BELOW: Here are the fat little plums cooking down in the top of Carol's wonderful steam juicer. If you are not familiar with this wonderful device, here is a link to more information on Buy.com (No, it's not a commissioned link.)
We canned up the crystal-clear purple plum juice that collected in the bottom of the juicer, for use later. Our focus on that day was on the meltingly soft and sweet plum meat.
BELOW: Enter the Victorio food mill!!! This wonderful old-fashioned device takes the whole cooked fruit that you feed into the top, and shunts all the tough skins, seeds, pits and what-have-you out one way, and the creamy milled fruit flesh comes out the other way. It's awesome. More info about this machine on Buy.com.By the way, the recipe we used for this was inspired by the one in the Ball Blue Book - except that we cut the sugar WAY, WAY back. The Ball recipe called for SEVEN CUPS of sugar to FIVE cups of fruit pulp - OBSCENE!! That is just an insane amount of sugar... we had six cups of plum pulp and we used just one-half cup of sugar. It was delicious when we tasted it - more sugar would just have adulterated the taste of the real fruit. So there.
BELOW: The fibrous plum "tailings" separated by the Victorio mill get put through the mill once again, to release all the yumminess they hold. After that, the tailings go right out to the chickens. Boy do they love that!
BELOW: Next step in creating plum leather is the Excaliber Food Dehydrator!! The smooth plum puree is spread onto special nonstick sheets which are the put into the dehydrator for 8 hours - and there you have it.The dried pools of plum leather peel right off, and are rolled up in wax paper, where they are shelf-stable for weeks to months - but they don't last long around here! The essential flavor of the natural plums shines through in every bite of the leather - it's just fantastic. Wonderful snack.
