Peach Butter
Peach season is in full swing, and I couldn’t be happier. Peaches are my favorite fruit hands down. I love having canned peaches in the pantry for spur-of-the-moment desserts, and peach jam for toast and biscuits. Except peach jam has soooo much sugar in it.
That’s why I love peach butter so much. It has all the peach flavor mixed with cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, with a whole lot less sugar. I feel so much better about eating peach butter than peach jam.
I found this recipe on pickyourown.org and really like it. I made a few tweaks, of course – I seem to be incapable of using a recipe without tweaking it.
The two significant tweaks were to replace the allspice with nutmeg (because I didn’t have any) and to use my food mill to prepare the peaches instead of going through the blanching, peeling, and chopping steps. We have the Back To Basics food strainer
, which is excellent, especially for big jobs. But most of the time, I use the Roma strainer (which we call the “popper” because of the noise it makes). It’s much easier to put together, take apart, clean, and use. Either way, a food stainer, in my opinion, is priceless if you make a lot of apple sauce or tomato juice. Or peach butter…
How to make delicious peach butter
- Peaches – about 35 for a 6-quart crockpot full
- 2 Tablespoons ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 4 cups sugar, or to taste
Wash, pit, and quarter peaches. Run peaches through the food mill. You’ll probably want to run the peels back through a couple of times to make sure you get all the pulp. Or you can follow the directions for peeling them on pickyourown.org. Pour the peach pulp into a 6-quart crockpot and stir in the cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Cook down until the peach butter is the desired thickness. I usually cook mine on low overnight. Stir in sugar to taste, jar, and process in a water bath canner.
I believe most fruit jams, jelly, and butters are processed for 10-15 minutes. I usually turn my jars upside down for five minutes to sterilize the lid with the hot butter, and very rarely have one go “bad”.
Enjoy!
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