Just when you thought we were shifting into fall recipes, I’m sneaking one last summer preserve onto the blog. You see, about three weeks ago, the folks from the Washington State Fruit Commission sent me one last box of peaches to close out the 2018 Canbassador season. These gorgeous, fragrant peaches arrived right around the time that I had a minor surgical procedure (nothing critical, but it slowed me down for a bit) and so I needed to make something easy.
Slow cooker fruit butter. This is a topic I’ve talked about at length over the years. This time I made it even easier. I washed the peaches, cut them into quarters, popped out the pits, and put the quarters into my 6 quart slow cooker. All told, I used about eight pounds of peaches, but you can vary it up depending on the size of your cooker and how many peaches you have to use.
Once the cooker was filled, I covered it tightly and set it to run on low for 8 hours. That’s enough time to soften the peaches enough to easily puree them smooth with an immersion blender. Once they were smooth, I once again ran the cooker on low for a series of three 8-hour sessions, this time with the lid cocked so that the evaporating water could escape.
Once there was no longer an water puddling out of the butter, the cooking process was done. I pureed it again to make it smooth, tasted, and added a bit of sugar to sweeten (all told, I used about 3/4 cup). Then I scraped it into an 8 cup measuring to get a clear idea of my yield.
Because white peaches are lower in acid than yellow ones, they need to be acidified like tomatoes. My yield was precisely 8 cups, so I added five tablespoons of bottled lemon juice. That’s one tablespoon per pint, plus a little extra just to be safe.
Once all the calculations and acidification was complete, I funneled the butter into pint jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Into the water bath the jars went for 15 minutes. An easy preserving project, done in pieces.
