A couple weeks ago, I taught my annual weekend-long workshop up at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. I took nearly 150 pounds of produce up with me for the class and came home with just 15 pounds of stone fruit (it was a true canning achievement). The peaches, nectarines, and just a few plums went into the stone fruit drizzle I posted about last week.
I divided the remaining ten pounds of plums into two colanders. One of the piles became a slightly larger batch of the spiced plum jam I posted last year. The second pile became this plum ginger sauce (though really, you could also call it a drizzle if you prefer).
The finished sauce is a good one for savory applications. It is a tasty player in marinades. Add a squirt of sriracha and use it as a dip for salad rolls. And it makes a really great sweet addition to vinaigrettes.
Plum Ginger Sauce
Ingredients
- 5 pounds plums pitted
- 3 cups sugar
- 2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
Instructions
- Prepare a boiling water bath canner and four pint jars.
- Pit and roughly chop the plums. Place them in a low, wide, non-reactive pan and add the sugar and ginger.
- Place pan over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil and cook, stirring regularly, until the fruit softens and had reduced by about half.
- When the sauce is finished cooking, use an immersion blender to puree it smooth.
- Funnel jam into prepared jars. Wipe rims, apply lids and rings, and process in a boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes.
- When time is up, remove jars from canner and let them cool on a folded kitchen towel.
- When jars are cool enough to handle, check the seals. All sealed jars are shelf stable for up to one year. Any unsealed jars should be refrigerated and used promptly.
I don’t make much jam because I don’t eat it. Drizzle? I might eat it if I thought of it…. but this looks so fantastic I’m going foraging for plums tomorrow!
Marisa, when you talk plums on this site (and in your books) do you usually mean Italian “prune” plums which are coming ripe right about now, or those round globes that seem to be available in stores all year long? The color and seeming texture of this sauce/drizzle makes me think the former, but I wanted to check. Also, can you confirm that canning this sauce in half-pints would use the same processing time?
I made this one with red plums, not prune plums. I typically try to indicate if I mean Italian plums, otherwise I figure anything is fair game.
Thanks for the speedy reply. I can almost taste this ginger-spiked drizzle as the base of a fruity-spicy wing sauce for a football-watching party in the fall or as a glaze on a roast fowl during the depths of post-holiday winter.
Would this be one of the kinds of recipes you could leave to macerate overnight? I love those ones that can be done in two stints: the cut and sugar one night; boil and can the next.
Yes, absolutely!
I’m really new to canning. I just bought a house with a plum tree and we are at the end of an incredible harvest. I have bowls of plums everywhere. These are the kind that are small and cannot be cut and pitted. So I am cooking them and putty through a sieve to make juice for jelly. I’m just wondering if I can freeze the juice now and make the jelly later?
I have this issue too. I just cook them, let cool then just squeeze the seeds out with my fingers. Messy but effective and easy. The pulp is very versatile fruit leather, jam, bbq sauce, asian style sauce, plum apple sauce, and etc.
Marisa, you have such a beautiful and busy life now so I’m not holding my breath for a reply but if you did have time…would this recipe work well with Italian prune plums? We have a tree of that variety and sadly, nobody in my family loves them preserved whole or in jam or butter. They do love dehydrated but to process a whole tree takes so much time. I’m hoping this sauce would at least take 5 pounds of fruit off my hands, haha.
Yes! This would be fantastic with Italian prune plums (and those are the very best plums for jam!).