Plum.... something
Sep. 10th, 2013 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidThanks to omly, I now have a new Favorite Plum of All Time (at least this month :-): damsons. They're flavorful, firm, somewhat drier than other plums, and easily come off the pits.
I ate a lot of these fresh, but they have a limited shelf life, so canned the rest of them today. I halved and pitted the remaining plums (half a soup pot worth; not sure how much that is in pounds). I put a bit of sugar in to encourage juice formation, then put the pot on a very low temperature while doing the rest of the food prep. I chopped up the elderly lemon and orange that had been hanging around in the fruit bin, just looking for trouble, then peeled and chopped the three local apples left over from Rosh Hashana. I'd been debating jam v chutney, and all of this could go either way. I came down firmly on the anti-jam side of things by adding cider vinegar, and some malt vinegar as well. I minced the last couple of cloves of garlic from the farm share weeks ago, as well as the last jalapeno I froze back in the summer of 2011. And I tossed in some yellow mustard seeds as well (mustard and plum go together in my head, plus a plum chutney recipe I'd seen earlier had some). And I tossed in the end of a box of raisins, too. Once that all settled in and got to boiling, I turned the heat down and gave it time to come together. Usually, I like chunky chutney, but when I looked at this, it didn't look right, so I used the immersion blender briefly to get a smoother texture, and just before canning it was more like a brownish-red sauce than anything else. The taste is spicy-sweet, the lone jalapeno louder than it ought to be, but I suspect it will mellow with a few months' aging.
And then I started wondering: is this still a chutney? Or would it better be described as a spicy plum barbecue sauce? Or perhaps even a spicy plum ketchup? (What is the definition of ketchup, anyway? Poking around the internet gets the colloquial definition of a tomato-based condiment with vinegar, sweetener, and spices, but there are other, non-tomato ketchups out there (prominently mushroom or walnut) that are very different from their popular tomato cousin, and still are called ketchup. So I'm not really sure.)
What have I made? How should I label the jars? I don't know, so I ask you, gentle readers, for your opinions.
omly, I now have a new Favorite Plum of All Time (at least this month :-): damsons. They're flavorful, firm, somewhat drier than other plums, and easily come off the pits.I ate a lot of these fresh, but they have a limited shelf life, so canned the rest of them today. I halved and pitted the remaining plums (half a soup pot worth; not sure how much that is in pounds). I put a bit of sugar in to encourage juice formation, then put the pot on a very low temperature while doing the rest of the food prep. I chopped up the elderly lemon and orange that had been hanging around in the fruit bin, just looking for trouble, then peeled and chopped the three local apples left over from Rosh Hashana. I'd been debating jam v chutney, and all of this could go either way. I came down firmly on the anti-jam side of things by adding cider vinegar, and some malt vinegar as well. I minced the last couple of cloves of garlic from the farm share weeks ago, as well as the last jalapeno I froze back in the summer of 2011. And I tossed in some yellow mustard seeds as well (mustard and plum go together in my head, plus a plum chutney recipe I'd seen earlier had some). And I tossed in the end of a box of raisins, too. Once that all settled in and got to boiling, I turned the heat down and gave it time to come together. Usually, I like chunky chutney, but when I looked at this, it didn't look right, so I used the immersion blender briefly to get a smoother texture, and just before canning it was more like a brownish-red sauce than anything else. The taste is spicy-sweet, the lone jalapeno louder than it ought to be, but I suspect it will mellow with a few months' aging.
And then I started wondering: is this still a chutney? Or would it better be described as a spicy plum barbecue sauce? Or perhaps even a spicy plum ketchup? (What is the definition of ketchup, anyway? Poking around the internet gets the colloquial definition of a tomato-based condiment with vinegar, sweetener, and spices, but there are other, non-tomato ketchups out there (prominently mushroom or walnut) that are very different from their popular tomato cousin, and still are called ketchup. So I'm not really sure.)
What have I made? How should I label the jars? I don't know, so I ask you, gentle readers, for your opinions.