This oven roasted spiced plum butter is a delicious way to preserve early autumn plums. Also known as pflaumenmus, it’s a traditional German preserve that is very much worth making.
I first discovered The Wednesday Chef sometime in early 2006. I had become an avid reader of blogs about a year before (they were a great way to keep my mind off my terrible day job) and was always on the hunt for new sites to add to my list of bookmarks. Luisa’s voice and perspective on food resonated with me immediately. I spent a morning engrossed in her archives and once caught up, tried never to miss a new post.
In fact, it’s fairly safe to say that I’ve read nearly everything that Luisa Weiss has ever posted to the internet (I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a stalker. I swear, I’m just a fan). And, when an advanced copy of My Berlin Kitchen arrived just before the mini-vacation that Scott and I took few weeks back, I tucked it into my travel bag and proceeded to read it in a single, giant gulp.
As I read, I dog-eared recipes I wanted to remember. I marked the Pizza Siciliana and the Poppy Seed Whirligig Buns. I’m hoping to make the Yeasted Plum Cake before their season is entirely gone and, come Christmas, I’m definitely planning on making the Fruit Bread on page 161. It sounds dense and divine.
As I read, there was one recipe that jumped out at me more insistently than the rest and cried out to be made immediately. The Pflaumenmus or Spiced Plum Butter on page 237 had my name written all over it (particularly since I had the necessary four pounds of Italian prune plums at home, thanks to the Washington State Fruit Commission and their Canbassador program).
Of course, I’ve made plum butters before, but never with this particular technique. Luisa has you quarter the plums, stir them together with a bit of sugar, a cinnamon stick, and a couple cloves and let them sit overnight. The next day, once they’re nice and juicy, you pop the pan into the oven and bake them them at moderate heat.
After their time in the heat, the plums are incredibly tender and fragrant. The liquid has thickened a great deal and the slumping fruit just smells incredible.
Once pureed, she has you funnel the prepared butter into sterilized jars and use the inversion method to seal. This is the only place where I diverged from the recipe as written and I chose to run my jars through a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Because this is a relatively low sugar preserve, I wanted to ensure that all bacteria was killed and the best way to do that is with a hot water bath.
Now, just a note about the yield. The recipe says that it makes four to five jars, but doesn’t specify the sizes of those jars. I found that after pureeing, I had exactly enough butter to fill three pint jars. I imagine the jars Luisa used were a bit smaller than a standard pint and so figure my yield was just about right (I did the math and found that had I used the 1/5 L Weck jars, I’d have filled exactly five jars).
I plan on applying this same overnight maceration and oven roasting to other fruits, because it made for such a nice finished product and filled my apartment with the most delicious smells.
Disclosure: Viking sent me an advanced copy of My Berlin Kitchen and are providing the copy for this giveaway. However, I’ve not been paid to host this giveaway and my opinions are entirely my own.
Spiced Plum Butter
Ingredients
- 4 pounds Italian prune plums
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 2 whole cloves
Instructions
- Pit and quarter the plums and put them in a heavy 4-quart pot. Add the sugar, the cinnamon stick, and the cloves. Stir well and let sit overnight or four 8 hours.
- The next day, heat the oven to 350 degrees. Put the pot, unlidded, into the oven and cook for 2 hours, stirring the mixture occasionally.
- Sterilize the glass jar and lids in boiling water.
- When the plums have broken down and the liquid has reduced to a thick jam, remove pot from the oven and fish out the cinnamon stick (if you can find the cloves, fish them out too).
- Puree the jam with an immersion blender until it resembles a fruit butter, and then fill the sterilized jars with the hot puree, screw on tops and immediately turn the jars upside down. If you prefer a jam with discernible chunks of fruit, however, don’t puree the jam; simply ladle the hot jam into the sterilized jars.
- Let the jars cool complete before turning the right side up again and labeling them. The jam will keep for at least a year.
(Marisa’s note: You can also process the jars in a boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes if you’d prefer to do it the American way.)
Recipe from My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes) by Luisa Weiss, published by Viking, 2012.
I have been addicted to canning for the last few years. Your Yellow Tomato Basil Jam is my absolute favorite. My friends hope that it is part of the menu when they come to my house for dinner.
Food is my #1 way to make memories so there are so many… but one of my only memories of my grandfather, who passed away when I was very young, was sitting at his kitchen table together eating jam directly out of the jar and giggling with guilt that we would get caught!
My favorite food memory is my grandmother’s blintzes……….they were so very good!
My favorite food memory is making peanut brittle with my mom. Everyone asked her for the recipe, but no one could make it like my mom. Now, I’m carrying on the holiday tradition at my house.
I think my favorite food memory is eating fresh caught fish in Mexico. They served a giant flounder with lots of lemon juice and herbs… We were at a little hole in the wall that looked horrible, but was heaven on earth.
It would be having boiled dinner with my mom and now with my daughter.
Boiled dinner is a ham, potatoes, carrots, turnips, and cabbage all boiled together
My mom used to make corned beef hash from scratch. This was my favorite. I love to watch her grind everything up and then cook it and top each serving with egg. Thanks for the memory; I haven’t thought of that in quite a while.
The food memories are mostly from my Mom’s side of the family; we lived upstairs of my Great Grandma so we were exposed to her traditions. I think my earliest memory is Saturday morning shopping; going from one grocery store to another to buy what was on sale. In the summer we would add the farmers market and then the last stop every Saturday was the bakery. Ah, those special days when we would come home from the marketing and have some special tidbit to eat. Maybe fresh bread and some lunch meat or a piece of Grandma’s homemade kuchen. Just thinking of this warms my heart.
I have so many great food memories, it’s hard to single out one. What comes to mind first is baking pies with my mom. She taught me how to make a perfectly crimped crust when I was about eight.
My mom used to make spiced walnuts every Christmas, which were not only tasted heavenly, but made the house smell wonderful, too. I make them for my family and friends today.
My favorite food memory is while living in California we had the most prolific apricot tree we used to can like mad and still gave away laundry baskets full of fruit to others. I have never again tasted an apricot as delicious as those.
My favorite food memory is helping my Grandmother prepare Christmas dinner when I was a little kid. I mostly peeled potatoes and cut up beans and so forth, but I still loved it.
I am so excited by this method~ looking forward to trying it out. A favorite food memory is my grandma’s peach pie for my 12th birthday dessert at her house. I’ve always loved pie and fruit desserts more than cake, and she was surprised that I asked for something other than a birthday cake.
My favorite food memory is biting into a fresh Fay Alberta peach that was on the tree mere minutes before.
My favorite food memory is biting into a fresh Fay Alberta peach that was on the tree mere minutes before.
wowsers! What an awesome givaway. One of my favorite food memories in relation to canning is being 8 or 9 and absolutely amazed that my 90+ yr old great grandma could peal a peach with a knife and peel it in 1 long continuous peel. Talent…and practice. Yes, I can do it continously now, but I use a peeler =) Hope to win!
My favorite food memory would be my great grandmothers fried apple pies off her wood cook stove. Delicious!
This would be a great book to share with my Dad, who lived outside of Berlin when he was a little boy right after WWII. He is fruit crazy, and I remember him drying and preserving fruit all throughout my childhood…even making a fruit dryer out of an old refrigerator and drying all of our Italian prunes. I guess that’s what you do when you nearly starved to death as a child…
My favorite food memory is standing alongside my mother, grandmother and aunties and learning the magic of cooking for others.
This is one cookbook that really sounds interesting. I would love to try some of these.
My favorite food memory was the first time I canned. It was tomatoes and they all turned out great. And of course the first time I pressure canned anything. I sat in the kitchen the entire time and prayed I had done it right so it wouldn’t explode. The best canned green beans I ever ate that winter for sur. LOL
When I was a kid my dad worked nights. A couple of times a month he would bring home a pizza from the best pizza joint ever, wake me up (this was at around 2:00 am), and the two of us, just my dad and me, would sit in the kitchen and eat pizza and talk. Just the two of us, none of my siblings (I’m the oldest).
I have a lot of great food memories, but this is hands-down my favorite.
I would love to win this book for two reasons; I am a voracious reader and it sound marvelous and I am a beginning canner and want to try that plum jam.
My favorite cooking memory was when my husband’s grandmother set out to teach me how to make perogies. “you start with a pile of flour”…. What an experience.
I am so interested in trying plum butter with this method. The whole discussion reminds me of a fond food memory: being with my grandmother in her kitchen for hours and hours as she stirred her apple butter. Nothing smelled better than that.
Ooh, I’m a Canbassador too! Hurray for canning, and thank you for always sharing so many inspired recipes! This one sounds like an excellent destinations for plums, and boy do I have plenty. At the moment, unrelated to any official duties, I’m listening to jars of Greengage plum preserves ping shut (plums from a friend’s tree) and just finished off an Italian plum cake (plums from my tree)–not Luisa’s plum cake recipe, although I look forward to trying it as well! So thank you for this recipe and helping me to keep up my plum-processing enthusiasm. 🙂
A favorite memory of mine from growing up–since I do want that book and haven’t ordered it yet–is the smell of my parents’ canning kitchen (yes, it’s a separate kitchen–not at all fancy, but it avoids heating up the whole house all summer!) as they juice/jam/can the produce from their orchard.
My favorite food memory is me as a growing child, eating an impossible amount of bacon and pancakes on Saturday mornings.
I have several food memories especially from my gramma back in the 1960’s but the one I have as an adult was the first (of two) dates I had with hubby. He didn’t know I was vegetarian!So he took me to the best steak house in town. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I ordered fish and only nibbled the crispy coating. I took it home, confessing I was too nervous to eat. My dad loved it! Next month, 40 years!
My mom making pizza and telling me that it needed to look as good as it tasted. It looked wonderful but when she took it out of the oven she dropped it. We looked at each other and just laughed.
When I was a small child, my Italian grandmother–who was THE best cook–would top her incredible baked ziti with sliced hard boiled eggs as a “treat” for me and my sister. 🙂 We thought that was great!
So many memories, it is hard to choose one! When I was sick I remember my mom would make rice pudding for me. I still love it when I’m under the weather. 🙂
My favorite food memory has to be just about anything I helped my grandmother cook/bake. But there was one time when, as a family, we went berry picking – for elderberries in some spot a buddy of my dad’s had told him about. We took all these berries home – my dad juiced some to make wine, the rest went to jelly. The jars were all filled hot and then topped w/ paraffin. My dad took some of the berries to work w/ him that Monday to give to the guy who told him where to go pick. Turned out they were NOT elderberries! Eeek! They were thankfully edible, but were some kind of Indian Ink Berry.
My favorite food memory is helping to make homemade soup with my Slovenian grandpa every Saturday morning. Also, helping grandma make Potica and homemade noodles for the soup!
My favorite food memory would have to be makeing christmas goodies with my Mom. She made almost all of our Christmas sweets, breads, cookies, fudges, candies. I still carry on the tradition of makeing just about all of our christmas sweets. We also have a tradition in which everyone in our family makes each others gifts. I just think it makes it more personal.
My favorite food memory is,
garden fresh tomatoes that my
Dad would cut up into a bowl
Add a little olive oil & salt.
He’d get 2 forks and a loaf of
fresh Italian. We would sit
down and share the tomatoes
and torn bread. He passed away
a couple years ago. The first summer
after I cut up my tomatoes and grabbed
my bread the first taste I burst into
tears. He isn’t with me to enjoy that
tradition any longer. I still love my
tomatoes with bread but something
Is missing…….him 🙁
my favorite food memory is hunting for mushrooms
A fond food memory is my discovery of how much I loved homemade dill pickles at 5 years old. My godfather had made a batch which everyone else found too sour…I on the other hand thought they tasted divine and got to sit on his knee eating nearly the whole jar while everyone looked on and laughed. My mom fretted I would make myself sick…! Lol. I was fine and to this day love a good dill pickle.
Fav food memory is measuring all the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies with my mom. Then my dad would cream the butter and sugars by hand and we would all plop the dough on cookie sheets and enjoy them hot out of the oven. Runner up memory…annual canning of green beans. It was a family affair!!
favorite food memory? I think we make one every day. Tonite it was picking blackberries with my kids at dusk… mouths purple and sweet, fall chill drifting into the fields from the ocean, a total delight as the kids debated which recipe to use on our bounty on the way home. What better memory could I give them than that? Food, love and fresh air.
favorite food memory… sheesh. just one? an early one is my mom letting me drink all the “corn juice” in the serving dish once the corn was all eaten. I had been sick and sletp thru dinner, so I missed the actual corn, but the juice was so sweet and good. I do make corn broth now sometimes and think of my mom that day, she was surprised that I wanted it. 🙂
My favorite food memory would have to be putting together the family dessert table every Thanksgiving. Everyone wants to make something, so you never end up eating much of any of the dishes, but it’s so nice to be together and have everyone participate.
My favorite food memories are of family reunions at some warf mounted restaurant where I learned how to eat crab by watching my parent, aunts, uncles and cousins. I love a giant pot of steaming crabs with Old Bay to this day even though I live so far away my crab eating is limited to the rare summer trip home or the amazing shipment my brother sent me for my birthday this year.
So many wonderful food memories – one that stands out is camping out with best friends, grilling peaches & eating them with foie gras around the campfire. Gritty decadence.
My favorite food memory is eating a slice of my grandmother’s (Bohemian) Hoska bread, lightly toasted and dripping with butter. Imagine brioche, studded with blanched almonds and golden raisins. Outstanding. She would gift everyone with loaves at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we would look forward to it for months, and practically mourn when it was gone.
Hm, I think I’ll be trying to make some this year. Thanks for prompting the memory!
My favorite food memory is watching my mom make hot water cornbread and fried cabbage.
My favorite food memory is Gravenstein applesauce. My grandmother used to make it every day for dinner. When I grew up and moved to the desert I forgot about that wonderful aroma of the apples. Now whenever I get a chance to get some of those wonderful fragrant apples, I buy as many as I can, bring them home and make my own applesauce. My mind swims with those memories of my grandmother and her applesauce.
Yum!!!! This looks so good!!! I would have to say that my favorite food memory would be making Christmas cookies with my Mom!
My favorite food memory….baking Christmas cookies with my mom….the most amazing cookie maker:)
the first time i canned – i made strawberry mint jam with my great-grandmother’s canning supplies. i don’t think i’ve ever felt such satisfaction in something that i made or such a connection to someone i’ve never met.
growing up, every sunday after church we’d head over to my grandparent’s house (my mother’s parents) and my grandfather would make pancakes. every week. it was a tradition for as long as i could remember, until one sunday we decided to pick up tacos instead, and a new tradition was born. it’s funny how you remember things like that so vividly.
My favorite food memory is, waiting for the soft serve ice cream truck with my Dad. I can still taste it 🙂 Thanks for making me remember.
I discovered Luisa’s blog pretty early on and have read consistently since. Her voice is so genuine, so real, and so approachable. I’ve heard so many amazing things about the book and have been meaning to pick up a copy…though winning one would sure be great 😉 As for food memories, I have many, but one of my favorites is making blinis with my grandmother, who passed away nearly 2 years ago. She has always been my inspiration in the kitchen–a fearless cook and a do-it-all type of lady.