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How do you know the difference between a red/purple plum and a prune plum (by prune plum, do you mean actual prunes?)?

Also, at Target or BB&B, you can pick up a relatively inexpensive stone fruit pitter.

I LOVE the depluminator!

Another fun thing to do with too many plums is to make fruit leather (sweetened or not). Plums work great for that. You can dry it in a dehydrator, an oven on the lowest setting with the door cracked (makes your house smell yummy!) or outside if you live in a hot area.

And Marc, don't think of it as plum jam that didn't set. Think of it as delicious, gourmet plum sauce! I'll bet it would be great over ice cream or pancakes.

I LOVE the depluminator!

Another fun thing to do with too many plums is to make fruit leather (sweetened or not). Plums work great for that. You can dry it in a dehydrator, an oven on the lowest setting with the door cracked (makes your house smell yummy!) or outside if you live in a hot area.

And Marc, don't think of it as plum jam that didn't set. Think of it as delicious, gourmet plum sauce! I'll bet it would be great over ice cream or pancakes.

Nancy -- Prune plums are generally elliptical in shape with a free stone. Red and purple plums are generally spherical with a clinging stone.

Thanks for the tip about the pitting machine.


Julie -- You're right about making sauce from non-setting jam. It might also make a flavor layer for a cake.

For Midwesterners looking for local sugar, Pioneer brand sugar is grown in Ohio and Michigan, and Peninsula Sugar is grown in the thumb area of Michigan.

I've been inspired by this article to take some pictures of the next canning/jamming session I have. The plum jam looks marvelous.

A few other ideas for how to deal with plums....especially when you have a few trees in your yard and dozens of cans of plum jam in the pantry already:
-oriental plum sauce
-plum chutney
-plum leather
-dried plums
-plum kuchen (cake made from frozen halved plums)
Any more ideas?

I've been trying to read up on the safety of canning with honey. Most sources site that honey should only replace up to 1/2 of the sugar. I would prefer to can with all honey, like this recipe. Any knowledge out there about using honey to replace all the sugar in jam or preserves?

Thanks!

I made this recipe too and mine didn't set well either. I suspect I had too much fruit that was on the ripe side. Less ripe fruit has more pectin in it-which makes it set better. It does make a wonderful sauce.

I went ahead and tried this recipe with a variety of plums (which, after peeled and diced and made about 6 cups) and added a box of pectin after reading that other have had problems with setting. I also snuck in a tablespoon of lemon juice to keep the color, but the honey was the perfect sugar replacement that I have been lusting after.
My six 8oz jar batch turned out firm-ish, not as solid as blackberry jam, but not like a syrup either. Oh, and super delicious! We all ate some on french toast.....
Thanks for sharing your experience!

A possible alternative for you (since you're not getting the jelling you crave) is to use calcium-activated pectin--the only commercially available brand I know of is called Pomona's Pectin. Unlike traditional pectins, it is, as the name implies, activated by calcium (which comes in a little packet with the pectin) so you can sweeten with any sweetener, natural or artificial you like. In fact, you can skip the sweetening part altogether if you so desire. But this means that you can simply sweeten to taste with honey, agave nectar, even splenda, supposing that's your thing. Just google Pomona's Pectin, and you'll find places where you can buy it online with PayPal, or perhaps even a local supplier near you. Happy canning!

Another pectin alternative is to somehow extract natural pectin from fruit. For example, after cooking the whole plums, you could let the entire mixture steep for a little while to extract pectin from the skins, then strain it. I used that approach this year and my plum jam was thicker than last year's batch. Whether the steeping led to thicker jam is hard to know, however, as the cooking rate and duration was different, as was the composition of the plums and so on.

Another source of natural pectin could be lemon or orange seeds. You could take a bunch of lemon seeds and put in a cloth bag, like David Lebovitz and Elise Bauer do with orange marmalade.

I cook my plums with pits. The pits settle nicely to the bottom of the pot and not a lot of plum is wasted. There they can easily be found by stirring with a metal spoon, if you miss any they will be noticeable in the jam and can be removed when eating.

I have another way to get the pits out if anyone needs one. Bring the plums to a boil in a bit of water. They will pop open, then rather than straining them you can let them cool, and really they'll slip right out with a little flick of the finger. I pitted about 15 cups in 10 minutes this way.

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