Summer Fest and Peach Freezer Jam Recipe

To celebrate Summer Fest, a four-week cross-blog celebration, Stephanie Stiavetti and I are swapping posts for the day. This week Summer Fest is all over fruit, and Stephanie and I selected peaches.

I have always maintained raspberry is my favourite fruit, but a damned good peach is enough to make a liar out of me. While you can pop a whole raspberry into your mouth, swallowing every iota of the berry, biting into a perfect peach is a decadent act of waste. Juice dribbles down your chin and you know there's flavour in the skin you so diligently peeled and threw away.

Plus a truly peachy peach is a rare find. So I will amend my previous declarations and say, "An everyday raspberry is my favourite fruit but a damned good peach trumps them all."

And so, using the decadent peach, Stephanie is going to introduce you to freezer jam, a preserve that tastes more like the fruit than standard jam. Meanwhile, I'm at her blog, Wasabimon.com, blogging about peach ice cream. Imagine the two together? Now that's some thing to celebrate!

Hi everyone! This is Stephanie from Wasabimon.com. I blog about all sorts of food topics, most of which are gluten free. My goal is to keep things fun, healthy, and above all, fresh! I'm excited to write this post for Christie's Corner, and look forward to your comments. Please do say hello and let me know what you think.

Peaches are the one fruit I wish were in season all year round. Maybe someday I'll find a magical genie in a lamp, and when I do, that's exactly what I'm going to ask for. Until then, I'll keep making peach preserves to keep me content through winter's staunch fruitlessness.

Many folks are wary of preserving their own fruit, and for good reason. Besides being a fairly time consuming process, a botched attempt at canning can spell disaster for anyone who eats from a contaminated batch. In reality, canning isn't difficult or scary, though it can take some time to build up the gumption for such an involved project. Fortunately, there's a baby step on the roadway to heat-processed preserves: freezer jam.

It's so easy to make freezer jam that it's almost laughable - the only time consuming part is chopping your fruit. Beyond that, you can easily make a whole batch in half an hour or less. Perhaps the best thing about freezer jam is that it doesn't require cooking, so when you crack open your container sometime mid-January, your fruit will look and taste much fresher than if it were heat-canned.

Another plus: since there's no heat involved, this is a great project to get your kids involved in the kitchen. They'll love the fact that they made the best part of their peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

Freezer Jam Containers

There are many kinds of containers you can store your freezer jam in. While you can buy specially made plastic tubs, you can also use good, old-fashioned mason jars. You'll want to buy the straight-sided kind, not the ones with rounded shoulders up near the mouth. When your jam expands in the freezer, it will push against the shoulders of the jar and cause it to explode. Seriously no bueno.

A Few Words on Pectin
When it comes to pectin, I use Ball's Freezer Jam Pectin, though you can also use Pomona's Universal Pectin with great results. These two particular brands allow you to use Splenda instead of sugar, if that's your inclination, but if you're using another brand of pectin, make sure to read the directions ahead of time to ensure that it will gel with something other than regular sugar.

Another note about pectin: it's imperative that you buy the correct kind for your project and read the instructions carefully. Recipes can (and will) vary from brand to brand. Different kinds of pectin will call for different amounts of sugar, so read the directions or your jam won't gel correctly. Freezer jams are always a little thinner than regular heat-processed preserves, but they should still set to a nice spreadable consistency.

Easy Peach Freezer Jam Recipe

Makes four cups of jam, enough to fill five 8-ounce containers with room to expand.

Thank you Charmian for having me guest post! I've really enjoyed my time here on Christie's Corner.

<3 Stephanie

Visit me at Wasabimon.com

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