Life of Wry

We have all these plums. It’s insane how many plums a single tree can bear. Our tree is only 5 years old.. it punches well above its weight.

Jim filled a bucket and brought them in.. and we weren’t sure what we should do with them, only that we didn’t want them to fall off the tree and rot on the ground.

We settled on dehydrating them. We thought that would yield a whole lotta prunes.

Jim read that before drying fruit, you are advised to soak for a few minutes in ascorbic acid (we used lemon juice). Turns out, that’s only for apples, bananas and any fruit that might oxidize and turn brown. It was unnecessary for the plums, but we didn’t know that.

This is a photo of our garden haul yesterday (and my version of 8647, the creation of which gave me a lot of satisfaction!) and in the corner you see Jim preparing the acid bath.

We then pitted and sliced the plums and laid them on four trays, which were then stacked & readied for the drying process..

The recommended time for drying plums was 7-14 hours, so we plugged the dehydrator in and let it run overnight in the laundry room/pantry…

We tested them this morning (after 14 hours) and some were dry and chippy (rather, leathery) and some were still wet, so we removed the dry ones and let the wet ones go another several hours.

A close up of our not-prunes:

Clearly, more like dried fruit. They’d taste a whole lot better if the plums had been ripe. As it turns out, if you dry underripe fruit, they turn into underripe dried fruit.. very very tart!

It was a good test run.. learned a bunch. We have hundreds more plums to experiment on.