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Peaches are incredibly delicious. My kids will actually eat them! But fresh peaches are only good for a very short window of time unless you properly preserve them. In this video, I'll show you the method I've been using to can peaches since my childhood.
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0:00
Well, my friends, today we are canning peaches
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The reason for that is I just went over to my parents' house. They have this little orchard there in their backyard, and we kind of have this deal
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I help them out with it all the time, and we get all the fruit and stuff that we want
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and we use that garden space a ton. So you're probably going to see a fair amount of that space here on this channel
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And anyway, I was over there, and the peach trees were just laden, and not only that
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at least a couple of the trees were fully ripe, and it was absolute time
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So I took the kids over there, took Julie, my wife over there, and we loaded up 5 boxes
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of peaches. We usually only fill them up about that high because if you fill them too full when they're
0:43
ripe, they just smash the ones on bottom. So usually about 2 to 3 peaches high
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And it's time to go ahead and can them. So today I want to walk through that entire process and what that looks like
0:53
First things first, we have a lot of jars. We reuse them year after year after year
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And when we do, I always store them upside down. I've learned this lesson
1:01
The reason why is I store them in the garage, and they just get covered in dust
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So I end up with dust on the bottom instead of having a whole bunch of dust on the inside
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Even so, and even though I store them clean, I go ahead and I clean all of my jars
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That's step number one. I rinse them off with warm water. I put them in this hot sudsy water and clean them out real quick
1:21
Because they're already clean, it's a really quick process. I also go ahead and rinse off the little rings
1:26
Again, just to make sure that we're minimizing the possibility of stuff getting into the
1:32
actual jar itself. Now while those are over there drying, I'm going to go ahead and set up a whole bunch
1:37
of stuff just to make sure that everything's ready to go. Canning is kind of a big process and there's a lot of moving pieces
1:43
And so if I can get everything ready to go, it makes it super easy. I'm going to go ahead right now and I'm going to mix up some light syrup
1:50
Light syrup is just a mixture of about 2 1⁄4 cups of sugar for every 5 1⁄4 cups of water
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So I go ahead actually and what's in this pan here is a double batch of syrup
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10 1⁄2 cups of water as well as what does that make? 4 1⁄2 cups of sugar
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I'm also going to go ahead and put another pot on the stove full of water and I'm going to get it boiling
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We're going to be using that to blanch the peaches. I then take the jars and I put them in the oven
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I set the oven temperature to 220 degrees. That's going to help keep those jars sterilized and have them be warm when I go ahead and
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add the peaches in the warm syrup. If the jars are warm throughout this whole process and when I put them in the canner
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they're going to be a lot less likely to break. I'm also going to take all my lids and I'm going to put them into a small pot of water
2:33
and I'm going to get that boiling too. That's going to sterilize my lids and it's also going to make the little gasket a little
2:39
bit softer and make it so that it seals a little bit better when I initially put it together
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Now, if these lids look a little bit different to you, it's because I'm going to try out some reusable lids here in this process
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I'm also going to do some with regular ordinary lids like these ones that everybody mostly
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uses, but I'm going to try out two different brands of reusable lids
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I'll talk about that in another video here on this channel. I just want to test them out and see, first of all, how well the reusable lids work, but
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also I'm trying out a couple of different brands. I have seven of each of the two different brands as well as a whole bunch using the
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regular lids and we're going to see how they compare over time. Anyway, back to it
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Next, I'm going to go ahead and fill up one side of my sink with cold tap water and I'm just going to put the peaches in there to soak, just give them a little bit of a rinse off
3:28
I'm also going to go ahead and fill a large bowl full of water with a little bit of lemon
3:32
juice in it. The reason for that is it keeps the fruit from browning a bunch more
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As I cut up these peaches, I then put them in this lemon juice mixture
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What you're going to want to do is for about every four cups of water that you put in, you put in about one quarter of a cup of lemon juice
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This large bowl that I have here has 12 cups of water and three quarters of a cup of lemon juice
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Now I'm going to fill up the other side of my sink with cold water. I'm going to get the cold tap water and then I'm actually going to dump ice in here
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Fortunately, we have an ice maker because we go through a ton of ice in our household, so we're just going to run that thing outright and just have as much ice going as we can
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because as I put hot peaches into this side of the sink, that ice is quickly going to melt
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Now I've done this a lot of times before. I've done it using just cold tap water and I've done it using ice water
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When I do it with ice water, it works a lot better. So here's what we're doing now
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We're taking these peaches and we're putting them into this boiling hot water in this pot
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on the stove. It sits in that water for just about 60 seconds
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Occasionally, if the peaches aren't super ripe, I'll go just a little longer
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Maybe 80 or 90 seconds at the most. Usually 40 to 60 seconds is ideal and with ripe peaches, you don't want to go a lot longer
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than that. It'll start to cook them and make them extra mushy. As soon as that time has passed, I start checking these peaches
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If we see that the skin is starting to split a little bit on at least some of the peaches
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that's exactly what we're looking for. So I'm going to scoop these out. I use one of these strainers here
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I scoop them out and I put them into that ice water. You can see that after going in the ice water, the skin on most of these peaches is just
5:09
going to peel off super easy. Occasionally, you get one that doesn't peel super easy but most of the time, it works
5:16
pretty well. Then I'm going to go back and I'm going to go blanch some more. You see I hand off the peach that I just pulled out of the water
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I hand that off to my wife, Julie. She's going to get started cutting
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Canning with a partner is fantastic. It goes well about twice as fast
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There are a lot of steps that can be done simultaneously. For example, I can keep blanching and get a bunch of peaches ready to go while she starts cutting
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Then once I'm done blanching a bunch, I can join her and I can help cut two so we can
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get through this process a lot faster. When you do it alone, you find yourself going back and forth a lot
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All right, so here we are. The very first peach I get and what happens
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Turns out it's one where the skin didn't come off. This peach is not that ripe
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I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to include it. It's going to be mixed in with a lot of more ripe peaches and it's not so bad that I wouldn't
6:00
want to eat it. Once it's been sitting in that syrup for a while, it'll be good
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It'll taste good later on. But it's just not quite as ripe. So, the skin didn't come right off
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Now, I'm cutting these peaches. I'm going to go ahead and cut them in half. I take the pit out and then usually I quarter them and then I kind of scrape out the inside
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That inside right around the pit is kind of hard. You get some kind of hard pieces in there and you get some fibers in there
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And for canned peaches, it just tastes so much better when you don't have it
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If you want to half your peaches instead of quartering them like we just did, which is
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pretty common with a lot of the smaller peaches that we got. We went ahead and just halved a lot of those
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You can take a spoon and just kind of scrape out the middle too. That works really, really well. Alright
6:43
Once those are cut up and we've basically got this red bowl filled up, we're certainly
6:47
not done. We're going to be going back and taking these same steps over and over and over again as
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we get through the peaches. We just don't have enough bowls and lemon juice and water to cut up all the peaches
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before we fill the bottles. And there's really no reason to do that
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Once we have enough, that bowl filled, we go ahead and start putting them in the jar
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Now you'll notice here she's putting them in the jar. She's trying to put them as much as possible so that the open side, the cut middle part
7:12
is face down. You're going to get a lot more peaches in the jar that way
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But you can never get it perfect and it's just not worth wasting your time doing that
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So what do we do? We put them in. Sometimes we'll kind of shake the jar. We kind of move them around with this little tool here
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That tool there by the way is your head space gauge. It's got the little steps on it that makes it so that you can see just like if the head
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space, we'll show you that in just a second, but if that's just right
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But also you use the other side to kind of prod those a little bit. We're also going to use it to get the air bubbles out once we start filling with syrup
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So once we got the jar good and full and you can see she's just packing them in there
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We want to get as many in as we can and that's just because as you go ahead and cook these
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or rather as you put them through the canning process, through the water bath, you're going
7:59
to see that the peaches kind of just sort of condense and you're going to end up with like a big space of just syrup at the bottom
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You'll notice this is a completed jar and it doesn't look like it's overfilled, but
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yet when we put the raw peaches in there, we crammed them in
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That's just how we do it. And that way we just don't end up with just a ton of syrup
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Rather we get a lot more fruit in each jar. All right
8:23
So that's filled. We're going to fill it up and then we use that headspace gauge
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For peaches, we want a half an inch. That's two steps on that gauge
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So if you get that, you'll know the headspace is just right. Then she passes it over to me if I'm there and available
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Otherwise, one person can do all this. But I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to wipe with just a damp rag so that there's
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no syrup and stuff right on the very top. It's going to help with the seal
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Now again, in this video, I'm showing you using these reusable lids
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If you use these regular lids, it's very easy. I use a little magnet. I pull them out and I just set it right on top with the reusable lids though
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It's a little bit more of a process. So that's what we showed here. Then I screw the bands on fairly loosely just until when you start to screw it like this
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if you're setting it, set it down on a table and you put one finger just to put a little
9:15
friction there and you start to screw the band on. As soon as that jar starts to turn, the band's on plenty tight
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If you tighten it down too much, it won't be able to vent while it's in the canner and
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you need it to be able to vent. You're trying to get the air out of it
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And then when it's done, the fruit and everything's going to shrink down in size and it's going
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to pull that lid on tight. That's the way the canning works. All right, now it's time to put them in the water bath
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I can fit seven at a time inside of this water bath
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Now you'll notice I'm doing this outside. There's a couple of reasons for that
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One, sometimes I overfill it with water because I want to make sure there's plenty
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And what happens? It just spills over. Well, if that's outdoors, no big deal
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Second of all, it's over 100 degrees outside right now here in Idaho
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And if I am like boiling this pot full of water inside my house, the amount of heat
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that's going to be just emanating from this thing makes your kitchen like unbearably hot
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So in the summertime especially, but really every time we can, we at least do the water
10:19
bath outside. As much of this as you can do outside as possible, the better, because your floor is going to
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get sticky. It's just a mess. So if you can do it outside, that's even better
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Anyway, so I do this outside. I put up to seven jars in
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With this water bath, it's really nice. It's got this rack so I can set them in and then I can lower the whole rack in together
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Now one thing that I'm careful of is I don't want the water like super duper boiling when
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I put these in unless the jars are really good and hot still. If they've been sitting too long and they've started to cool off and you put them straight
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into super hot boiling water, you'll tend to get this problem where a jar will just burst
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It'll just crack. This can happen for one of two reasons. One, it happens because the temperature changed too fast
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And so, it just cracks, it breaks. Just because glass is just not very elastic, obviously
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It's very, very brittle. And very reactive to temperature. The other reason this happens is if you over tighten those lids and the air can't escape
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it'll end up just bursting. And a lot of times, you'll see that happen right at the bottom. We'll see just the whole bottom comes off
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So, I just don't want the water boiling super hard. If the water isn't really bubbly, I'm okay with that at first
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Then I'll put the jars in. I'll get it really quickly back up to temperature with the jars inside the water bath
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As soon as it's at temperature, it's boiling like that, I'm going to set a timer for 25
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minutes for quart jars. 25 minutes is just right. Soon as that timer goes off, I'm going to go back out there and I'm going to pull those
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jars right out. Now, I don't usually lift that little tray back out, that little cage back out mostly
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because I don't want to burn my hands. I just use one of these grabbers to just grab them out jar by jar
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That brings the water level back down and then makes it so I can easily grab the cage, lift it up and then put new jars on it for the next batch of 7
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You can see this first 7, they did well. They all sealed just fine
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And when it comes again to these reusable lids, being able to test the seals a little bit different
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But you can see with these standard lids, basically what I'm looking for is after a bit of time has passed and they started to cool, all of the lids should suck in
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So, they shouldn't be able to pop up and down. So, that's why I'm going through and touching each one of the jars one by one
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You can see it visually, but I like to just touch them and just see if there's any give there
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If there's give, it tells you that it probably didn't seal all the way
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And if that happens, you have a couple of options. One, put in the refrigerator and just eat it within the next week or so
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You have some delicious peaches. The other option is you can go ahead and reprocess it
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The downside of that is you're putting it in boiling water for 25 minutes, it does kind
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of cook the peaches a little bit. And the peaches will get softer if you do that
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So, there's kind of that pros and cons there. You can go ahead
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I mean, if you have a bunch of them that fail, go ahead and reprocess them. It's just fine
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Just know that if only like one failed, you might be better off just throwing it in the fridge so you don't end up getting a little bit mushier peaches
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That's really all it takes to cane your peaches. And all that's left after that is to label the jar
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Now, I use sticky labels for a reason. In this other little video that I made, I show exactly why I do that
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And realistically, it's just because that sharpie eventually washes off over time
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But these labels, they won't. Especially with these kind of one-time-use lids, the disposable ones
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I just stick it on the lid. It's going to last there forever and I don't ever need to worry about getting the sticker
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back off. But also, if you put stickers on the glass, then when you wash it in hot water again later
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usually it just rubs right off really well. But it sticks incredibly well. Anyway, I've made these templates here
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I really like having them. It looks nice. This has peaches on it
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And then what I do is I just write what it is. This is peaches. And I just print them all out and then I leave a spot where I can put the date
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The month and year. So I know how long my peaches have been being stored
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So I just take one of these and I center it right there on the lid
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And then I have peaches. I hope that video was helpful to you
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If you want to learn more about how to be more prepared for whatever's coming, canning
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is an important part of that. It's a way we preserve food. It's a way we're able to really use and make really good use of the food that we're able
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to grow. But we're all about preparedness here on this channel. So hopefully if that's something that interests you, you'll come back and we'll see you in
14:43
our next video on this channel. Bye
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