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.
My favorite food memory is salmon fishing with my dad in southeast Alaska… and the subsequent smoking and canning marathon that ensued shortly afterwards!
My favorite food memory is the first trip I made to a CSA farm with my young daughter. We were picking up food from my sister’s share and it was magical to see my toddler walking through the rows, picking and eating delicious, ripe and organic food. Her face was stained with strawberry juice and she was beaming with pride.
just one memory? well, i guess it would be the first time i watched the canning process done by my folks. dad was moving a hot pot of something across the kitchen, splashed hot liquid on his hand and howled till he could safely put that pot down. had blisters, and i was too scared to can for many years. then i made a garden. the rest is history and i have not scalded myself yet. i didn’t just jinx myself did i?
Mine is probably baking pies with my mom. She would give me a little piece of the dough and I would roll and reroll and generally mangle it as long as I could. Then we’d bake it with a little milk and sugar and that would be my personal pie.
My favorite food memory as a little girl was when my dad would take an apple and slice it VERY thin (horizontally, so that the stars would be in the middle). He would then put the apple back together and present it to me on a plate…looking like a whole, uncut apple. When I would try and eat it…voila!…the slices would separate. It always made me laugh and think he was a magician.
Favorite food memory: my grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. She made them with black walnuts and kept them in her red McCoy cookie jar and they weren’t complete without a few strands of white persian cat hair from her cat. LOL
My brother made my rehearsal dinner and it was amazing. You could tell he really wanted to make it the best he could and everyone enjoyed it. I still look back with mouth watering and heart warming memories.
My favorite food memory involves smelling the whole wheat bread baking and then looking at the lovely golden brown loaves cooling on the rack. Finally, with butter & jam, eating it!!
My favorite food memory is the first time I spent Christmas Eve dinner with my girlfriend’s Ukrainian family. Bowls of borscht followed by a never ending supply of dumplings, fish, fruit, cabbage rolls…..I was in heaven.
My favorite food memory is a birthday dinner that I experienced at the Black Cat Restaurant in Boulder, Colorado. I had just gotten back from a trip to NYC and had dinner at Le Bernardin. It was amazing but the birthday dinner really sticks in my mind as the chef is a friend and was so into making the food for my meal special. Food really can be love.
Just one? I grew up in the middle of an apple/pear orchard. On the way home from school in the fall I would pick a few perfect Rome Beauty apples for our afternoon snack. Can’t beat fresh off the tree!
I have two favorite food memories – eating Christmas cookie dough that my mom would make every. single. year. (she would actually make the cookie dough and set aside some for me and my brother just to eat raw) and also the first homemade meal that I ever made for my husband – homemade spaghetti 🙂
It’s kind of an anti-foodie food memory, but I still love mac & cheese out of the blue box simply because it’s what my mom would make on Sunday afternoons after we did the grocery shopping for the week. It always signaled that we would be spending the afternoon in while she did laundry and read to me from the Little House books.
My favourite food memory is making “Petes de soeurs” = nun’s farts with my mother. The left-over dough scraps from making pies is rolled out, covered with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon then rolled up like a jelly roll, sliced and baked…pure deliciousness and great bonding with my mum!
Getting up early and picking blackberries and gathering all the fruit that had fallen at my parent’s house when I was young.
My favorite food memory was going to my grandparents when my great-grandmother was staying with them. She would make delicious meals – our family favorite were the little pizzas! So simple but such love went into creating dozens of them for us all to enjoy to our hearts content.
holiday dinners at my grandparents. So many sweet memories.
My favorite food memory is my grandfather making blueberry pie. He and I would go out and pick the wild blueberries along the rail road tracks, then he would make the best pie with it.
I can’t wait to try this recipe for plum butter.
Making sugar cookies for Christmas with my mom and brother: using my grandmother’s old cookie cutters, carefully decorating each cookie, and getting to eat the bits that broke off!
My dad loves to cook, and so when I was growing up, we ate lots of varied, homecooked meals – all very healthy. When we went to visit my grandmother in the midwest for the first time, I was delighted to discover that she stocked her fridge with a huge package of American cheese slices, which we never got to eat at home. I ate them up greedily, along with cookies and other goodies I normally didn’t get to have at home. Isn’t that what grandmothers are for? These days, I have a better taste in cheese – but I have a special place in my heart for processed cheese food.
This sounds like a really fun book, I’m going to head out and buy some plums to try that recipe for myself.
My grandmother used to make applesauce every fall. I find my year a bit incomplete and out of balance if I don’t do the same. I miss her terribly.
So hard to choose…my dad was the primary cook, and he canned and pickled and preserved with a passion. He also bought beef in bulk from local farmers and ground the hamburger himself (and this was in the 60’s and 70’s.) I remember the smell of that beef, and how he would let my sister and me have a tiny bit as tartare, with just a touch of salt. Wouldn’t dream of doing that with any “commercial” beef today!!! And his homemade and canned tomato juice was luscious…now I am trying to get back to those great preserving ways.
My favorite food memories are sharing thanksgiving dinner with my family and friends. it’s usually a large group — it’s been as many as 30 — and a potluck so it’s totally chaotic, but always marvelous. I love trying what each person has contributed.
Not surprisingly, I am always stuffed by the meal’s end.
making bread bowls for salads with my grandmother. Mmmmm good!
I will always remember the many enchanted evenings spent cooking, talking, eating, and cleaning up the kitchen when my now husband, then boyfriend, would come over to my apartment for our weekend date nights.
Furiously picking ripe yellow plums into plastic grocery bags from my grandpa’s pick-up truck with my grandpa and sister one summer. And then making jars and jars of delicious yellow plum preserves.
There’s 2 really – smelling freshly baked bread in the oven when coming home from school…and all it was was frozen bread dough that my mom bought at the grocery store. But the best part was eating a slice of it with melting butter! And the other was all us kids (there was 5) sitting around the dining table, waiting for my dad to cut up oranges or a pineapple, as he doled them out while telling us stories. Awww! Happy childhood memories!
roasting marshmallows over an open fire and making smores!
When I was 17 my grandmother took me to Austria. I have no idea where we were exactly, but the tour guide took us to this lake with a pastry shop next to it. The pastry was the most delicious pastry I have ever had, everything was so flaky, buttery, not too sweet, fresh and wonderful. To this day nothing has compared, and every pastry I eat is meh :o)
I love Luisa too!
I have many favorite memories but the one that I still observe today is popcorn and chocolate milk on Sunday evenings. I grew up in a Mennonite community and Church was a must every Sunday morning. Sunday was also the day to visit family and friends and many Sunday afternoons were spent at my Uncle Lonnys’ home. All the children would play outside while the adults visited with each other.
Late in the afternoon aunt Mary would start popping popcorn. She would pop huge bowls full of popcorn and stir up several large pitchers of cold chocolate milk. We would eat all the popcorn we wanted and washed it all down with chocolate milk.
To this day popcorn is best on Sunday evenings and I always always serve it with chocolate milk.
Umm, I have a few that stick out to me, but I’ll play nice and only share one. As a child probably the only candy I did not care for was orange slices. I remember older relatives seemed to love them and usually offered them to me when I would visit, and I always tried them, but just couldn’t develop a taste for them. Shortly after I married my grandmother, who could make anticipation for any event exciting with her contagious enthusiasm, and wonderful descriptions, began to tell me about an orange slice cake she had made. She talked about this cake for my entire visit, and offered to make one for us. I told her not to, explaining that I had never really cared for orange slices. The cake worked it’s way into the conversation several more times, and about a week after we returned home I gave in to the haunting that had followed me and searched out the recipe and baked the cake. Just as I expected, I did not care for it, but in tribute to my Mimi’s storytelling abilities I simply had to try. That was 30 years ago, and I’m wondering if my taste have changed? I may just have to make it again!
Finding wild plums on the creek bank while fishing with my grandparents, filling up all the minnow buckets and bailing cans with sweet ripe plums and then going home to make beautiful hot pink jam together
Staying up all night stuffing/rolling tortellinis for chicken tortellini soup. I was much younger than.
I was born in Germany and lived there for a while, and the Zwetchkin Kuchen is the best plum cake! I loved making it with my grandma growing up.
I recently started canning and am super excited to try this recipe. The book itself looks fantastic.
My best food memory is when one of my sons thanks me for dinner or something else I’ve cooked & says “that was really good!”
My favorite food memory is the smell of bread rising in my mother’s kitchen. And seeing the dough puff up and double in size!
I’m not sure I can think of THE favorite food memory, but I did have an excellent one from yesterday. I made challah with my one and three year olds yesterday. And by “with”, I mean I made most of it and they loved eating it. It was really special to share the day with them while getting to make something delicious at the same time.
My favorite food memory is making strawberry jam with my mom growing up. We’d go strawberry picking at a local farm early in the morning and make the jam when we got home. Before canning it, we would skim off the foam and after all the jars were in the canner, we’d make buttered toast and spread the foam on top.
One of my favorite food memories is eating mountains of lasagna when I was little, and having my parents say that I had a hollow leg… that’s where all the food was going!
My favorite food memory as a child was my grandmother’s Texas sheet cake.
Favorite food memory…has to be fall when I was little, when we would sit around the table after dinner and dad would crack apples in half by putting is thumbs in the stem divot. I thought he was so magical, like a super hero dad. We would eat apple slices with REALLY aged cheddar cheese and the crystals would crunch with the apple. Western New York in the fall really is the best 🙂
Favorite food memory? Too many to count.
Today’s favorite memory: Having homemade noodles & homemade pasta. Why? Because it’s the first time I’ve ever made noodles. I also put about a half-cup of pumpkin in the noodle dough- pumpkin from our garden last year that I’d pureed and frozen. The sauce came from tomatoes, peppers, celery, garlic, onions, and herbs we grew ourselves this year, some things from seeds or plants that overwintered from last year (or even older).
This garden has been important to me in a number of ways. It’s been a big part of us eating and being healthier (both eating the food from it and the physical acts of caring for the garden). It’s also been one of the biggest signs of my husband and I growing closer from when we were first dating through the present – when we were first dating and I asked him to help me get some bags of soil from the nursery to my house, he said “Okay, but that’s all I’m going to do – don’t expect me to garden with you.” He’s slowly gotten drawn in, away from the computer games, drawn into the amazingness of seeds growing into baby plants growing into mature yes-you-can-eat-them-now foods. Like me, he gets into geeking out on the biology, chemistry, genetics, geology, climatology, and nutrition involved in choosing what to grow, how to grow it, how to cook it, and how to preserve it. “That’s how potatoes grow?” “That’s a good bug?” “That’s what tomatoes are supposed to taste like?”
My husband is an amazing cook too – he was even before I met him, but then the two of us get together and we can make almost anything. Now he’s even more thrilled to have really good ingredients for cooking.
One of the ways I knew the relationship was going to be long-term was when I realized we weren’t planning two separate gardens for our respective homes anymore – we’d started taking it for granted that I’d be moving in and have to figure out how to bring my garden with me, and talking about how we were going to create this joined garden in his yard. We didn’t decide one day that yes, I think we’ll move in together. Bit by bit the “we” and “our” started creeping into our language, and happened first talking about that garden. Heck, we even got married in the garden.
So my bowl of pasta & sauce the other night is pretty much a little mini-celebration of, among other things, my relationship with my husband.
My favorite food memory is my Granny’s cornbread dressing (yep, Southern) that we had every Thanksgiving and Christmas. I spend my holidays every year trying to perfect mine to taste just like hers! It’s one of my favorite things!
My favorite memory is watching my grandma cut up a whole chicken to fry. She would just hold the chicken down in the kitchen sink and cut it up with a big knife. I even asked her about a year ago to come and do it at my house with my husband and 2 kids watching. I videotaped it!
My favorite food memory is being 5 years old and helping my mom can dozens of quarts of green beans. My job, (And I LOVED it) was to use an repurposed spatula stick, sans spatula, to poke down the sides of the quart jars, removing all the bubbles. I was excruciatingly thorough.
As usual, i turned a 2 minute job into a 20 minute production. Mama never complained and I was so proud to have such an important job!
The plum butter looks incredible! I’d love to check out My Berlin Kitchen.
I totally remember my mom setting up a kid’s table in the middle of the kitchen, placing a bowl of sugar and another bowl of lemon wedges on the table. Then my brother and I would go to town on the lemons dipped in sugar, playing a game to see who could resist the pucker/tart face the longest.
My best food memory is helping my mom with chocolate cream pie.
I don’t know if anyone will see this question buried in all the entries, but what are your thoughts on using regular black or red plums instead of Italian prune plums? Does it make any real difference?
If i remember correctly (its been a while since i got my hands on italian prune plums) they have a much deeper flavor than the un-named reds and blacks that show up i markets this time up year.
I have every intention of making this tomorrow with black plums, but i will be tasting them after the roasting, to see if they should be either cooked down more, or are in need of a little help from spices.
If it tastes good, CAN IT!