Local plum jam

(Editor note:  This September, the Eat Local Challenge blog will be hosting an international, month-long eat local challenge in association with the Locavores.  This particular challenge will have a special focus of preserving, canning, and putting food up for the winter.  Stay tuned to this site in the next few days for more information. Meanwhile, this first post from Marc discusses making plum jam at home.)

By Marc

The grounds around my apartment have two plum trees that become heavy with fruit in the mid-summer.  The first few years I lived here, I didn't do anything with them except perhaps eat a few, only to rediscover that they are almost all pit and skin.  But last year my upstairs neighbor taught me how to make plum jam, so this summer I was sure to spend part of each weekend on a ladder harvesting as many plums as I could, even creating a strange contraption called "the depluminator" to pick fruit growing on high boughs beyond my reach.

Jam or jelly can be a fantastic way to preserve the bounty of local summer fruit.  A significant non-local component, however, is often required in the form of large quantities of sugar.  Much of the sugar sold here comes from the tropics, often produced by ill-treated workers on ill-treated lands.  Sugar beets are another source of white sugar, with California produces only about 6 percent of the U.S. crop (most comes from Minnesota and North Dakota). (An episode of the Deconstructing Dinner radio program goes into great detail about sugar, stevia and honey). 

In a quest to learn more about fruit and vegetable preserving, I came across a Rodale Press book called "Stocking Up."  The recipe called "Plum Honey Preserves" immediately grabbed my attention, as it would allow me to create an all-local plum preserve.

The recipe in the book--which I have posted below--instructs you to manually remove the pit from the plums before cooking the fruit.  Although I'm not averse to shortcut-free cooking, there is no way I was going to remove the pits from over 100 grape-sized plums.  So I tried a cook-then-strain method, first cooking the plums in a little water until they were soft, then pressing them through a colander, as shown in the photo.  The photo also shows a little trick I used to hold the colander in place, and thus press with less mess.  I threaded a piece of stainless steel wire through one of the holes in the colander and then wrapped it around the pot handle.

Due to my inexperience, and perhaps too little extraction of pectin during the plum softening and pressing, my jam did not fully set.  But it is still delicious, with a combination of sharp, tart plum flavors and a mellow honey background.  And it's all from within 100 miles of where I live.

In the recipe below I have not included the details about preparing the jars or processing the filled jars.  To learn proper techniques, consult a book on home preserving or one of the page in the University of California Food Safety program's collection of on-line resources on home food preservation.

Plum Honey Preserves

Adapted from Stocking Up, by Carol Hupping and the staff of the Rodale Food Center

Makes enough to fill three to four half-pint jars

Ingredients
2 pounds red or purple plums (but not prune plums), slightly underripe, or a mixture of ripe and underripe
1 cup honey (a variety with mild flavor is recommended)

Method

Use a heavy six- to eight-quart pot made of stainless steel or enamel-coated metal, ideally one that is wide and short to allow faster evaporation of water. 

There are at least two ways to prepare the plums:  1)  Pit the plums and cut them into large chunks.  2)  Cook the whole plums in a small amount of water over medium heat until they are tender, then press them through a sieve or colander, pressing hard to extract as much pulp as possible.

Combine the plum pieces or pulp and the honey in the pot.  Bring to a boil over low heat, stirring frequently. When the mixture appears soupy, increase the heat to bring the mixture to a full, rolling boil. 

As the mixture boils, stir it slowly.  After fifteen to twenty minutes of cooking, the fruit and honey will become translucent and darken slightly.  Use one of the classic tests (thermometer, cold plate, the spoon test) to determine when it is time to stop cooking.

Pour into the hot jars, maintaining 1/4 inch headspace, then seal.  Process for ten minutes in a boiling-water bath.

Comments

[Nancy]

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.

[Julie Cummins]

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.

[Julie Cummins]

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.

[Marc]

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.

[Emily]

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.

[MrsSveinson]

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

[Alice Weber]

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?

[Nancy]

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!

[Deb G]

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.

[Ariel]

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!

[Jessie]

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!

[Marc]

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.

[EJ]

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.

[Lib]

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.