All about plums!
Photo from Cavoletto
Plums are delicious, versatile and our fruit of the month for November. They pair fantastically with allspice, cinnamon, cloves or almond extract and are perfect in a fruit cobbler.
Plums are available in over 200 varieties. They range in flavour from tart to sweet, and are available in several colours: green, yellow, red, purple, blue and black. Plums do not ripen after picking so you want to select ripe ones. A ripe plum is firm but should spring back when pressed gently. Smell it: a ripe plum should smell sweet, though the lighter coloured varieties tend to be less fragrant than the dark ones. Look for plums with uniform colour and smooth skin.
Photo from My Blueberry Basket
Plums will keep at room temperature for 3 days and in a perforated plastic bag in your fridge for up to five days.
Most plum varieties are perfect just washed and eaten raw, but these little fruits are also great for cooking. Remove the skin by blanching them in boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds, remove with a slotted spoon and plunge into a bowl of ice water. Once the fruit is cool, the skin should be easy to remove. Certain recipes will even ask you to cook the plum with the skin on, just make sure to pierce it.
Plums are in season from July to October. Plums are great in a kuchen (German plum cake), chutney or a sauce. Here are some of our favourite recipes:
Italian Plum, Hazelnut and Rosemary Galette from Cavoletto.
This butternut squash salad has a handful of delicious ingredients including plum! Recipe from My Blueberry Basket.
Easy and fun, you could make frozen plum yogurt with this recipe from A Lemon Tree Café.
Photo from Simply Fresh Dinners.
This plum sauce is proof that these fruits work great in both sweet and savoury meals! Recipe from the Food Network Kitchen.
And if you needed further convincing how about this delicious Asian plum sauce over cedar plank salmon from Simply Fresh Dinners.
What are some of your favourite ways to incorporate plums into your cooking?
