Jarring Peaches

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On Wednesday night a friend called me and said he went to an orchard and picked thirty dollars worth of peaches. He said that was thirty pounds (13.6 kg). Would I be interested in helping him can them? We had talked about canning peaches earlier this year but I really didn’t expect it to happen since my friend talks about doing all kinds of things that he never does. But now he had the peaches I couldn’t very well back out. So I told him Friday would be my first free day. I got up Friday morning dreading all the work that was going to happen. I was raised on a farm and we canned vegetables out of our garden and fruit bought from orchards. It was a lot of work that lasted for days. I gathered up a bunch of pint jars that I saved. They originally came with tartar sauce in them. My friend said he may have to run to the store to get sugar. I told him not to because I had a bag of organic evaporated cane juice sugar that had never been opened. That went into the box with the jars. He lives a good forty-five minute drive from me. A little bit of rain drizzled from the sky on the way there but quit by the time I reached his house. When I arrived there he had out the canning book reading about canning. That surprised me a bit because he had been telling me all about his canning experiences so I asked what he was doing. “I’m reading how to can,” he said. “I thought you already knew how to do that.” “I do. I just haven’t done it in so long that I need to refresh my memory.” I told him what I remembered and between us and the book it all came back. First my friend dug out his big pressure cooker. We found we could get twenty-two pint jars in it. Eleven on the bottom then he placed a metal plate full of holes, that came with the pressure cooker, on top of those jars then stacked the other eleven on top of that and put the lid on. Everything fit nicely. After we determined we could get the jars into the pressure cooker I washed them and got them ready to put in boiling water to sanitize them. The skin from the peaches had to be removed first. So we set a kettle of water to boil. Then we filled a container full of cold water. The peaches had to go into the boiling water for one minute, then into the cold water to cool to remove the skins. My friend got out some vitamin C powder and poured it into a separate bowl of cold water. I asked what that was for and he said dipping the peaches into it would keep the peaches from turning brown. He determined he didn’t have enough powder so he took some Vitamin C pills and crushed them into a powder and added that. I told him I didn’t remember doing that when I was a kid. He said you can buy stuff to do it with but I still couldn’t remember dipping the peaches in anything when we did it, but then that was a good many years ago. So we got started. He put the peaches in the boiling, water then into the cold water while I put the jars in another kettle of boiling water. He slid the skins off and sliced the peaches into quarters as he remove the pits. He put the quarters into the vitamin C water. I took a jar out of the boiling water and put another one in. Then I took the quarters out of the vitamin C water and put them in the jar and set it aside. Before all the jars were fill we started another pot of water boiling. My friend asked if I wanted heavy, medium or light syrup. I told him light. So he measured out the water and told me to put in eight cups of sugar. I think he measured out eight pints of water, but however he measured it, he had done it according to what the canning book said. When all the jars were filled we still had peaches left. We decided to worry about them later. We added the syrup to the jars, put the lids on and placed them into the pressure cooker. He sealed up the cooker and left the rocker off so all the air would be pushed out. He did this according to the time in the canning book. Then he replaced the rocker and brought the pressure up to five pounds. Then he let it cook for ten minutes. After the pressure went down we removed the jars and put them on the counter to cool and seal. That, we figured, would take about two hours. Then my friend said he want to can some peaches. He said what we just did was jar the peaches. He had some tin cans and lids be bought for canning. He also had a apparatus to seal the lids onto the cans. This turned out to be more work than jarring the peaches. Everything was the same up to putting the peaches into the cans. We had to heat the peaches back up and put them and the syrup in the can hot and put the lids on while the can was hot. Then they went in to the pressure cooker for the same time and pressure as the jars. As soon as they were done they had to be removed from the cooker as soon as possible and placed in cold water. If that wasn’t done then the peaches would be overcooked. After the cans were done the jars had all cooled and sealed. I took twelve jars and one can home. One other thing I learned was you don’t need a pressure cooker to can peaches and some other things. It just takes longer to boil the jars in a water bath. I never knew this because we always used a pressure cooker when I was a kid. A pressure cooker is a good investment because you can cook many things much faster and many tough cuts of meat will come out tender. All in all, it turned out to be somewhat a fun adventure. Certainly not the dreaded day I had envisioned.