Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
Pomegranate wine is easy to make at home with fresh pomegranates or pomegranate juice. It’s a traditional drink in eastern Europe and the middle east, and it’s still made today. Commercial bottles of pomegranate wine generally sell for more than $20 each and tend to be very dry and acidic. Making pomegranate wine at home costs about $2 per bottle, and you can adjust the sweetness to your own tastes.
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Autumn is cider season, but that means more than apple cider. Pear cider is a delicious way to enjoy the season and preserve pears at the same time. While the process of making pear cider is similar to making apple cider, the taste is as unique as a pear itself. Whether you enjoy pear cider fresh or ferment it into hard pear cider (known as perry), it’s well worth the effort.
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Elderberries have a very short season, and they barely have time to ripen before they’re gobbled up and carried away by the birds. If you have a keen eye and watch closely, elderberry bushes produce huge harvests of medicinal berries each year. Those berries make a quick and easy elderberry jelly that preserves their goodness all year long.
We often preserve them as elderberry oxymel, which is a honey-based probiotic cough syrup for winter colds. Elderberry mead is another one of our favorites. Both of those aren’t the best for young children, so this year I made a special batch of elderberry jelly for my jam loving babies.
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Nothing says fall like pumpkin, but sometimes it’s nice to enjoy their flavor outside of harvest season. Dehydrating pumpkin puree into pumpkin powder allows you to add pumpkin flavor to baked goods without adding a lot of moisture. Homemade pumpkin flour, nutritious, flavorful and a great addition to baked goods, including paleo and gluten-free recipes.
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Homemade jam is delicious and good for more than just toast. Thinking up creative ways to use jam throughout the year is part of the fun of canning. Every summer I go way overboard making homemade jams and jellies. Just about all of the jars are canned for the winter, but I always have to pop one open to try it right away. This week I’ve made 14 batches of jam, which means there are 14 opened jars of jam in my fridge right now.
Homemade Blackcurrant Jam
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When the peaches come in, our preservation kitchen goes into overdrive. Peaches are high sugar and high acid, which makes them perfect for canning, but that also makes them ideal for homemade peach wine. Once the canned peaches are put up, it’s time to break out the fermenter.
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Peach jam was the very first thing I ever canned, and nearly 20 years later I still love making it. I’ve yet to find peach jam in the store, and that’s part of the appeal. If I want peach jam, I’m going to have to make it myself.
Once you have the process down, it only takes about 30-45 minutes start to finish to can a batch of peach jam. Start by peeling and chopping the peaches. Though you can peel peaches with a paring knive, I generally use the boiling water method. Pop the peaches in a pot of boiling water for 2-3 minutes and then remove them to a cold water bath. The skins should slip easily with finger pressure.
The most time intensive part is bringing the water to a boil, but you can reuse the boiling water to can the peach jam later. It’ll have a bit of peach fuzz in it, but it doesn’t really matter. The jam is sealed in the jar and pressure is forcing air out of the jar to form a seal. The canning water never comes in contact with the actual jam. Change the water out if you want, but it’s a waste of energy.
A bowl of skinned peaches waiting to be chopped up for homemade peach jam.
After skinning, chop the peaches into cubes. I like chunky peach jam, so I chop the peaches into smallish hunks and just use the back of a wooden spoon to mash them slightly while they’re cooking. If you want a smoother jam, try chopping them smaller and then using a potato masher to pulverize them as they cook.
It only takes a few minutes for peaches to start releasing their juices. The picture below is after about 1 minutes on the heat, and they’re not even boiling yet. Notice they’ve already got a thick sauce in the pan, so there’s no need to add water or liquid to the jam pot.
Peach jam after just 1 minute of cooking. It’s not even simmering yet, but the peaches are already starting to fall apart.
Once the peaches start the boil, they disintegrate even further and the natural sugars in them begin to carmelize. That’s well before adding any granulated sugar. If you watch the bubbles, they move slowly over the surface, like when you’re making candy. The bubbles rising to the surface when you’re boiling peaches for peach jam looks quite a bit different than boiling water for pasta.
The picture below is at about 5 minutes of cook time when the peach jam is just beginning to boil. The color has already changed dramatically, and it looks a whole lot more like jam than fruit already.
Peach jam after 5 minutes of cooking. It’s just starting to bubble and form into jam.
I think peaches are sweet enough already, so I add very little sugar. This is a recipe for low sugar peach jam, but you’d follow the same procedure to make a very sweet candy like jam. Many peach jam recipes tell you to add equal parts peaches and sugar, but even as a child with a wicked sweet tooth I found that overwhelming.
My recipe uses 1 part sugar to every 4 parts peaches, and that results in a strong peach flavor and plenty of sweetness. Feel free to increase the sugar, or substitute honey if you’d like. Either will work just fine with the same directions.
I’m using Pomona’s pectin, which allows you to dramatically reduce the sugar in canning recipes, or substitute honey if that suits you. Pomona’s pectin is a citrus based pectin, that’s activated by a calcium dissolved in water which is included in the pectin package. Since it’s not sugar dependent, this same pectin could be used to make a paleo no sugar added peach jam.
This reduced sugar peach jam allows you to taste the fruit and captures the essence of summer in a jar.
Add peeled and chopped peaches to a saucepan along with lemon juice and calcium water.
Bring to a boil and simmer for about 5 minutes. Give them a quick mash with a potato masher until they're at the desired consistency.
In a separate container, mix the sugar and Pomona's pectin powder. It's important to mix the sugar and pectin before adding them to avoid clumping. If you're using honey, mix the pectin into the honey.
Add the sugar and pectin mixture into the cooking peaches, stir well and simmer for another 2 minutes.
Ladle peach jam into prepared canning jars and water bath can for 10 minutes for half pints or 15 for pints. Or, simply store in the refrigerator.
Recipe yields about 3 half pint jars.
Home canned peach pie filling on the pantry shelf is like having a homemade dessert ready at a moment’s notice. It works wonderfully to top a cheesecake or coffee cake, and it’s perfect for whipping together a homemade pie in minutes.
Every year I put up a big batch of canned peaches, and in the winter time I pull them out for cobblers and pies. The trick is, when you’re canning peaches in syrup, some of the peach flavors leaves the peaches to flavor the syrup. For peach pie filling, every drop in that jar will land in a pie, so every last bit of peachy flavor is preserved.
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Every summer I make a huge batch of no sugar dill pickles with the tiniest cucumbers I can find. I save the monster cucumbers that get lost on the vine for sweet dill pickle relish, but that leaves me a lot of dill in my canning pantry. I searched for quite a while before stumbling across this bread and butter pickles canning recipe in my Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.
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Canning peaches is surprisingly easy to do at home. All you need is a few jars, a big pot and a little sugar and you’re on your way. Home canned peaches stored in glass mason jars also taste dramatically better than store bought peaches in tin cans, and if you have your own peach tree they’re almost free.
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