For this weeks recipe, I thought Id try something new and have partnered with Ashley Adamant from the blog Practical Self Reliance to do a recipe exchange. She created this wonderful pectin free, wild foraged plum jam that is easily made at home, even with no canning experience.
If foraging isnt your cup of tea Ashley has included instructions for using commercially grown plums as well. You can find Ashley at www.practicalselfreliance.com as well as on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Huge crops of wild plums ripen at the edge of woodlands across North America each fall, and most are left to the squirrels. The plums are small, only slightly bigger than a cherry, but most are flavorful and sweet. With a bit of added sugar, wild plums cook into a tasty wild foraged jam without any added pectin.
In Vermont, the first wild plums ripen in early September and individual trees continue producing all the way through October and the first frosts of winter. Unlike commercial plums, that have been bred for size and intense sweetness, wild plums are small and often tart. Plums don’t come true to seed, and each wild plum tree will produce fruit with a slightly different taste.
Some will be pleasant for fresh eating, but many have hints of bitterness and tanning, and they can pucker the mouth. Once you add a bit of sugar, all that pucker turns into complexity of flavor.
Historically, wild apples with tart or bitter flavors were prized additions to homemade cider. When you’re pressing apples for cider, it’s important to balance sweetness with acid and tannin to create a more rounded flavor. Wild plum jam has that rounded flavor, rather than the one dimensional sweetness of many commercial jams.
Wild plum skins tend to contain most of the “character” and have more bitter flavor. If you’d like a milder jam, strain out the peels early in the cooking process. I leave them in because I feel they add a beautiful color to the finished jam, as well as a bit of texture. They also contain a good bit of pectin, which helps the jam thicken more quickly.
I like to pit the wild plums with a cherry pitter before making jam, and since I don’t have to strain out the seeds, the jam also keeps a chunky texture and the colorful plum skins.
After pitting, the plums can go into the pot whole or quickly chopped, depending on your preference. The plums will need a bit of liquid added at the beginning to prevent them from scorching on the bottom of the pot, and I add a bit of lemon juice to the jam at this point for safety.
I didn’t use to be this careful in my canning, and I happily put away jams and canned fruits without added lemon juice. Fruits are acidic, and in my mind, they didn’t need any added acid to reach a safe pH for canning. It wasn’t until I was canning peaches, and I read that some varieties of peaches, namely white peaches, aren’t acidic enough to can.
Fruits need to have a pH below 4.6 to be canned without additional acid, and commercial plums generally have a pH between 2.8 and 4.6. Some plums are dangerously close to the safe line, and when you’re using wild plums there’s no way to know if they’re acidic enough. They tend to taste more acidic than store bought, but a tiny bit of lemon juice is a good thing to add to be sure.
Most of my homemade jams are low sugar recipes, regardless of whether or not they used wild or conventional ingredients. There’s just no need to add an absurd amount of sugar to a wild strawberry jam when they’re already so sweet, and less sugar generally means you can taste the fruit better. That doesn’t quite hold true with wild plums. Don’t skimp on the sugar when making wild plum jam, trust me on this one. Weight the plums, and add granulated sugar at a 1 to 1 ratio by weight. If you like sweet jam, you might want to add even a bit more than that.
Plums, lemon juice and sugar is all you need to make a wild plum jam that’s safe for canning. The fruit already contains plenty of pectin, and don’t require any store bought pectin.
These little babies are delicious – sweet and juicy with just a hint of sour. They are pretty small but the plants are prolific. The fruit to pit ratio is also pretty reasonable. The plants are super hardy.
They do not look like prunes from the store. They are orange/pink and a little tart. But I like them and actually prefer to preserve large quantities this way because it saves space, is not dependent on electricity, and doesn’t add a ton of sugar to our diet.
This article is part of our “trees for bees” series where we feature trees/shrubs that are excellent pollinator forage
Usually, the inside of the fruit is nice and sweet – with an apricot flavor. The skins vary in tartness and bitterness. In the wild, I often eat the inside fruit and spit the skin.
One of my favorite “wild” foods to forage is the Wild American Plum. It comes in a variety of colors and flavors. They range from yellow, to yellowish-red, to light purple-red, to deep purple. I find the skin of darker purple plums to be more bitter than the yellowish ones. But they all cook up to make a fantastic jam.
Substitutions for Wild Plums
Wild plums can be found in just about any climate or region where wild apples grow. They ripen from August through October, though it’ll be later in more northern climates. If you cant find wild plums, store bought plums can be substituted. To get the pucker of a wild plum jam, add in one part cranberries for every 3 parts plum. Since commercial plums tend to be much sweeter, make sure you reduce the sugar by ⅓ to ½.
Tree of the Week: American Plum
FAQ
What are the uses of American plums?
Are American plums good to eat?
How do you eat American plums?
There are countless ways to use American plums. Although you can eat them fresh (even straight off the tree), the most common way to use them is in jams, jellies, preserves, and wines. When looking for American plum recipes, remember that they are often called “wild plums,” so look for wild plum recipes as well.
What are the benefits of eating plums?
Plums are fruits that have a lot of fiber and water, being very beneficial for intestinal transit and cases of constipation. They also have vitamins, minerals, and antioxidant properties.
How to use plums?
Another interesting way to make use of your plums is to make some plum wine. Of course, you will need to invest in some wine-making equipmen t and make sure that everything is properly sterilized, but if you do, the process from then on is relatively easy and straightforward. A simple plum wine recipe can be found here: 24. Make Plum Cocktails
Are American plums good for You?
According to WebMD, these nutrients – and American plums in general – help improve digestion and stimulate respiration. Because they’re high in antioxidants, they have a wide range of other important health benefits, such as improving heart health, controlling blood pressure, reducing blood sugar, and even minimizing anxiety.