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Food and Drink

Plum delicious time of year

Plum delicious. Plum crazy. With any luck you, too, will be plum full of plums and other fresh fruit this time of year.

The only thing better than summer is late summer, with so much gorgeous fruit around that you barely have to think about what you're going to eat. Just grab a fresh anything - tomato, peach, handful of just-picked blackberries - and off you go.

For me, the best of the best right now are fresh plums, and from the looks of the Okanagan fruit stands, it's a beautiful year for plum lovers.

Some people turn up their noses at plums because they've gotten a bum deal more than once and had to suffer plums that were dry, pulpy and tasteless. Uck.

Unless you have a private line to your own orchardist - or, better yet, a fruit tree in your backyard - all the tree fruit you buy was unripe when picked. Tree-ripened fruit is too tender and delicate to hold up to shipping. The key is just how green was it.

Here's a rule of thumb: The more distant the fruit supply, the greener the fruit was picked to better withstand the rigour, and the time required, for shipping. Unless your produce was flown in as air-freight from, say, Chile - and it wasn't; it came by ship and truck - it was plucked from the branch so long ago it was hard as a rock and hadn't even started the ripening process.

Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking nicely enlightens us about the ripening process, which is the last stage of a fruit's development. It starts when the seeds inside the fruit are capable of growing on their own. After all, that's the whole purpose of fruit - to spread the seeds and make more little trees or plants.

So fruit ripens to attract animals, including we humans, to eat it and disperse the seeds by discarding them or eliminating them via digestion. I wonder what a plum tree would think of its seed's journey now as we gobble up the fruit and relegate the pits to plastic-wrapped garbage in a landfill, never to see the light of day again.

Ripening is the last stage before a fruit's death, says McGee, and several things happen at once. Starch and acid levels decrease while sugars increase. At the same time, a "characteristic aroma" develops and the skin colour changes from green to a variant of red or yellow. All to advertise, come and eat me.

"As it ripens, the fruit actively prepares for its end," writes McGee, "organizing itself into a feast for our eye and palate."

Most of the changes are caused by enzymes, which are triggered by a process discovered quite by accident. In the early 1900s, someone noticed that bananas shipped from the Caribbean and stored near a kerosene stove ripened faster. The magic catalyst? Ethylene, a hydrocarbon gas produced by burning kerosene and by plants themselves to ripen their own fruit.

Climacteric fruits, such as plums, pears, bananas, apples and peaches, can be picked while mature but hard enough to be shipped. Then they're gassed with ethylene at their final destinations.

You've heard of the paper bag trick to ripen fruit? Place it in a bag and close the top. It works because of the ethylene gas fruit makes. Don't use a plastic bag, it traps too much moisture and encourages rot. If you want to hurry things along, add a piece of ripened fruit. Some old wives' tales said it had to be an apple or banana, but any ripe fruit will do.

This, or any other ripening technique, doesn't work for other (nonclimacteric) fruits, such as berries, pineapples, citrus fruit and melons. While leaving them on the counter to "ripen" might continue to soften their cell walls and create aroma, they don't store sugars as starch after they're picked, so best to choose good ones in the first place. Heft them in your hand (weight means juice) and smell them for signs of those alluring aromas.

With few exceptions - namely pears, avocadoes, kiwis and bananas - even climacteric fruits are much better if allowed to ripen on the tree or vine, where they continue to gather the raw materials of flavour until they're picked.

But back to those tasty, or not so tasty, plums. Before harvesting, good orchardists use syringes to sample the sugar levels in their tree fruits, including plums, to ensure the levels are high enough to produce delicious tasting fruit.

This time of year the local plums you're most likely to find are the prune types, some call them French or Italian prune plums: oval shaped with deep purple skins and a bluish bloom, and greenish-yellow freestone flesh. These, along with damson and greengage plums, are from a Eurasian species.

Rounder plums usually seen earlier in the season, such as Santa Rosas, which normally have yellow or reddish skin and yellowish flesh that clings to the stone, are from a different plum species, one native to China.

If you happen to pick poorly - or, more accurately, the orchardist harvested poorly - and you get stuck with some bum plums, they'll still be good in a plum cake. This cake is super easy and fast to make and it's delicious - my favourite kind of recipe.

 

Open-face plum cake

(From marthastewart.com)

 

1 1/2 c.  flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

3/4 c. plus 1 tablespoon sugar

1/2 c. milk

1/4 c. vegetable oil

1 large egg

9-10 large black plums, halved & pitted (or prune plums as needed)

1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon

2 tbsp. cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces, plus more for pans

 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Butter two 9-inch round cake pans. Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. In a separate bowl, combine 3/4 c. sugar, milk, oil, and egg. Fold into flour mixture. Divide batter evenly between prepared pans. Arrange plums, cut sides up, over batter. Combine cinnamon and remaining sugar, and sprinkle over plums. Dot with butter. Bake until tops are dark golden, plums are soft, and a toothpick inserted into centres comes out clean, 30-35 minutes. Let cool. (Cakes are best the same day; leftover cake is good for breakfast.)

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who is eating a yellow plum.