[Recipe] Palisade Peach and Colorado Whiskey Jam

I have a lot of hobbies... I love to take photographs, I love making things in my shop with wood, I love flying my drone and now I have gotten the canning bug. The latest hobby has been a hit with friends and family too! It all started with my first box of Palisade Peaches. I am not a fan of peaches at all, or at least I wasn't until last week. The only peaches I've ever had have either been Georgia or South Carolina peaches and I didn't care much at all for them. Palisade peaches on the other hand are by far too addictive! Since I can't eat an entire box of them, I started making some jam with them!

The very first attempt was a success! The spicy and sweet combination married into a mason jar with Palisade peaches and Hatch green chiles is nothing short of heaven. Now, being that I love my whiskey, in particular, Colorado whiskies, I had to give a shot at a peach and whiskey jam... Off to the internet I go to find a recipe!

After finding one, I added my own twist to it to make it my own. This is the recipe that I chose to use:

4 cups Palisade peaches

7 cup pure cane sugar

1/4 cup lemon juice

1/2 cup Colorado whiskey

Cinnamon stick

1 tsp Madagascar vanilla bean extract

6 oz. liquid pectin

Just like before with the peach and green chile jam, I started out with peeling the peaches and throwing them in the food processor to get them to the consistency that we wanted to have in the jam. In a pot we added the pureed peaches, 6 cups of sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon stick and brought it to a boil. In a separate smaller pot, I added the remaining sugar and the Colorado whiskey to cook. Why did I do this? Here is the easy answer, I wanted to caramelize some of the sugar with the whiskey to get a deeper flavor. After the caramelizing, happened, I poured the mixture into the peach jam. Making sure the mixture was at a rolling boil, we then added the liquid pectin and boiled for another minute. After the minute was up, we began to jar into 8 oz. mason jars.

Ideally, I would have liked to use all Stranahan's whiskey, but I didn't have enough because I drank it all... Oops. I added the remainder of what I needed from Bear Creek Distillery.