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.
Hands down, my favorite food memory is my grandfather, hauling out that giant enamel pot (which now seems quite small compared to the various stock pots I use, but was enormous when I was little), and making halupkis in it. Halupkis, or as I grew up calling them, pigs in a blanket, are simply stuffed cabbages. I never liked the cabbage growing up, and would just pick out the meat and rice filling. Now, I clean my plate!
My favorite food memory is delicious food while camping, especially s’mores. Everything tastes good outside.
Chicken Soup! My mom used to make chicken soup for my two children every time they were sick. By the time my son was 8 he was convinced he only got better because of grandma’s soup.
My favorite food memory would be my late grandmother’s dumplings. She was a wonderful Czechoslovakian woman who made the best dumplings. They were not potato dumplings, but rather flour dumplings and they were fabulous. We made a tape of her maiing them once, which embarassed her terribly. And when she was almost done, she realized she had left out one ingredient, so she insisted she start over! I treasure that tape and the memory of her dumplings…and her!
My favorite food memory is learning to make Funny Cake (a family Pennsylvania Dutch recipe) from my grandma.
My favourite food memory is the whole family working together to chop vegetables for a Russian salad, my favourite kind!
In most families, the holiday meal seems to revolve around the turkey, in ours it is all about the stuffing! More specifically, the greek stuffing. It is only served twice a year, once on Thanksgiving and once at Christmas. As with all of Grandma’s recipes it was not written down. When I was a teenager, Grandma told us all that making the Thanksgiving meal was getting to be too much for her. At my mother’s insistence, I went to help grandma and it was actually really fun to spend that time with her. That year I learned how to make the stuffing. Grandma is gone now, but I still make the stuffing every year and it brings back my memories of her and makes me glad I took the time to learn how to make it and can pass the recipe down.
I have so many favorite food memories but this peach that I ate in Italy when I was a teen still occupies a lot of space in my mind! This peach butter sounds delish and I love italian plums. gotta get to meat farms!
I have an awful lot of them, but most recently, spending the evening of my birthday on the porch, eating homegrown fried green tomatoes, and listening to my husband play his guitar.
Making pizzelles with my grandmother.
I loved my grandmother’s cinnamon rolls and the little bowl of boiled potatoes in the fridge!
Grandma’s golabkis on slow cook in the oven all day long!
Eating waffles with powdered sugar on the beach in France with my cousins — I must have been about 4 years old as I was wearing the most fab 70’s giraffe printed pants.
One of my favorite food memories is of the restaurant that my sister and two of our friends created when we were 10 or 11 years old. We planned the menu, typed it up, sent invitations, did all the shopping and cooking for a one night restaurant for our parents. There were lots of messes, some burned spaghetti, and a very imperfect meal but it was successful enough that the restaurant opened again the following summer.
Hot cocoa and toast with peanut butter, made on a camp stove and enjoyed while watching bald eagles nesting on a nearby island, at our campsite at Acadia National Park in Maine.
I have too many to choose one! I will say, however, that some of the best involve cooking with my mother and grandmothers and learning at their sides.
My favorite childhood food memories are of saturday morning baking: cake, pie, coffee cake, cookies, doughnuts etc. Yes, mom had a sweet tooth!
My favorite food memory is my grandmother’s concord grape juice – homemade, home canned, and always served out of this tiny little amber glass tumblers…!
Favorite memory, without doubt, is picking crabs with my entire family at our family reunion.
My favorote food memory is watching my great grandmother cook in her kitchen. She had no recipes and didn’t use measuring cups. She made her biscuits and cornbread by sight and feel. Miss her.
My grandparents had an old ice cream maker, and one of my favorite part of summer family gatherings (4 generations worth of folks) was the sound of that ice cream maker, helping my grandfather add rock salt and ice, and the taste of the ice cream. Always made with fresh Colorado Rocky Ford peaches. Yum!
I remember my mom making strawberry jam that way once, years ago… she didn’t mean to either! she had sugared her berries and let them set over night, but she put them in the oven to keep the ants off..so she says, but had the oven on very low. the resulting product was almost a fruit leather…. very dense and surprisingly good… thanks for an interesting jam recipe..! the book sounds great, by the way, the perfect combination, novel and recipes!
How to pick just one…. Every year my grandmother would make enormous amounts of candy around Christmas time. While I was in college, she would send me a box of it. My friends figured this out and would come by to “help” me with my “problem” because she’d just send a little bit of everything and I never told her that there were some kinds I didn’t like. 🙂
I have a colleague who, when she can find Italian prune plums, makes an old family recipe for prune plum cake. It’s so delicious that I know this butter has to be amazing.
I always loved going down south to the grandparents’ and gorging on canned peaches!
That plum jam looks fantastic, and the book sounds fascinating!
I have a plum tree but have no idea what kind of plum it is. Would you be able to tell me the difference in an Italian plum. These are a bit tart which I love. This recipe sounds like one I would love to try if the plums I have are the right ones!!
I love this overnight and oven-roasting idea!
My favorite food memory is just being around food. Both of my parents cooked and baked and they always found a way to let me and my siblings help.
Before we and our friends had children, we used to have seasonal meal get-togethers. A theme was decided upon, and the host would create a great meal based on that theme. Amongst the group we have lactose intolerance, vegetarians and meat lovers, and it was always a challenge. We all live in different locations, so everyone would have to travel and we’d spend the weekend together. It’s been much more difficult with children, but we do manage a dinner and a brunch every year.
My favorite food memories also include memories of my mother, especially cooking with her over the holidays. And I loved her chicken and dumplings!
Most of my favorite food memories have to do with my grandmother and her speaking to me in Cajun French. When I was very young I thought we had our own language. One memory in particular is sitting in her kitchen learning to make fig preserves after I’d spent the entire morning picking figs from her tree. Buckets and buckets of delicious figs! Oh, she also made the best split pea soup I’ve ever had.
Favorite food memory would be eating cookie dough in my grandma’s kitchen … looking back, this was where my love for baking began.
I love fruit butters. I can eat them with just a spoon or my favorite is slathered on crackers. Such a comfort snack.
One of my favorite food memories is the stove top jam my grandmother made from her canned summer berries. She made homemade biscuits and poured the jam overtop. It was delicious! So she only used the sugar when needed and canned the berries whole w/o the sugar. Saved her money initially during canning season.
Love the Plum Butter recipe and will check out her blog today.
One of my early food memories is of my German grandmother saving the peach peels (and pits) from canning peaches to use for an infusion to make peach jelly. I was very surprised but don’t remember the finished product! She also saved potato peels to plant the tiny “eyes” instead of larger pieces one could eat. This was in the 40’s.
My favorite memory is my Dad and I sitting on the porch eating pumpkin butter on crackers. It was our quiet time on Saturday mornings from the time I started school until I moved out. I still can’t eat pumpkin butter without thinking of our fun times together.
One of my favorite food memories, was when my parents I still lived in Germany. Every year before Christams we would go to the Christkindlmarkt (Christmasmarket) eat the freshly grilled Nurnberger Bratwurst (basically the same as a regular Bratwurst, but smaller and you usually eat three on a roll) along with Kinder Gluehwein (mulled juice). That plus the smells of the roasting nuts and gingerbread, were the sure signs that Christmas was around the corner.
A favorite memory-“helping” my grandmother bake scrumptious pies. She rolled out leftover scraps of dough and sprinkled cinnamon sugar on them for the grand kids.
My favorite food memories are all the times I’ve spent in the garden, harvesting, then bringing things in the house and making jam or canning. It’s a slow, deliberate process that I get to repeat regularly and that I get to enjoy year round.
My grandma’s rhubarb crunch on Sunday afternoon!
my favorite food memory: my mother’s pork roast dinner with crispy brown potatoes. We used to come home from church on Sunday to the delicious smell in the house. Now, she can get us all home for dinner by just mentioning that she is making pork roast.
I can’t say that I have one exact food memory, but when I visit my sister Kath in Maine, (who is a wonderful cook AND baker!) my vacation is almost all about food. Daily we start with discussions – over coffee and her Jewish Apple Cake – at breakfast about what we’re having for dinner that night to heading out on adventures and going from little bakeries to the big grocery store shopping for yummy items. Then of course we have to stop somewhere for lunch and then head home to rest up and have another cup of coffee or tea with a little sweet. Then its prep for dinner time! No matter what my sister makes, it’s delicious and it’s mostly about love and how she shows it! Looking forward to visiting her for Christmas…the first time in about 25 years we’ll spend the holiday together!
I just plain old stink at cooking…and I imagine my family would love some yummy creations presented to them at the table, rather than Burger Helper. One time. they all said they weren’t hungry, and I caught them making PBJ sandwiches an hour later. I felt terrible, and have since tried to be a better cook, but it’s hit and miss. I need some hits!
I just saw this book at the bookstore this week and was hoping to read it! The plum jam reminded me of my Oma who used to make a delicious plum tart every fall.
Goodness, that plum butter sounds good!
It’s hard to come up with THE greatest food memory ever, but one that I will always love will be the vegetable soup from a restaurant in the town where I used to spend summers. I was always happiest with a bowl of that soup, and I associate it with my favorite place.
Hands down, my favorite food memory has to be home made chicken soup. It’s medicinal value is priceless. Nothing else can make me feel better when I am under the weather.
My daughter’s father made me saltcod stew with cream of coconut and cabbage. It was served with brown rice and roadside flowers in a can on the table.
My favorite food memory is my mom’s Breakfast Casserole every Christmas! Every time I make it, it brings me right back.
I just recently got taught to make taschana from scratch from a 90 year old woman who didn’t speak English. After the first session involving pungent sheep’s yogurt she made from her son’s sheep, she shooed me out and I didn’t even know when she’d come back for me ( now I know, overnight the taschana needs to rise). She’d talk to me in Greek as I’d rub the taschana between my fingers on her bed hoping she wasn’t telling me I was doing it all wrong. A few hours later, I returned to do it again and an orange-aid later I finally got the small crumbles of taschana you need. I only need to glance at the small jar on my desk to remember the cool dark environment of her summer kitchen/bedroom.
Favorite food memory? How to choose? I was only 4 when my grandfather died. Because he was so sick for a couple of years before that, Mom would pack us up and go spend half of almost every week at her parents house. Some of my food memories from that time are the sweetest. Like the time that I was shucking corn with Grandpa before dinner and he let me eat half of one raw. I was only 3 and it was so exciting. Or that he always let me slip my egg yolks onto his plate at breakfast because I didn’t like them.
I just love decorating Christmas cookies with my family. There are some traditions that will NEVER get old…
So many memories! Learning how to make all those savory and sweet Greek foods with my Mom. She spent literally hours teaching me how to make home made philo dough. Wish she were still here to see how much I have progressed. She was the first to introduce me to canning, too, back when we used those big jars with the rubber bands and metal bales.
My favorite food memory is watching my grandma peel potatoes over the sink. She was a great cook, made yummy mashed potatoes. They always turned yellow because she used so much butter. I wish she were still here…