Plum Jam/Jelly

Plums are by far my least favorite stone fruit. I think it's because the flesh clings so tenaciously to the pit -- feels like you are wasting food if you don't suck on the pit, but the fruit there is so sour. It also seems like the flesh to pit ratio can be pretty small for plums. There was no way I was going to cut flesh off of the pit for 200 plums, I wanted to be able to cook them into jam/jelly with no prep other than washing. So I kind of amalgamated a couple of recipes, and used what tools I had laying about. Basically cooked the plums covered for a couple of minutes to get them to split their skins and release juice, then cooked uncovered for about 30min to get them to release pectin from their skins. Poured that into a colander over a pot, and mashed with a potato masher {you are supposed to use a chinois}. Thus no skins and no pits the easy way. I probably left some flesh behind but the worms will eat it. Recipes call for adding 1/2 the volume of the plum juice in sugar. I eyeballed it, the first batch was less sweetened/better tasting than the second. Cooked it for an hour or so, so it was nice and thick, probably would go less in the future as there was plenty of pectin, I didn't have to reduce it for it to be thick. Pretty tasty.



Here is an earlier post with links, lots of research went into this...