I recently made the Curried Peach Preserves and the Whole-Fruit Fig and Lemon Preserves from Deep Run Roots. In both cases, I scaled the recipes by half but I like both enough that I would be happy to have full batches on hand.
Sorry about the photo, this one is from my breakfast post and I was too lazy to take more, but it gives an idea of how they look.
The Curried Peach Preserves are a sub-recipe from the Fried Green Tomatoes with Curried Peach Preserves and Whipped Feta on p 458. @Steve Irby posted about making the preserves for holiday gifts and gave them a thumbs up. I concur.
The peaches and sugar macerate overnight with sugar, Madras curry powder, lime and orange zest, star anise and thin slices of fresh ginger. The next day, they get cooked down and lime and orange juices and salt are added just before they go into jars. I processed mine but the recipe says they will last 6 months in the fridge.
Although I made a half recipe, I accidentally used the full amount of the citrus zests and ginger. I'd do that again as I like both those flavors. The recipe says to remove the citrus zests with a vegetable peeler and I'd recommend taking the time to julienne those zest strips and it looks much prettier and gives you a little of each in every bite. I didn't think of doing that until after I put the lime zest in and was too lazy to fish it out but I wish I had.
I have to try and track down some green tomatoes so I can make the whole recipe but in the meantime, the preserves were great on toasted bread smeared with goat cheese. I think they will be equally good with salmon, chicken or pork or as part of a cheese platter.
Edited to add that we have a few more weeks of fresh peaches at the local farmer's market and I'm planning on making more of these for sure.
I had my doubts about putting my beautiful, perfectly ripe figs into the recipe for Whole-Fruit Fig and Lemon Preserves p 178 but the finished product really captures the lovely tender texture of ripe figs into a preserve. The recipe calls for Brown Turkey figs and I used Black Mission figs as that's what's most common around here. I would double the amount of thinly sliced lemon next time as the they add a nice touch. The recipe estimates a cooking time of ~ 1 hr for the figs and mine took much longer but that's pretty much the story of my life with preserves.
I tried these fig preserves for breakfast, on toast with goat cheese and I ended up needing to break up the fig as I found a whole preserved fig to be way more sweetness than I want in one bite! I think they will really shine simmered into a red wine, port or sherry vinegar sauce for duck or pork and you'll be eating those with knife and fork so it will be easy to control the size of that bite of sweetness.
