Dried Plums

As I said in a previous post I had been thinking about drying plums as a way to preserve the huge amount of wild plums I had already picked.

My first batch, I thought I'd cut a slit in the side, down to the stone and assumed that it would dry around it and the stone would sort of pop out and be standing proud of the rest of the plum.

Yeah.  That didn't work.

Plums are dried and stuck rather firmly to the stone.

So I cut the plums in half and took the stones out of those I could easily (the others went into a plum syrup type thing that I'll explain below) and spread them out on the dehydrator trays.

It took a few days of drying - I don't like leaving my dehydrator on when I go to bed, the noise alone is a nuisance - but I started to fill my jar with dried plums.  I think I'd done several batches before I thought to actually try one.

All that delicious juicy sweetness that these plums fill your mouth with when they're ripe must evaporate with the moisture.  These were so face-puckeringly sour as to be almost inedible to me.  We tried a few each to be certain it wasn't just that I'd picked a bad one.

Well bugger.  I have kept them, sure I'll find something they can work in.  A Phillipino friend who visited tells me that the Chinese would love them, they use a lot of flavours like this in their food.  Sadly I don't know any Chinese people to give them to.

The plums that didn't get dried - the slightly over-ripe ones that squished when I tried to halve and stone them - were stewed up with sugar and sieved.  I'm using them to make a plum fruit leather.  Unfortunately, I think there may have been too much liquid.  This is taking forever to dry out enough to remove from the paper and roll up.  I have been trying to dry this for more than a week!

Butter and Buttermilk

Since we weaned the calf from Brownie, the volume of cream we're getting with our milk has increased significantly.  It becomes so thick and rich that if we don't scoop most of it off, it forms lumps in the milk jugs and looks as though you have melted butter in your coffee.  I don't mind this in the slightest, but it can be off-putting for others.

I finally understand the "double-cream" that I see in usually British recipes.  This is no good for a cream sauce as it splits and melts and looks quite disgusting.  So I make butter.

Butter is really simple to make. Put the cream into a cake mixer and beat it until it's butter and buttermilk.  With my cream, it doesn't take long.  In fact, it's quicker than whipping cream with store bought cream.

Cream

Nearly there, but not quite - note there's no liquid

Now we have butter

Once you have butter, press it together lightly and strain it through a sieve, making sure to catch the buttermilk in a jug.  Then run the butter in the sieve under the tap until the water runs clear.

Buttermilk.  You can see the tiny butter blobs around the edge of the jug.

Put your butter into a clean bowl and beat it quite firmly - more liquid will come out and more rinsing will be needed.  If you want to salt it, add 1 tsp of salt to 500g of butter and beat it through at this stage.

From there I turn it out onto baking paper, shape it into a block, wrap it and freeze it.  It doesn't keep as long as store-bought butter.  I don't know if this is because I don't always get all of the buttermilk out or if it's because I only pasteurise and do no further heat-treating.  Freezing has the added bonus of being perfect for making pastry.

The latest attempt at spreadable butter on the left.  A block for freezing on the right.

Several times I've tried to mix it with olive oil or rice bran oil to make it a simple sandwich spread - my mother used to do this when I was young, but it's hard to tell when you've added enough oil as it's soft and spreadable when it's freshly made.  So far, all of mine have been rather firm.

Many people ask what do you then do with the buttermilk.

Anything you like!  Choices are endless.  Miss Ten likes to drink it as it is.  It works nicely in my cheesemaking.  I've used it making bread and baking.  There's nothing particularly unpleasant about buttermilk, except maybe the odd tiny globule of butter that may be floating in it - and even then that's only if that is unpleasant to you.