Naked Peaches

I love peaches! Yummy! They are so tasty.  My favorite peaches are my Grandma's canned peaches.  I can eat an entire jar in one sitting. She's given them to me as birthday presents because I love them so much.  I used to be horrible at sharing, aka I didn't share them AT ALL. But now, well, I still am probably horrible at sharing, but at least sometimes I offer.  Well, now my Grandma lives over 1000 miles away. And trying to get some of her peaches out here is a little tricky.  I decided to try my hand at canning peaches.  So that's what I did.  I bout a bushel of peaches, picked out the best, found a recipe online for non-pressure cooker canning recipe, bought some jar, and made a mess. And what did I end up with. 14 gorgeous looking jars of peaches! I am so excited! I did have two little jars for leftovers that wouldn't fit in the quart sized jars, so we've already eaten some. Even as good as they are, they are still not quite like Grandma's.

I found that canning peaches is easier than freezing corn.  My last bulk project a week ago was buying 8 dozen ears of corn, husking them, blanching them, cutting the corn off the cob and freezing them. And that makes a HUGE mess.  Corn kernels everywhere. But now we have 18 gallon bags of delicious corn to eat all year.  After finishing 2 dozen, I thought to myself "What was I thinking getting 8 dozen?" But I'm glad I did. The fresh corn is so much better than anything I've tasted. And I'm excited to be able to eat it all year long.  And now I have peaches.

What I thought was going to be the worst part of canning was peeling the peaches.  I made peach crisp earlier in the week, and had to peel 10 peaches.  You look a lot pealing them with a knife, or at least I do because I don't get very close.  Luckily, when reading about canning, I found the easiest way to peal peaches.  It's so great I'm going to use it again on Sunday when we make dutch oven peach cobbler. YUM!  Here's the trick.

Heat a large pot of water and bring to a boil.
Fill sink or bucket with ice water.
Place whole peaches in boiling water for 30 seconds (more the higher altitude you are)
Take out peaches from boiling water and place in ice bath for a few minutes (I kept them in there while I put all the peaches in the boiling water until I slice them all)
Skin will rub right off of the peaches.  I suggested cutting the peach in half before pulling all the skin off.  Most of the skin will rub off just by cutting in half.

This was so easy to do, and not that hard.  The weirdest part.... naked peaches.  Sometimes all the skin would come off a whole peach.  Peaches feel weird naked.  Plus my hands were wet and the peach just came out of an ice bath.  But naked peaches are beautiful.  And I'm all for no skin on my peaches.



Here's the link to my instructions I followed for canning my peaches.  I'm sure it works the same for other fruits. (I did light syrup and didn't sprinkle anything on my peaches to prevent them from turning brown, and they didn't)

Happy Canning!

http://www.pickyourown.org/peachescanning.htm

PS. Right after I finished my first batch, I found out 6 jars of my Grandma's peaches were on there way to me via some one moving out our way.  So EXCITED!!!!! So many Yummy Peaches to Eat!