Plum Information

Photo: flickr user the_tahoe_guy

Ingredients

Plums' complex flavor is as sophisticated as wine

Pity the poor plum.

Preparation

Its tart, mouth-puckering skin turns off many of the same people who lust after its stone fruit cousins, the cherries, peaches, nectarines and apricots.

Yet beneath that often forbidding skin is juicy flesh boasting a complex interaction of sugar and acid reminiscent of fine wine.

Eaten out of hand when perfectly ripe or baked in a tart, plums offer a very adult taste of summer, the sweet tempered by a bit of sour. But interesting recipes for anything beyond a plum cobbler or crisp can be hard to find in a world obsessed with peaches and apricots.

Part of the plum's image problem, suggests Nancy Garrison, is that too few people have eaten one straight off the tree. That's a treat reserved for fruit lovers who grow their own or track down tree-ripened plums at farmers markets and roadside stands.

At most supermarkets, 'the ones you can get, they're always picked immature, they're always hard and crunchy,' said Garrison, director of the University of California Extension's Master Gardener program in Santa Clara County. 'They're never melty, drip-down-your-chin juicy and yummy. My guess is most people of this generation really don't know what tree-ripened fruit tastes like.' Even commercial growers lament the flavor of much of the fruit that's produced for a market that prizes size, firm texture and perfect looks.

'Growers grow what the store will buy, and taste has not been an issue,' said San Jose's Bill Cilker, who formerly grew prune plums for drying in Santa Clara Valley and now grows six varieties of fresh plums on 500 acres in Tulare County.

Cilker's taste favorite is the venerable Santa Rosa, an amber-fleshed plum with very tart purple skin introduced by Luther Burbank a century ago.

The Santa Rosa, popular at farmers markets, is one of the few plums still available by name in supermarkets, which tend to label plums merely red or black despite the fact that the state produces at least 60 commercially grown varieties.

California grows about 90 percent of the nation's plums in a season that begins in May with the Red Beauty and ends in September with the Autumn Royale.

Most are grown in the Central Valley, and varieties range from yellow to deepest purple outside with flesh that can be honey-sweet and dripping with juice or bland and crisp.

But if you want to taste one of the more unusual varieties, say a yellow Padre or a deep red Elephant Heart, you may need to visit Andrew Mariani's 75-acre orchard in Morgan Hill. It's one of the last commercial orchards in the agricultural region once called the Valley of Heart's Delight and known for its French prune plums.

Mariani knows plums better than most. In addition to uncommon varieties of other stone fruits, he cultivates 100 or more varieties of plums and their hybrids. He sells about 30 varieties at his Mariani Orchards' stand on Half Road from mid-July through September. The rest satisfy his personal obsession with horticultural variety.

'The plums are something we've added because they don't get much respect anymore,' says Mariani, whose family has been farming in Morgan Hill since 1958. 'Actually there's a lot of good plums out there, but in the marketplace they aren't treated very well, I think.' Last week, the Burgundy plums - with flesh as dark as their name suggests and a taste reminiscent of cherries - were just getting ripe. So were the sugary but milder Beauty plums, their red skin punctuated with yellow dots. Each variety is in season for only a couple of weeks.

'There are plums that are every bit as rich as any apricot, cherry or peach,' says Mariani, who also grows donut peaches and Blenheim apricots.

'Some of my favorite fruits are plums, and I've tasted a lot of them.' But most of his plum harvest is in the usually juicy Asian varieties, which dominate the California market, and Mariani prefers to eat them straight out of hand. He notes that most traditional recipes call for more concentrated European varieties such as greengages and mirabelles.

Yet Asian plums work well in dishes that capitalize on their liquid assets.

The sweetest varieties are a natural for desserts, but even tart-skinned varieties like the Santa Rosa produce sophisticated baked goods with an intriguing interplay of sweet and tart.

Plum kuchen, a traditional European recipe, stands up well to juicy fruit.

Its firm, caky crust soaks up the juice without getting mushy or falling apart, allowing the fruit to shine. Any plum with a nice color and rich taste would work in this simple dessert.

More labor-intensive but worth the effort is the elegant plum-frangipane tart with its cookie-like crust and ground almond filling. Stone fruits have a real affinity for almonds, and the tangy, cooked plums play well against the sweet and crunchy frangipane.

Plums also may be preserved to extend the flavor of summer into colder months. Cooked with red peppers, onions and hot spices, they make an exceptionally bright chutney with hints of cranberry. It would be great with Thanksgiving turkey - if it's not consumed long before.

Even more appealing for the holidays are Fran Gage's exceptional sugar plum cakes. Gage, a San Francisco baker, came up with the recipe as a way to use up the boxes of plums a friend gave her every year when she owned a patisserie.

Although the cakes require you to preserve your plums in vodka now, the process is quick and easy. Come December, all you'll have to do is stir together and bake the buttery cakes. It's the cornmeal in the batter that gives them great texture.

However you prepare them, give tree-ripened plums and their hybrids a chance.

You could discover a new summer fruit favorite.