When I teach classes, I’m often asked about peeling fruit. I typically tell people that I always peel peaches and apples, but leave the skins on nearly everything else. However, it looks like I might have to revise that statement, because the preserve I’m about to tell you about includes unpeeled peaches. Shocking, I know.
This particular recipe came about when I became the proud owner of both 10 pounds of cherries and a half bushel of rapidly ripening, very sweet, yellow peaches about ten minutes before I was leaving town for 2 1/2 days.
Both boxes of fruit were courtesy of the Washington State Fruit Commission, the folks behind the most fabulous website Sweet Preservation. When I signed on to be a Canbassador again this year, I didn’t realize that it was going to converge with the cherry challenge. Still, I am not one to shirk a canning challenge and so, when I got back to town, I went to work.
I made eight half pints of peach chutney (more on that tomorrow). I cooked up a smallish batch of honey-sweetened peach vanilla jam (look for it on Thursday). And I made these unpeeled, but very delicious, peach preserves. I also ate a whole bunch of these peaches just plain and raw (good lord, were they amazing).
I washed four pounds of peaches well, doing my best to rub away most of the exterior fuzzy. Then, I cut them into wedges, covered the fruit with 1 1/2 cups of honey, added some thin ribbons of lemon zest, and stirred it all together. It sat for an hour or so, until everything was juicy. Then I scraped it into a pan, brought it to a boil, funneled the peaches into prepared pint jars and processed them for 20 minutes (I used the processing time recommended by the NCHFP for pints of peach halves and slices).
It’s hard to tell from the picture of the jar up at the top of the post, but the peach slices are still quite distinct. My vision for these jars is that I’ll eat them with yogurt and granola or with oatmeal for breakfast later in the year. I often eat those same things with fresh, unpeeled peaches during the summer months and never mind the peels, so my guess is that I won’t mind them with the peels when they’re coming out of a jar. Here’s hoping that will prove to be true!
UPDATE: These peaches are delicious! The peels aren’t a textural issue at all.
Though it seems kind of hard to believe, this is the fourth year that I’ve been one of the Washington State Fruit Commission’s Canbassador. Last year, I made Oven-Roasted Nectarine Butter and Luisa Weiss’s Spiced Plum Butter. The year before, it was Italian Plum Jam with Star Anise and Honey-Sweetened Apricot Lavender Butter. And if you go all the way back to that first year, I made Apricot-Blackberry Jam and Pickled Sweet Cherries. These boxes of fruit have led to some very good eating over the last few years.
Lazy Peach Preserves
Ingredients
- 4 pounds peaches
- 1 1/4 cups honey
- zest of 1 lemon
Instructions
- Wash peaches well to remove fuzz. Slice the peaches into 12 to 16 slices per peach. Place in a bowl.
- Pour honey over peach slices. Add lemon zest and stir to combine. Cover the bowl with a plate or some plastic wrap (to keep any bugs out) and let the fruit sit for about an hour until the juices start to run.
- When you’re ready to cook, prepare a boiling water bath canner and 4 pint jars. Place lids in a small saucepan and bring to a bare simmer.
- Scrape the fruit into a large, non-reactive pan and bring to a boil, stirring regularly.
- Funnel fruit into the prepared jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Use a chopstick to remove any air bubbles.
- Wipe rims, apply lids and rings, and process in a boiling water bath canner for 20 minutes.
- When time is up, remove jars from canner and let them cool on a folded kitchen towel.
- Once jars are cool enough to handle, remove rings and test seals. Sealed jars can be stored on the pantry shelf for up to one year. Unsealed jars should be refrigerated and and used promptly.
loved this recipe! wondering if you think i can do this with strawberries, maybe with some added lemon. thanks!
You absolutely could. Strawberries are high in acid so it would be easy enough mimic this approach.
Hi! Should have consulted the recipe in detail before the peaches forced my hand to aspire to deliciousness, but what, and how, does ( for future reference and posterity) one “zest of 1 lemon thinly sliced” – both slice and zest? I must forge ahead with a guess, trusting your superb and tasty track record, but would be eternally grateful for a parsing of the above.
Ah. If you read the narrative of the post, you’ll see that what I did was I removed sections of the lemon peel with a vegetable peeler and the finely minced it with a knife. That’s how you get lemon zest, thinly sliced. But when the recipe was imported into the recipe plugin I use, it lost some of that detail. Honestly though, that seems like an awful lot of trouble looking back on it. Just zest the lemon with a microplane and move on with your day.
How many pints did you get from this recipe?
I say to prepare four pint jars in the recipe’s narrative so I assume that’s how many pints are yielded. It’s been an age since I made these, so I don’t remember much of the details.
Do you just bring it to a boil and then put in jar or do you cook them for a while before putting them in jars?
I just brought them to a boil. I didn’t want to cook the fruit too much as I wanted the slices to retain their shape as much as was possible.
I have made these several times now and shared this recipe widely. This is the only recipe I use for peaches. So easy and so amazing.
Thank you!
I am new to canning so I hope I did this correctly. I followed the directions to the letter but there wasn’t enough liquid to fill all the jars. So I boiled some water, added some sugar and lemon and filled the final jar.
The yield varies with this recipe. You just funnel the peaches into the jars until the jars are full. If you didn’t have enough liquid, you probably used too many jars. But what you did is also fine.
PS – Love your email address! DS9 is my favorite Star Trek series too.
Have you used these canned peaches for a pie?
I have not, but I bet they’d be delicious. They’d need some thickening, for sure.
I lucked upon your recipe today and made it with Rio Oso peaches from my tree. It came out amazing and tastes delicious. I added some ground ginger and cooked it for a couple hours on low until it thickened then processed in a water bath canner. I won’t make it any other way from now on…and that from the daughter of a Home Ec teacher mother. Too easy!
I’m so glad you like it!
Step 4 above — how long do you cook the preserves for? Thanks!
I bring it to a boil and once the fruit is hot through, it is done. This isn’t a long cooked, reduced preserve. It’s quick.
excellent recipe!
Thank you!
Great recipe! I had already canned some peach jam that I had peeled but I still had alot more peaches from my tree to deal with. I could not fathom peeling all those peaches again so I was happy to find your recipe. I was out of honey so I used sugar instead. It came out so tasty! Instead of zest, I added the juice of an entire lemon. I also diced and added the entire rind of the lemon I juiced. It is SO good.
Thanks for this wonderful recipe! As stated above, I changed it up a bit but that fact that you didn’t peel the peaches inspired me to try it.
I’m so glad I helped you make good use of your peaches! Enjoy!
I love your blog… I am usually wary of people posting canning recipes as I have found them, at times, not to adhere to safe canning guidelines, but you do your research! My question is about cherries and other stone fruits, preservation in alcohol, such as vodka, rum, and Everclear; a riff off rumtopf. With whole cherries I’ve been concerned about the skin keeping the alcohol out so I started using a toothpick to pierce the skin opposite the stem end. I have been storing everything in an extra pantry fridge since the product was not processed. Does heating cause the alcohol to evaporate to the point is would loose any preserving effect, or intoxicating effect for that matter? Also wondering if you could come up with something to approximate Luxardo Cherries- they’re REALLY expensive and I’d love to be able to make something similar.
Honestly, alcohol is such a powerful preservative that you don’t need to heat process your riff on rumtopf. Fruit in booze keeps for ages. Luxardo cherries are tough to replicate. You might take a look at my bourbon sour cherries. They get the closest. https://foodinjars.com/recipe/sour-cherry-preserves-with-bourbon/
What honey do you like to use.?
I use whatever it mild and not too precious. This isn’t the place for really expensive raw honey, as the cooking process robs it of its virtue.
Can one skip the honey and add half the amount of sweetener as sugar?
Yes!