Georgia Peaches: Sweet Heat Salsa!

When I think of Georgia in the summer, I think of sweet white corn, peaches and peanuts.  It is such a blessing to be able to purchase organic fruits and vegetables from local farmers through community farmers markets.  I love the delightful unexpectedness of the markets, as you never know which vendors will be selling or what they might have for sale.  I may go looking for tomatoes and come home with scuppernogs. Ah, bliss!

On a recent market visit, I was lucky to find beautiful peaches at an unbelievably low price.  They were gorgeous: huge firm round globes of juicy goodness. Must make peach salsa! And into my shopping bag they went, along with some peppers, purple onions, sweet red peppers, jalapeños, habaneros and cilantro.  My mouth was watering already. If you've never tried peach salsa, you're missing out!  It is wonderful on tortilla or pita chips, as a relish for grilled mahi mahi or pork chops.  You can use it as a topping for ice cream, on pancakes or waffles, or rolled up in a crepe with a dollop of whipped cream...But I digress.

My favorite peach salsa recipe is a variation on the one published in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.  I like the salsa spicy, so I add a few habaneros.  For eight 8-ounce jars, you will need:

Recipe
1/2 cup (125 mL) white vinegar
6 cups (1.5 L) chopped pitted peaches
1 1/4 cups (300 mL) chopped red onion
4 jalapeños, finely chopped
1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1/2 cup (125 mL) loosely packed chopped cilantro
2 Tb (30 mL) liquid honey
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 1/2 tsp (7 mL) ground cumin
1/2 tsp (2mL) cayenne pepper

You will need a water bath canner, which is essentially a deep stock pot with a rack in the bottom to keep the jars from direct contact with the heat source.  I use a stock pot with the rack pilfered from my pressure canner.  You will also need a wide-mouth funnel, a jar lifter, a magnetic stick for grabbing lids out of hot water, and half-pint canning jars, bands and lids.  If you have an Ace Hardware near you, they generally have good prices on canning supplies.

Method
1.  Prepare canner, jars and lids according to safe home canning methods, which can be found at the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Everything in the pot!  

2.  In a large stainless steel saucepan, combine ingredients.  Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring frequently, until slightly thickened, about 5 minutes.  Remove from heat.

Ready for lids and bands

3.  Ladle hot salsa into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch (1 cm) headspace.  Remove air bubbles by stirring gently, pressing in from the outside towards the middle.  Wipe rim.  Center lid on jar.  Screw band down until resistance is met, then increase to fingertip-tight.







4.  Place jars in canner, ensuring they are completely covered with water.  Bring to a boil and process for 15 minutes.  Remove canner lid and wait 5 minutes, then remove jars with jar lifter and place on a folded tea towel or hot pad to cool.  Check seals after 20 minutes.  If you press the lid in the center and it "pops," the jar did not seal. Refrigerate and use within a week, or remove lid, wipe rim, apply new lid and band and reprocess.

Summer flavors captured in a little jar of heaven

5.  Do not disturb jars for 24 hours.  Then remove bands, rinse, label and store.

Tips
If you like your salsa milder, seed and devein the jalapeños.  Wear plastic gloves when handling peppers and don't touch your eyes, nose, mouth or any other potentially sensitive area.  Pepper oil will remain on your skin for several days, even after washing your hands.

If you like hotter salsa like I do, use 3 jalapeños and 3 habaneros.  Seed and devein the peppers.

To keep peaches from darkening while I prep them, I pour about a cup of vinegar into the bowl where I'm keeping the chopped peaches.  Give it a stir every so often to make sure all the peaches have gotten a vinegar bath.  When you are ready to use the peaches in salsa, drain the vinegar and measure peaches into the pot.  DON'T use the soaking vinegar in the salsa; it has been diluted with peach juice and the acid level will not be safe.

Happy canning!  Let me know what you think!

Smokin' Hot: Ode to Spicy Sauces

I'm somewhat of a chili head, I'll admit.  If the bridge of my nose and scalp aren't sweating, the food isn't hot enough.  Although I understand heat isn't for everyone, I have what might be described as an unholy passion for Sriracha.  Enter Twitter, and a tweet from @FamilyFoodie highlighting a homemade Srirachi recipe from @FarmgirlGourmet.  Uh oh.  My imagination had been captured.  Must make homemade Sriracha, thought I.  Obsessively, in fact.  Although FarmgirlGourmet's recipe looked delightful, it wasn't shelf-stable.  As much as I love hot sauces, I cannot imagine being able to use up a whole recipe within 30 days.  The search for a canning recipe was on.

Although many of the sites I visited had stunning #foodporn quality photography and purported to contain canning recipes for Sriracha, I didn't find any that actually provided the type of water bath canning recipe I was after.  Simply decanting your delicious concoction into Ball jars and affixing lids and settling the beautiful treats into the fridge is not shelf-stable canning.  Call me weird, but I don't have room for 24 half-pint jars in the fridge with everything else that is currently in residence.  Additionally, I'm just not willing to take the chance of killing any of my friends and family by giving them a jar of botulism-tainted hot sauce.

After what I considered an exhaustive internet search for an actual canning recipe for Sriracha (it wasn't; I just got tired of looking), I reached for the Canning Bible, the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, edited by Judi Kingry and Lauren Devine.  Shock: the book devotes 6 pages to canning recipes for chili sauces of different varieties.  Oh boy!  As I was still fixated on Sriracha, the tomato based versions didn't appeal.  But wait:  Singapore Chili Sauce.  That's the ticket!  The Ball recipe had a few more ingredients than the commercially produced Sriracha bottle listed, so I knew it wouldn't exactly be a true Sriracha.  It did sound quite similar to the Iron Chef Thai Sweet Pepper & Garlic Sauce sold at Publix.  Game on.

Dried Thai Chiles

My sister was an Ex-Pat for several years.  One of the things she brought me from Thailand or Singapore or Malaysia or some such faraway place was a bag of dried Thai chiles.  Yes ma'am.


I consulted the recipe and was off to the farmers market in search of ripe jalapenos and another ingredient, which shall remain nameless for a bit longer. [Sidebar:  if you are one of those people who are highly suggestible about food flavors once you know what is in a dish, please stop reading when I describe making the sauce and give the ingredients.  Just skip to the pictures.  Trust me.  My son used to love Trader Joe's Habanero Lime salsa until the day he read the ingredients, which included carrots.  From then on, all he could taste was the carrots.  I will tell you with total honesty that no carrots were harmed in the making of this hot sauce.]

Ripe jalapenos, or red chiles

Given the seasonality of ripe jalapenos, I was quite lucky to find them, and in the quantity needed.  Since I was also using rehydrated Thai peppers, I bought a little less than 2 pounds of beautiful red chiles.  I decided to double the recipe as written in the Ball book, as I really don't think all the effort is worth it to yield a mere six jars of heaven.  Unlike jam, this recipe can be doubled without problem.  My water bath canner will hold 12 half-pint jars, so that's how much sauce I made.

All righty then.  I had the chiles. I had the secret ingredient.  I also bought organic Demerara cane sugar to substitute for granulated sugar for two reasons: standard sugar production methods are an environmental problem and raw sugar provides a lovely hint of molasses.  I opted for cider vinegar over white for the added depth of flavor.  Many recipes call for rice vinegar, but some of those are sweetened and I didn't want to make the sauce even sweeter than it was destined to be.

Red chiles, Thai chiles and sultanas

Time to prep!  After washing the chiles, I donned plastic gloves and wished for a breathing mask.  Although many recipes suggest leaving the caps on the chiles for a floral note, I opted to remove stems and caps from both the Thai chiles and the red chiles.  The remaining pepper carcass was tossed into the food processor along with [If you fall into the aforementioned suggestible category, skip down to the next paragraph NOW!] the secret ingredient, which is secret only because I don't want anyone to be turned off before they even taste the finished product.  Ahem.  So back to the secret ingredient: sultana raisins, or golden raisins.  I find them infinitely more desirable than high fructose corn syrup or artificial thickeners.

Pre-puree

Into the pot, my pretties...Based on the prep intelligence I gathered during the initial search for a suitable recipe, I decided to do a two-step cooking process.  In the first step, vinegar and sugar were combined and brought to a boil.  Once the sugar was dissolved, chiles, sultanas, garlic, grated ginger and salt were added to the pot and allowed to boil for a bit.  This stage had two purposes: soften the peppers so they would puree more easily, and reduce the liquid to create a thicker sauce.  After the sauce had reduced a bit, I allowed the mixture to cool and then processed it in the blender in batches.  An immersion blender would have been preferable, but alas, mine was dead and had not yet been replaced.  Note: if the sauce is steaming, don't try it in a traditional blender.  The hot business will explode and you will have hot, sticky sauce everywhere.  And I do mean everywhere.

Thickened sauce, ready to be canned

Fire burn and caldron bubble.  After pureeing, everything went back into the pot for a good long simmer.  I've had trouble with my canned salsas turning out juicier than I want after the canning process, so I really wanted to make sure this sauce was nice and thick.  Once the sauce had been reduced to the desired viscosity, it was time to jar it up and send those babies for a soak in the hot tub, so to speak.

Jars need 10 minutes processing, 5 minutes cooling time

Let me get up on my canning soapbox for just a moment.  Guidelines for safe home canning were developed for a reason.  It is NOT SAFE to seal jars by inverting them, putting them through a dishwasher cycle, or baking them in the oven.  If it's acidic, it needs to be water bath canned.  If it isn't acidic, it needs to be pressure canned.  I really don't care how Grandma or Aunt Ethel used to do it; if they didn't follow safe canning procedures, they are stinkin' lucky no one died.  Please be safe, my friends.








So how did it turn out?  Oh my mercy, y'all!  After tasting the first batch, I hied it back to the farmers market for more red chiles and this time, habaneros.  The habanero version is even hotter than the Thai chile sauce.  My lips are tingling and my taste buds are singing.  So far, the sauce has been used as a glaze and dip for grilled shrimp and pork.  It would be wonderful over cream cheese with crackers as a spicy-hot appetizer.  This Sweet & Spicy Thai Pepper/ Habanero Pepper and Garlic Sauce will be a staple in my pantry.

Singapore Chili Sauce Recipe