Foraging Fun #3!

I was done with two weeks worth of apricot picking and preserving (among other projects) and about to breathe a sigh of relief when I determined that I had a problem on my hands.

I've been remodeling one of my sister's houses as preparation for sale, so I was familiar with the tree which overhangs the driveway, it is a plum. I hadn't seen much fruit on it so I presumed it was an off year for this particular plum; I was wrong. Each time I would go to do something on the house an yard, I noticed plums littering the ground in twos and threes, then fours and eights, and then 12s and 15s. If I didn't want food to go to waste (and I didn't) and if I didn't want to have to pick up rotten plums for a month (nope, not that either), I was going to have to take some drastic measures.

I was unprepared to spend weeks preserving plums the same way I did with apricots, and nobody in my family really wanted anything to do with them. (Plums, as they say, are only good fresh, and that at a rate of one per day.) So I thought I could get creative. After all, foraging is largely about learning to eat from what's locally available, and the fruit was good.

My dear neighbor has a steam juicer of a kind my family has never used and she swears by it. She prefers her apricots juiced, not in nectar form, and as I saw her using it she offered to let me try it anytime; this was my opportunity. I had a lot of plums and couldn't eat them but was sure if I just bottled them as juice I'd come up with something.

The set-up of a steam juicer is pretty simple: you have three containers, the lowest you fill with water to boil, the top is filled with prepared fruit to juice, and the middle collects juice! The juicer I am using will collect ~ 4 quarts of juice safely before it needs to be emptied to collect more.

The usage can be a little more dicey depending on the fruit, so for initiates let me give a few rules of thumb:

1 - If you are watching the pot it will not boil.

2 - If the pot is boiling, and you are watching it, it will not produce juice.

3 - If you go visit your neightbor when the pot is not boiling and visit for 30 minutes, it will be overflowing and wasting juice when you get back.

4 - If you allow the juice to overflow in the bottom section (with the boiling water) and don't promptly clean it out, the rest of the juice you collect from that batch will take on a 'burned' flavor.

5 - It's not worth trying to salvage juice with a 'burned' flavor.

6 - As the fruits release juice they will compact. You can toss fresh fruit on top of the old stuff no problem.

7 - After the fruits have released their juice they will stop producing as quickly. Time to toss that batch in the bin and start on a new one!

8- Check the bottom level of water once you collect a lot of juice - it will need to be refilled.

9 - If you have hard water, you will have to refill it more often unless you want a massive cake-up of residue to clean when you're done.

10 - Even if you're careful you'll probably get a cake-up of residue anyways. Use vinegar.

That's what I have learned so far. The best part about juicing is that because fruit juice tends to be super acidic and it's boiling when you collect it you can seal the jars immediately with no additional processing needed.

The plums, which had a great flavor fresh, made a light pink syrupy juice that is very sweet and tart. I think it will work great as a Wassail mix-in this winter, and plan to try some syrup too. If I experiment around with plum-ade in the meantime on the hottest summer days, maybe I can get through all 26 quarts I bottled! Does anybody else have any ideas for use?