Ready for a spicy, flavorful taste on a delicious favorite? One of our customers, Dylan, crafted this unique jam that is an instant classic!
Ingredients
3 large peaches
1/2 cup sugar
1 lemon
1/2 cup chopped green chile
Pinch of salt
It's best to use ripe or slightly overripe peaches for this recipe as they produce a sweeter flavor. This recipe is pectin free because of the lemon juice used. We used 1/2 cup of sugar because the peaches provided plenty of sweetness.
This recipe yields roughly 12oz of jam
Directions
Peel the skin from the peaches. You can slice an x on the bottom of the peach and then boil for 1 min if the skin isn't peeling easily, or you can take your time and slowly peel each peach. Remove flesh from the pit and set aside.
Once all peaches have been peeled, roughly chop them and place in a medium/large saucepan over medium high heat. Add the juice of 1 lemon. The peaches will also produce liquid as they heat, bring this to a boil stirring frequently and mashing/breaking up the peaches to the desired consistency.
Add 1/2 cup of chopped green chile, or more if you want more green chile flavor. We did 1/2 cup starting out to make sure it wasn't overwhelming the peach flavor and decided the 1/2 cup was appropriate for the flavor we were shooting for. Continue to mix/stir and add the 1/2 cup of sugar and mix well.
Continue to cook on med/high heat until you reach 220 degrees. This is the point where you start to see the jam break down and form a gel. This took us about 20-25 min of cooking. Once you hit this level you can remove from the heat and allow to cool. I added a decent pinch of salt and mixed at this point to help bring out the sweetness of the peach and balance the flavor overall. It's ok to try the jam as it's cooking to make sure you seasoned correctly, just be careful not to burn yourself.
Once the jam starts to cool, place in a clean and sanitized mason jar. I put this in 2 smaller 6 oz jars. You can properly can this in a boiling water bath for longer storage life, but I think doing a small batch like this is ideal. Expected life expectancy in refrigerator without proper canning is roughly 2 weeks.
Final Results
Flavor wise, there is an apparent presence of the green chile in the form of heat and smokiness you'd expect from a hatch pepper. Consistency is spreadable and mostly smooth with what to expect from most jams. The jam is sweet, but not overbearing and goes great on toast, biscuits, naan, or sourdough. I think the green chile does a great job at balancing sweet and savory.