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We are going to make
wild plum taffy.
Or you may call it "Sugar Plum taffy", if you'd like.
Here are the wild plums
we have picked.
.
These came from near the very end of the picking season. The picking
season starts about Labor Day in Nebraska.
.
We've picked all different qualities of plums. A lot of these came
right off the ground
We don't have to
throw these away, we don't have to
leave them out there.
As you'll see as we go through the process
the bad parts
can be cut out.
The finished product
will end up looking something like this and it is very
tasty!
Very tasty!
I call it taffy.
That's about the consistency of it. It's just
very
tart as if it's filled with vitamin C
and has very good flavor.
That's what we're working towards.
So we'll start with the plums.
If you're concerned about
the cleanliness of the plums you can soak them
in a mild solution of
sodium hypochlorite, which is bleach,
but all I've done with these is rinse them
and
as long as I get them squeaky-clean it's friction
that actually
cleans
the germs off of any kind of a surface...it's the friction. So I just work them
until they're squeaky clean in this pan of water.
It'd be better if it were running water. That way the germs would be washed away
that we're concerned about.
This is about as clean as I get them.
The next thing I do is cut them in half.
The reason I cut them in half
is because they
lay flat
on the sheet like this,
and it prevents the bottom side from oxidizing
as I finish the work.
So I've split all the way down to the seed
around,
completely around.
I twist the two halves apart. The seed stays in one half.
The other half I just
place ready to do the second step
over here.
I work the seed out
of that half and place the other half...
I'm going to do one more and explain something else
about my cut.
As I cut through
I cut so that the seed is easily removed.
So I find this line here.
There's a line
that
delineates where the
the seed
the side of the seed is. I want to cut so that I have a point
of that seed
exposed.
So I don't want to cut right along the line because then
that...seed I'd have dig it out.
So I want to cut slightly beside that at an angle.
so
here's where the stem came out of the plum.
I just want to cut at an angle to that,
work around.
Get my two halves, and that
leaves
part of that seed pointing out as you can see.
So I've got the
seed pointing out. Easily removed that way.
Once you get your
.
plums all laid out like this... Again you could do it all in one step
that we're doing but it leaves a lot of plum
flesh out here exposed while you're working to be oxidized. And I like to
just do this
final step
all in one fell swoop
and so there's less oxidation of the fruit.
So what we've got to pull the fruit out with,
the flesh out with
the
ninety seven cent
ice-cream scoop from Walmart...works just fine.
And in fact I'll do some right now.
It's
a little bit of a
technique
and you have to use some muscle there, but
it comes out by
scraping the inside of the skin up against one of the edges. And
these
can be
dried
as is. Just
one piece like that, but the
fruit juice is going to come out of these during the drying process and it's going to
flow around
and stick all these things together. So
might as well decide how big of a of piece you want
that's going to be stuck together
and make five...
six inches worth of
plums
that'll stick together, each in their own juices.
And then you'll separate
the next
row from these by maybe an inch and a half because that juice will come out
half an inch from either side
and cause the others to stick. So
we can work again
one more with the ice-cream scoop
from Walmart
.
we just work that
flesh out
scrape it right against the
skin there and
line that up.
Now I also have a [Tupperware] salt and pepper
shaker body
that's plastic,
bendable, and it conforms a whole lot better
to the shape of the plum if I
care to do that.
Plus it is a little bit sharper than
the
ice cream scoop.
Now one thing I did try that did NOT work
is a spoon
like a teaspoon or a tablespoon, a measuring spoon that has a flat top...
that did not work.
I think the reason is, it just tried to...
it did not
enter
underneath the skin as gradually as
as this shape would. It tried to pick that whole
area and go under the
skin there, and it just simply
was too much. So,
even though this is flat like I'm talking about,
I'll squeeze it.
And then I can enter in
underneath that skin
gradually.
And I like this better.
This works better.
So we will
piggyback all of these
together in strips. We
can do this quickly. If I
did one plum at a time from
cleaning,
cutting in half,
taking the seed out,
and scooping it out and laying it over here, by the time I filled this pan, these
first ones would have been oxidizing,
and a change in color, a darkening, comes with that.
However, once you get these
lined up as many
as you can,
fill the pan,
you put these into an oven.
It'd be nice if the oven had a circulator in it to circulate that air.
So a drying oven
would be nice. We don't have
such a thing here. So when
we put them in our oven it'll take a whole lot longer.
You don't want to get the temperature up to high, it just darkens them
way too much, it
caramelizes.
Not that that's any problem, but that's not what we're trying for here.
So we want to keep the temperature low, about 140F
would be a top temperature. However, when they are drying, when they're wet like
this
you can actually turn the oven temperature up to 200F
or thereabouts, maybe 175F,
and the fruit itself won't get to that temperature until it dries out a bit.
Anyway,
we've got these, I'll pull these out of the oven
show you where we're at on the previous...
so this
I've got this set down to probably
135F so I can
barely touch...
you know the temperature is barely cool enough for me to handle this.
Otherwise it'd be a bit hot.
But as you can see I've lined these up,
and these are not completely done at all but
.
you can see how the juice
has flowed out of them.
And this is a teflon,
or non-stick, let's just say that, non-stick
finish there, that's what you need for the pan there is a non-stick...
Actually probably a smaller pan
is easier to work with on these simply because it just
take so long to fill a large pan like this.
And once these have dried
substantially
they will be
actually be darker so they will look like
that and they are very tasty.
The seeds
in this manner, the seeds don't get killed by
boiling them and mashing them.
The seeds are alive and able to be planted.
and
What I've got going here
is a
previous plate of seeds
drying
on the burner
that is the vent for the oven.
So the oven heat'll come up
through the stovetop. One of the burners will be the vent for your oven,
and that's where you want to set your plate of seed to dry during
this process.
Another thing,
if you don't want to make the taffy
out of this, you can just put the
fruit pieces right in the freezer just like we've done here. These are frozen
and they're quite delicious.
I'll get a whole plateful here.
A whole plateful. They're quite delicious. so
Work these out.
.
If you leave them in the
freezer for a long enough period of time they'll probably get freezer burnt which
will
put a distracting taste in there.
So I would caution against
just leaving them
in the freezer
for more than a month
probably, unless you
sprinkle them with a fine mist of water
over the top,
and that should seal it.
Make sure it's
almost cold...
almost frozen, the
temperature of the water you want
to sprinkle on there, or
mist on there.
It should freeze
quickly, it needs to freeze quickly so make sure it's cold.
That could put a fine layer of ice or a thick layer of ice. It'll preserve that
from being freezer burnt.
Then you have your snacks.
Have I forgotten anything?
.
These plums were found
as I was driving along
the road. You just learn to recognize the bushes.
.
Deer
also enjoy these wild plums, so if they're next to
a field that has been planted with corn that year, a large enough field, the deer
will be so distracted by the corn
that they will leave plenty of plums for you.
If the field has been planted with soybeans that year...
farmers rotate between soybeans and corn on their fields
so a soybean year...
that particular thicket would be
probably
all eaten up come
Labor Day or soon thereafter.
The picking period goes from about Labor Day for about three weeks.
That date depends on when the
when the blossoms were set
but normally that's about mid-april.
Mid-april is the time to actually find the bushes. Thank you for watching this video.