California Peach Chutney
Preserving the Harvest, a recent post from fivecentnickel.com, inspired me to write a post about my own experience canning peaches with friends.
My friend Jenny’s next door neighbor Ralph has a large peach tree, the branches of which overhang Jenny’s back garden, making it easy to pick a good amount of ripe fruit each summer. The peaches ripen all at once, and Ralph doesn’t mind sharing, so last summer Jenny picked a basket of peaches and got together with Martin and me to prepare this California Peach Chutney recipe for canning. It was fun, and the chutney was fabulous.
This summer Jenny had the idea of selling the chutney as part of a Christmas fund raising effort at our church, the Episcopal Church of St Matthew, San Mateo, CA. The St Matthew’s Garden Guild is planning a Christmas Bazaar December 5-6 to raise funds for community outreach. The bazaar will feature a display of parishioner family crèches (nativity scenes) and sales of food and gift items.
The women of St Matthew’s are organized into sections, sometimes called guilds, each with a particular theme. St Catherine’s section, the section to which Jenny and I belong, was founded in the 1950′s and has always had a food and catering oriented theme for fund raising. It particularly appeals to women with jobs outside the home as meetings are held in the evening. Jenny thought it would be fun to offer the chutney as one component of the sales offerings of our section.
Jenny was able to pick close to 18 lbs of peaches. It’s hard to tell whether a peach is good until you start peeling, but we estimated a yield of about 13.5 lbs of good peaches. We used this Excel document to scale the recipe for about 13.5 lbs. To revise the spreadsheet for a different yield, you need to first input a scale factor. Compute the scale factor by taking your estimate of the number of pounds of good peaches and dividing it by 1.5.
We blanched the peaches to make them easier to peel. Two other St Matthew’s friends, Whitney and Jane (Jane also belongs to St Catherine’s), arrived in different shifts during the day to help with peeling and chopping. I made lunch for everyone: shrimp salad, pita, lettuce, and tomato, and spent a fair amount of time at the sink washing dishes, knives, cutting boards.
We put all of the prepared ingredients into one of Martin’s large pots he uses for brewing beer. It was nearly dinner time before the pot began to boil, so I agreed to finish the canning with Martin and sent my friends on their way. Martin arrived just in time to help with preparing, filling and steaming the jars. We used ordinary Ball jars with self-sealing lids at a cost of about $0.67 per jar.
The jars make a reassuring “pock” noise as they seal.
Peach Chutney yield: 35 ½ pts and 7 pts, for a total of 49 cups. We split the pints among ourselves to use as gifts, and will offer the 35 1/2 pints for sale. The cost of ingredients per jar was about $0.90, and the total cost per jar about $1.57. We’re still debating the sale price, but assuming $4.99 per jar we’d raise $121.45 for outreach.
Granted $121.45 is not a lot of money, but the women of St Catherine’s are busy working on ideas for other food and gift items such that we’ll collectively generate a significant donation to distribute to our favorite community and other non-profits, including:
- Central Asia Institute https://www.ikat.org/
- CORA http://www.corasupport.org/
- Call Primrose http://www.callprimrose.org/
- Shelter Network http://www.shelternetwork.org/
- Smile Train http://www.smiletrain.org/
- Advocates for Children http://www.advocatesfc.org/
- Village Enterprise Fund http://www.villageef.org/
If you find yourself in the neighborhood December 5-6, please stop by and enjoy the St Matthew’s Christmas Bazaar.
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This is a great idea and wonderful way to give something back to others. I have a fig tree and every year I think about ways to utilize the figs. This might work for my figs too!
thanks for the post-
Little House
Hi Little House,
Here’s a link to a canning recipe for fig jam http://www.pickyourown.org/figjam.htm
Thanks for providing the spreadsheet that adjusts the scale automatically. Canning is tricky enough without trying to do complicated math!