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 deserts, 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 major tweaks were to change the allspice to nutmeg (because I didn’t have allspice) and to use my food mill to prepare the peaches instead of going through all the blanching, peeling, and chopping steps. We have the Back To Basics food strainer
, which is great, 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 much 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 pealing them on pickyourown.org Pour the peach pulp into a six-quart crock pot 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 water bath canner.
I believe most fruit jam, jelly, and butters are processed for 10-15 minutes. I usually just 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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