Golden Plum Harvest

Our beautiful plum tree in the back of our yard not only produces spectacular plum blossoms in the spring, but also provides us with a large supply of golden plums in the late summer. Unfortunately, they all tend to ripen at the same time, and there’s no way that we can eat them all before they go bad. So in an effort to use some before they rot, I decided to make a golden plum jam.

The skin of these plums are extremely tart, so I needed to remove them before making the jam. Normally, I’d score and blanch the plums in order to peel the skin, but these plums were so ripe, that I could just peel them easily by hand. And because I was making a jam, I didn’t have to be too careful when separating the fruit from the pit because it was all going to boil down anyway. Two time saving events in one recipe, yay!

I didn’t want to make a plain plum jam, so I treated it like a peach, and made it into a spiced plum jam instead. To the de-pitted plums, I just added some sugar, a small amount of pectin (I had some leftover and wanted to finish it), cinnamon, and a dash of nutmeg. To anyone who actually makes jam, I’m pretty sure my lack of measuring is appalling, but the jam was just for us, so I went with a very rustic method (i.e., dump stuff in and hope for the best).

Due to the ripeness of the plums, they released a lot of juice, so in order to get to a jam consistency, I’m pretty sure I boiled and stirred the mixture for 15-20 minutes to get the liquid to mostly evaporate. What I ended up with was a small jar of extremely concentrated spiced plum jam; a little goes a long way.

It’s my first time making jam from our plums, and I’m happy with how it went. Next year, if we have an abundance of plums again, I’ll probably make another jar, but really, eating them fresh from the tree is the best way to enjoy them.