Peach & Ginger Jam

Jam is my favourite way to use up fruit before it goes bad in the fridge! We are just starting stone fruit season here in ON and and I am so pumped for local peaches and nectarines and apricots and cherries, so yum!

Jam requires very little prep time, just has a longer cooking time to get the fruit into the jammy texture.

This recipe can be scaled up/ down/ use other fruits it is really just a guideline! I used what I had so it wouldn’t go bad in the fridge. One of my biggest peeves as someone who studies agriculture and sustainability is food waste!

Prep time: ~15 minutes

Cook time ~ 2 hours

Ingredients

Peaches! (I had 5 VERY ripe peaches)
~2 tablespoons of fresh grated ginger (adding 1T at the beginning to stew and 1T at the end fresh to get that brighter flavour)
White sugar (I used 60% of the weight of the fruit I had, I’ll show you the math in the recipe don’t worry)
Splash of vanilla
Pinch of salt
Juice of half a lemon

Method

Gather your ingredients

2. Pit and chop your peaches, mine were chopped to about one cubic centimeter

3. Next I tarred out my scale with the pot on it and added my peaches to find out my fruit weight of 339g

4. I then take my fruit weight and multiply it by 60% (339g x 0.6 = 203.4g of sugar). I weighed out approximately that amount at ~200g of white sugar

5. Grate the fresh ginger

6. Add about half of what you grate into the pot

7. Add vanilla, measure with your heart

8. Add a pinch of salt

9. Squeeze in the juice of half a lemon

10. Give it a stir and let it cook for about 2 hours stirring occasionally. Keep on low and add a lid if you’d like.

If you cook it for less time you would end up with a delish syrup that could be used for a fun summer beverage!

11. Once it reaches your desired consistency you can take it off the heat!

I like mine to be a pretty classic jam consistency but not full on jelly. Mine cooked for around 2 hours. Different fruits take different amounts of time as their water content differs.

This is also when I added the last bit of grated ginger for some brightness.

12. Jar it up! 5 peaches made ~1.5 cups of jam. I am not canning this just put a screw top on once it was cooler and popped it in the fridge.