Smashed BBQ Peach Jam

When life hands you smashed up peaches and all your burners are in use for canning, its time to make Peach - vanilla - honey jam on the BBQ.

As mentioned in last week's post about our peach canning odyssey, I am never ever peeling another peach.

All pealing peaches does is take perfect lovely wonderful peaches like these...

 and waste your time blanching, plunging...

 peeling... 

only to end up having them go to total smashed up mush when you go to cut them.

It was so terribly sad that I'll show you this lovely picture of pre-smashed peeled peaches as I did not take one of the carnage.

I do pretty much all of our cooking out on the deck in the warmer months.  Our kitchen is small and the deck has much better light.  It also has the Barbecue.

Which is nice when you have a bunch of rapidly browning peaches, a full freezer, and no free burner on the stove as you are in the middle of canning a @#&*^@#! bushel of peaches.

The main danger of bbqed jam is that the wasps go crazy. As you can see I left the peaches pretty chunky.

Peaches are pretty high in pectin and set into jam quite nicely without adding very much extra sugar.  Almost all  fruit is also considered high acid so you don't need to be all that careful with your recipe like some other things (like tomatoes, or green beans).  

I simply added a little lemon juice to prevent browning and keep that acid level high, a teaspoon of vanilla, a cup of honey and a cup of organic white sugar, which was really an accident as I forgot we still had some of this wonderful honey. The ratio was around 25% sugar/honey and 75% fruit.  

I had been taught that jam needed to be 40% sugar-60% fruit but recently found out from a canning class at the local Mennonite Church that wasn't true.  As long as it's high acid fruit and there's enough naturally occurring pectin, the amount of sugar is purely dependant on taste.

Volia! A near disaster prevented! Delicious jam, slow cooked outside for the neighbours to smell. 

Some final notes: It took about an hour to set, then I jared it up and put in the already going waterbath for ten minutes.