Musing about Preserves – Peach & Chilli Chutney

This year might not have been a great year for veg in Melbourne but if my friends tree is any indication it has been a wonderful year for peaches.  She had loads and loads of beautiful, big and incredibly sweet peaches.  Just luscious.  I was the happy recipient of a large bag of these peaches and while the kids and I made a large dent in the bag eating them fresh there were simply more than we could manage before they would go off.  So I turned to my preserve books only the be met with, well, not very much at all.

Personally I think the best method of preserving peaches is probably bottling them but these were a little past that point – they were pretty soft, and I was concerned they would collapse in a sloppy mess in the preserving jars.  Bottling not being an option I pondered both sweet and savoury treatments but my books didn’t offer much in the way of either.  So I decided to try both.   I made some into Peach & Ginger Jam and the rest became Peach & Chilli Chutney.  Sadly I failed to document the Jam recipe – I used a basic  jam recipe (ie weight of fruit = weight of sugar)  and then just chucked things (ginger, chilli, salt) in until I got the ginger, sweetness balance right .  Or rather it seemed right.  I do find it hard to judge what the jam will taste like cold when I’m tasting it while cooking.

The chutney though I did document. (And I think it is probably the nicer preserve anyway).  I used a Nectarine Chutney recipe from my CWA cookbook as a base and then adapted it – primarily by the addition of lots more chilli than the original recipe included.

This is what  I did:

Peach & Chilli Chutney

• 1.5kg chopped peaches
• 3.75 cups soft brown sugar
• 3.75 cups cider vinegar
• 1.5 tspn grated fresh ginger
• 1 tspn ground cinnamon
• 6 cloves
• 2.25 tspns salt
• 12 fresh chillies chopped (more if you like really hot chutney)
• 1 tspn chilli powder
• 2 apples grated
• 2 onions finely chopped

Place all ingredients into a large saucepan.  Bring to the boil and cook uncovered for a couple of hours until the mixture thickens.

I started with fewer chillies than above, tasted my chutney as I went and added more chilli along the way.  In my experience the chutney tastes hotter when warm so I tend to add slightly more than I think is perfect.

The variety of chillies you use will have a huge impact on the heat of finished product – the above recipe was made using medium heat chillies (Joe’s Long Cayenne) and I think the chutney is a little too mild for my tastes so if you want  a hot chutney then use hotter chilli varieties.

Pour into hot sterilised jars and seal.