Zesty Peach Barbecue Sauce

Yay for weekend cooking!  This was my weekend to choose something fun to make, and instead of opting for a more "traditional" meal or something of the sort (i.e. baking), I chose canning! :-)  I've been eyeing my Ball canning and preserving cookbook for awhile now and I wanted to make something fun.  So, I decided it was time to try making barbecue sauce! However, since "regular" barbecue sauce is something everyone pretty much already loves and mine would, of course, never live up, I decided to try something new and different: peach barbecue sauce!


Zesty Peach Barbecue Sauce
(from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving)

• 6 cups chopped peaches 
• 1 cup finely chopped, seeded red bell pepper  
• 1 cup finely chopped onion 
•  1 1/4 cup honey 
•  3/4 cup cider vinegar 
•  1 TBSP Worchestershire sauce 
•  3 TBSP finely chopped garlic 
•  2 tsp ground mustard 
•  2 tsp red pepper flakes 
•  2 tsp salt

The recipe is pretty easy, seeing as you combine all the ingredients in a stainless steel saucepan and cook until it is the consistency of a thin commercial barbecue sauce.  Dan and I opted to puree all of the ingredients first in hopes of getting the best consistency possible. Here's what it looked like when we started cooking:

We let this cook for about 25 minutes, stirring frequently. Well, actually we let it cook for a bit longer than that because I totally forgot to start my water bath and it takes forever to start boiling. Anyway, it thickened up pretty well.  I think it's still a little bit runnier than most commercial barbecue sauces, but no real complaints about that.  We put it into 7-8 oz. jars and processed in a water bath for 35 minutes.  While cooling, they all sealed fairly quickly--quite the accomplishment for me since usually I have 1 or 2 that don't seal! 

We popped one jar open for dinner with grilled chicken, baked beans and fried zucchini so that we could taste it.  It was delicious! The peach flavor isn't really strong, but it does add a certain sweetness to the sauce.  The red pepper flakes definitely give it a spicy kick as well!  The thing that surprised us the most was that it has a distinct "barbecue flavor" despite being such a non-traditional barbecue sauce (i.e. no tomatoes, lol).  Three or four lucky people will probably get a jar of this for Christmas. ;-)