Doris and Jilly Cook » plums

Pickled Plums

dorisandjilly — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:55:47 +0000

It never would have occurred to me to pickle plums, but my friend Christina convinced me that pickled fruit was both delicious and indispensable. Hence, pickled plums. I made a couple of jars about a month ago and have been waiting until now so that I could taste them before sharing the recipe with all of you. I must confess: I’m underwhelmed. If you really like pickled fruit, you’ll like this—but they don’t necessarily taste like plums. Instead, they taste like vinegar, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. If this appeals to you, go for it! And if not, do something else with your plums, because this won’t make you happy.

Pickled Plums

(adapted from Linda Ziedrich’s Joy of Pickling)

3 pounds Italian plums
2 3/4 c. cider vinegar
2 c. sugar
2 small cinnamon sticks
2 dried chile peppers
4 whole cloves
12 allspice berries

1) Make a syrup from the vinegar and sugar over a medium flame. Prick the plums with a fork or needle to keep them from bursting. Add the plums to the syrup and cook them until they’re heated through.

2) Meanwhile, bring a water bath to a boil and sterilize 2 pint jars; heat up two lids.

3) Take the jars out of the hot water and add the cinnamon stick, 1 pepper, 2 cloves, and 6 allspice berries to each jar. Add the plums. Cover them with syrup, leaving 1/2″ head space.

4) Now, you have a choice. Ziedrich says you can just add the hot lids, screw on the lids, and hope for the best. This makes me nervous, so I gave my jars a quick (~5 minutes) dip in a boiling water bath to ensure a good seal. If you have a few extra plums, just stick them in the refrigerator and forget about them for at least a month.

So, dear readers, I’m curious. Have you tried pickling fruit before? What am I missing?

Raspberry Plum Sorbet

dorisandjilly — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:49:15 +0000

My husband—a native New Englander—insists that the time to eat ice cream is winter, not summer. So, now that there’s a chill in the air, he’s craving frozen treats. Since this is an excuse to pull out yet another gadget from the pantry, I am happy to oblige.

Sorbets are basically a frozen purée of fruit in simple syrup, with optional flavors added. The catch is that, since they’re fat free, they tend to freeze into a solid mass of fruit ice. Commerical sorbets contain stabilizers and emulsifiers to solve this problem, but the home cook has a simpler solution: booze. Adding just a single tablespoon of alcohol to a quart of sorbet before you freeze it will keep the texture scoopable by lowering the freezing point. If alcohol is a problem for you, I encourage you to experiment with adding egg whites instead—I’ve never tried it myself, but I’ve seen the technique described in Italian cookbooks.

This recipe is basically the one in David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop, only re-written in a way that makes sense to me. It’s a great book for flavors, but for reasons that aren’t clear to me, I find his directions confusing (too much information, I think). Here’s a streamlined version:

Raspberry Plum Sorbet

1 pound plums
1 c. water
2/3 c. sugar (more or less, to taste)
3/4 c. raspberries (fresh or frozen; if frozen in sugar, add less sugar)
1 T agreeable alcohol (he recommends 1 t. kirsch; I used rum. Something flavorless, like vodka, will always work.)

1) Pit the plums, cut them in large pieces, and cook them in the water until tender. Add the sugar and raspberries; stir to dissolve the sugar.

2) Purée, then strain if the raspberry seeds or plum skims bother you.

3) Chill thoroughly, then freeze it in your ice cream maker.

Dehydrated Fruit

dorisandjilly — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:55:01 +0000

The problem with dehydrated fruit is that the people who live with you tend to eat it before winter comes. The only solution? Dehydrate more fruit.

I’d give you drying times, but they’re sort of meaningless, since it depends on the variety, the thickness of the fruit, the ambient temperature, and how you plan to store them. What I can tell you is that you’ll get happier results if you leave the fruit in large pieces, even if it increases the drying time to 24–36 hours. The pears were pared, cored, and cut lengthwise into four pieces; same goes for the peaches; the plums were just cut in half. In any case, I wouldn’t go any thinner than 3/8″.

Visual cues may be more helpful.

This is what the plums looked like raw:

And this is what they looked like halfway through:

(Bonus: note changing light quality in afternoon vs. morning!)

The plums are done when they look like prunes. Both the pears and the peaches should be flexible, but not moist. Pop them in jars, label them, and hide them well.