It's been about 8 years since they last canned some peaches.
This year, the tradition was reborn!
I'm a member of the West End Food Co-op, a fantastic place that opened recently in nearby Parkdale where residents can find plenty of fresh produce, fresh-baked bakery bread, bulk pantry staples, and more, all at very affordable prices. They also hold workshops frequently to teach members about canning and preserving, making pie fillings and salsas, making jams and jellies, fermentation, and safe canning practices to ensure that the fruits of your labour stay safe to eat all winter long. I've never been to one of their workshops (because unfortunately I was always working when they were being held), but I really hope to make it to some of them in the near future!
I got an email a few weeks ago from the co-op saying that they had a local farmer from Niagara that was selling off tons of peaches at a special price to co-op members! They had first pick peaches (bigger, juicier, better for eating), and second pick (smaller, a bit more bruised or not as nice to look at, but great for canning and preserving). For a full bushel of second pick peaches, it cost only $32.
I'd be stupid NOT to do it!
Emailed my dad right away asking if he wanted to go in on it with me. Though they don't do fruit preserves anymore, my parents still do tomato sauce every year (along with half the neighbourhood - Labour Day weekend always makes northwest Toronto smell great :P), so they still have all their canning equipment and large pots to boil stuff in. We decided to do some of the peaches as slices, and I wanted to try making some into peach jam (which we've never made before).
Picked up the peaches from the co-op, fresh off the truck as soon as the farmer arrived. We had planned to do the canning on Monday, so I picked them up on Friday to give the peaches time to ripen if needed. Turned out that they were already dripping with juice and ready to go immediately. Crap. Luckily my parents have an extra fridge in the basement that they offered to me. I don't think they quite realized that when I said I needed the fridge, that I actually needed the whole fridge.
Thankfully most of them survived, and I lost maybe 15 peaches that were too bruised to even be turned into jam. We still had something like 40lbs of peaches to process :D
Starting at 9am, my parents and I started blanching peaches and slicing them up. Thankfully the rain held off, so we did the whole production outside (fighting off bees every few minutes) to avoid heating up the whole house. We finished the actual peach work around 11:30 or 12, and the boiling of jars (to make the jars airtight and make a vacuum seal, keeping the preserves sanitary and fresh for longer) took until about 2:30pm. WHEW!!!
We ended up with about 24 jars of sliced peaches, 16 jars of jam, and 4 leftover peaches that I sliced up and mixed into a white wine spritzer to celebrate our hard work :D
Canning fresh fruit is a lost art - I've found that most of my family friends that used to make canned fruit when we were kids have since stopped doing it, and it wasn't that many families to begin with..! But making canned fruit is a really great way to preserve the tastes of summer all winter long. When it's the middle of February and you're pretty sure that the sun will never come back out, cracking open a jar of homemade sliced peach preserves helps to bring some sunshine back into your life. It's also a great excuse to make pie :D
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