year processing peaches!  My quince didn't do anything last year, but this year there should be enough to also can, so that will be a nice treat that will augment that flavor profile.

Whether we have too many (how many is too many peaches?) or not enough, I like to toss at least one peach and some extra butter into whatever meat is cooking in the skillet. Beef, pork, chicken, fish - doesn't matter. That little bit of sweet in the pan sauce wins every time.

Afterthought: I just visited the Apple Butter thread, where they discussed adding - or completely substituting - apples for tomatoes in ketchup. I'm a fan of adding apple to tomatoes for the sweet part of the ketchup. Same goes for peaches! Cook peaches and tomato puree down to a brown umami sauce, add spices to taste and bottle. I'd share a recipe if I had one, but for ketchup I always manage to find something online under "homemade ketchup" to get the right proportions of vinegar and spices.