Wild plums (Prunus americana) are in season, and they’re a puzzle. The flesh is rich and sweet, the perfume so deeply floral it will make your toes curl, but the skins, the skins are tough, and tannic enough to make you feel like you drank a few cups of chianti straight. The two aforementioned reasons are…
Wild Plums
Fruit Scrap Vinegar
If you harvest your own fruit–any kind of fruit–you know how many leftover skins, seeds, pits, cooked stuff, raw stuff, and all kinds of other things are leftover from processing. So much scrap, from so much good fruit. If you’re anything like me, you may have wondered if there’s anything you can do with it….
Wild Plum Preserves
This is the greatest recipe for preserving wild plums I’ve ever had, and it should be–it’s taken me about 4 years to dial it in properly. For years I’ve been searching for a way to candy wild plums like this: soft, tart, yet sweet, with their flesh candied to the point of creamy, goodness. The…
Smoked Venison Ribs with Spicy Wild Plum Glaze
If you’re a hunter, and you throw away the ribs, all I have to say is you’re missing out, and you might consider taking them sometime, because they’re a helluva meal. As a chef, I never had time to hunt. Now, freelancing, consulting, and doing my own thing, I do have more time, and although…
Caramelized Pumpkin Bread with Wild Fruit, Maple Sugar and Black Walnuts
Recently I did a big tasting menu with a couple different desserts. The crowd favorite was this pumpkinbread, spread with butter, crusted with maple sugar, griddled and smothered with wild blueberries, candied plums, soft cheese and candied black walnuts. As pictured its a bit of a process, but doing a toned-down version would be a…
Wild Plums
Along with crabapples, foraging wild plums is the best bang for your buck as far as volume goes, if you want an easy to harvest, delicious wild fruit, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong I pick berries too, but the sheer ease at which I can fill my basket with plums on a good…
Wild Plum Sauce
Wild plums in my area are fantastic, but they can be tricky to get at peak ripeness and once they’re ripe, they’ll deteriorate fast. The good news is that wild plums have a strong flavor, and a little goes a long way. I shared another plum sauce before that’s highly spiced, see the recipe for…