In case you missed my previous post, I’m embarking on a new cooking project where what I cook will be driven by seasonal produce. Each month I’ll be focusing on different seasonal ingredients and documenting what I cook with them. The first ingredient to be featured on the Seasonal Cooking Project is PLUMS!
All about plums
Plums are my favourite stone fruit at the moment. They’re smaller than nectarines and peaches and are sweet and juicy with a little bit of tartness. There are countless varieties of plums with two main types available in Australia – European and Japanese. There’s also the Davidson Plum, which is native to Australia and has a distinctive sour taste.
Plums have a thin, smooth skin with a colour that ranges from pale yellow to deep pink depending on the variety. Those with a deeper pink colour are typically sweeter than yellow-fleshed ones.
Like other stone fruits, plums are at their peak from summer to autumn and best ripened at room temperature and stored in the fridge once ripe. You know they’re ripe when they have a sweet fragrance and the flesh gives when gently pressed.
I must admit, I was never really a plum person until about 2 months ago. I rarely ate them as a kid and didn’t go out of my way to buy plums. Then they started appearing in the fruit bowl at work and I decided to try one on a whim. Plums quickly became my new favourite stone fruit from that day on!
Cooking with plums
Plums are a very versatile fruit to cook with and go well in both savoury dishes and desserts. They’re perfect for dishes that require a bit of sweetness and can be paired with proteins like pork and duck. Overripe and bruised plums are perfect for baking or stewed down into a sweet jam or chutney. They can be used in crumbles, puddings, cakes and tarts and don’t need to be peeled when cooked.
I found myself with an abundance of overripe plums recently (courtesy of my boyfriend Adam who’d bought a kilo and left them for a little too long in the fridge) which was the perfect opportunity to try some new baking recipes! Here’s what I made with them:
Sticky Honey Plum Cake
I came across this cake by Vintage Kitchen Notes and it looked so good I just had to try making it. The recipe uses almond meal and wholemeal flour instead of refined white flour which creates a dense, wholesome texture. The use of honey in the batter gives the cake the most irresistible toffee-like flavour and helps it caramelise wonderfully in the oven.
Plums are thinly sliced and arranged on top of the batter before baking. I doubled the quantities in the original recipe to make a bigger cake, but didn’t adjust the temperature or cooking time properly so it didn’t quite cook evenly in the oven. The outside coloured quickly and formed a dark cookie-like crust while the inside was still a little gooey when it came out of the oven. Next time I’ll reduce the temperature and leave it in for a little longer.
The result is best described as cross between a tart and cake with a gorgeous caramel flavour that’s unlike anything I’ve tasted before. Although it was slightly undercooked, the cake tasted so good that it’s definitely something I’ll be making again.
Plum Crostata
I love crostatas (also known as free form tarts) because they’re less fiddly to make than a traditional tart. You don’t need a special pie dish or tin to make this and the more rustic it is, the better it looks. Plums are front and centre in this tart. They’re cut into wedges and piled on top of the pastry – the beauty of this recipe is that you can use as little or as many as you like.
I’ve made crostatas many times before and adapted this recipe by Coles to bake this plum crostata. The recipe has a thin layer of frangipane between the fruit and pastry to stop the juices from making the bottom soggy. I made the pastry using a handheld pastry cutter instead of a food processor, and substituted almond meal for hazelnut meal.
There are three main steps in this recipe – make the pastry, make the frangipane, and assemble. The frangipane is spread over the rolled pastry, then the fruit is arranged on top and the pastry folded up to make a freeform crust.
I love anything with pastry and this crostata is no exception – it has a buttery, flaky crust and the frangipane layer is almost cake-like in texture. The plums soften and blister in the oven and their colours bleed into the tart to give it a gorgeous pink hue. It’s perfect eaten on its own or with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream!
Plum Muffins
Muffins are an easy way to use up any soft, ripe fruit. I adapted this Women’s Weekly buttermilk recipe to use up the rest of the plums, which I chopped into chunks and mixed into the batter. They came out a little too dry for my liking, so next time I think I’ll use a different muffin recipe (let me know if you have a tried and tested one I can try!).
That’s a wrap of the first ingredient I cooked with on the Seasonal Cooking Project! A recap of the recipes I used or adapted in this post are below:
I focused on desserts here because I love baking with fruit, but posts to come will feature savoury dishes too. Stay tuned for the next ingredient 🙂
