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!