Not Your Grandma's Spiced Peaches, Part 1: Ginger Peach Jam

It's peach season here.

For the past couple of years we've had access to the peaches on a friend's tree.  This means that we spend days and days peeling and pitting peaches.

And then we spend months and months enjoying peaches in smoothies, pies, jams, etc.

God bless generous friends with peach trees!  Thank you!!

With all those peaches, I decided to do some experimenting with spices in my peach jams this year and I came up with some really great recipes.

Really.  Great.

As in - the finished products are likely to cause you to break out in the singing of spontaneous Halleluias.  I'm totally not kidding.   

These are not your grandma's spiced peaches.

This is what I made:

• Ginger Peach Jam
• Peach Chai Jam
• Peach Maple Cardamom Jam

So, over the next few days, I'll give you the details.

The delicious, mouth-watering, halleluia inspiring details.  

I'll start here with the simplest of the spiced jams.  Ginger Peach Jam is made with chopped candied ginger.  If you make the candied ginger yourself, then you can use your ginger sugar for this jam.    It's really good!   So good, that you just might consider trying to make some.

Ginger Peach Jam

• 4 cups peaches
• 1 Tablespoon lemon juice
• 1/3 cup Dutch Jell All Natural Lite Pectin OR 3 Tablespoons Ball Low Sugar Pectin
• 1/3 cup chopped crystallized ginger
• 1 cup ginger sugar
• 1 cup white sugar

Mix the peaches lemon juice and pectin in a large pot.   Bring to hard rolling boil, stirring constantly.  Boil hard for 1 minute.    Add sugars and ginger.  Stir well and bring back to hard rolling boil, stirring constantly.   Boil hard for 1 minute.   Ladle into jars and process 10 minutes for canning.  Yield ~3 pints

Note:  If you don't make your own crystallized ginger, try to get it from a bulk store and then make sure you collect about a cup's worth of the sugar that falls off the ginger and collects in the bottom of the bin.   If you don't have access to ginger sugar, don't worry about it.   Use 2 cups of plain white sugar.  It'll still be great.