Ume Boshi with wild plums

Ume boshi is a kind of Japanese pickled plum.  It's not really a plum, but it translates like that.  

It's like an explosion of sour and salt and a punch of sweetness all in one bite.  It is SOOOOO good!

This year I tried making some using variations on what my Japanese friends told me their mothers used to do and this recipe http://www.rootedfood.com/recipes/2015/8/24/umeboshi-with-california-wild-plums


I picked a mix of almost ripe and just starting to change from green wild plums.  
Weigh
soak overnight in water (the ripe ones split, so I don't think I'll do that again.
drain
10% salt rubbed into the plums,
Put in vat and weigh down with a plate.
2.5 weeks (I think 3 would have been better) making sure that the water doesn't evaporate and expose the plums
strain and reserve the liquid
dry at 30C for 6 hours (longer if wanting dryer plums)
pack tightly into jars and pour the liquid on top to cover.

Keeps in the fridge 10+ years.  Improves flavour with time.  

I fed some to some Japanese friends today and they said it tastes like commercial ume.  Which is pretty darn good.

It doesn't taste anywhere near as good as the stuff their mum makes.  

Interesting to look at this post today, as just last night I was reading, "The Noma Guide to Fermentation" by Rene Redzepi and David Zilber.

Pg 69 is the beginning of a multi-page section about "Lacto Plums". They cut their plums into halves or quarters and use 2% salt by weight (pits removed).  However, they are using ripe fruit that still has a little crunch, so the sugar levels would be higher.

Starting on pg 79, they have a section on uses. Some they peel, and then they dry the flesh and the skins separately (they dry at 40C/104F). They use the skins as "chips" or grind them to a powder for a rub on meat.  However, they consider the "plum juice" from fermenting also very useful as a salty wash for fresh seafood and as a flavoring to make plum custard.

My "volunteer" plum tree is just starting to ripen - this might be the perfect time for some experimenting!

It begins

When I buy real ume boshi, the fruit they use tends to stick to the stone.  One day I'll get a real ume tree... it is a dream of mine.  But for now, I find wild plums do the trick.  

I haven't tried making umeboshi yet. But I successfully made ume syrup with my ume this year. It turned out great and encouraged me to try umeboshi next year.

Did you add shiso to the ferment? Makes all the difference in flavor, and in color too if you use red shiso.

I would love to add shiso to the ferment.  But I don't seem to have the ability to grow it and it's never in the shops at the right time of year.

But I'm great at killing mint and mint family.  It's one of my super-powers.  That's probably why I can't grow shiso

I have to rely on my daughter for shiso. I can't grow it at all, and it flourishes at her house. Her yard is about 15 degrees (f.) warmer, but I doubt that's the whole story.

Thanks for all that good info. After having a glut of plums I started making a plum liqueur.
Pack a large jar with an equal weight of plums and sugar, fill with alcohol, I have a still so that's cheap for me. If you don't make your own alcohol you might want to use a smaller jar ;)
Anyway, make sure the plums are covered by the alcohol, put the lid and and put the jar in the back of a cupboard for at least 6 months.
The liqueur is delicious and the plums make a wonderful tipsy addition to desserts.

Hmmm... I'm going to ask anyone in the know; where do those wild plums grow? Are they true wild type? I've never heard of wild plums.
Thank you in advance

Mary Allan wrote:Thanks for all that good info. After having a glut of plums I started making a plum liqueur.
Pack a large jar with an equal weight of plums and sugar, fill with alcohol, I have a still so that's cheap for me. If you don't make your own alcohol you might want to use a smaller jar ;)
Anyway, make sure the plums are covered by the alcohol, put the lid and and put the jar in the back of a cupboard for at least 6 months.
The liqueur is delicious and the plums make a wonderful tipsy addition to desserts.

Sounds good! I like liquors or home made cordials from anything as long as it turns out sweet :-)
Do you remove pits before "soaking"?  What type of sugar you use? How do you use plums after the liquid is strained (I assume that's how it's done?).

I'm curious :-) Thank you :-)

P.S.  I tried sweet cherries two ways; first, they way you did plums, and second the way to pour sugar first in layers, and cover with sugar as a final layer. Wait for the sugars to dissolve, and then add gin (neutral taste unlike vodka) to "juice" leaving cherries in for a long time, than drain.  What I've found is that when doing  the first method, the sugar  (regular white sugar) didn't dissolve. It just sat there at the bottom of a jar. The second method worked beautifully dissolving sugar.
Thank you.

"wild plum" is the vernacular for an ungrafted plumtree with undesirable characteristics.  They generally have fruit that clings to the stone, ripens unevenly, excessively bitter or sour flavour, tough skin, small in size.  Most but not all wild plums are this way.  Sometimes we get one that is really good and has a lot of the traits that one gets in a cultivated plum tree.

They grow well in temperate zones for sure.  Not sure about other regions.  Here you find them anywhere plums have been eaten and the stones tossed on the ground.  On the farm we encourage these trees to grow and fruit and if the fruit is good we keep them, if the fruit is terrible, we graph a better variety on to the root.  

I have a still so that's cheap for me.

Well, if you have a still, you can make slivovitz, eastern european plum brandy. So fragrant, and not as cloying as liqueur.
Gather your plums over as many days as they fall, into a primary fermenter. Cover, but not air tightly. Stir occasionally to keep the mold down. Let sit until the crust forms and the bubbling stops. Leave the pits in, they give a good flavor. Distill the mash, once, so as to keep the aromatics. Bottle and enjoy.
http://slivovice.org/

1- shiso- it took me ages to get it to grow, and once you have it growing it will reseed and you'll have it forever, but I had to have someone give me a plant, I was never able to sprout it from seeds, no matter what I did, what variety I tried, or where I got the seeds from. I notice in the garden there is a certain time it all comes up (not just "in the spring"-- I have small ones coming up all year round, but there is a time when they all come surging) and I don't speak the language of shiso. Maybe see if anyone has a plant you can come get, they transplant pretty well.

2-- I have used a variety of plums to make plum wine (umeshu) and umeboshi, since the correct kind of plums are almost impossible to find where I live. In both cases I find it's essential to use harder and greener plums. Every ancestor is yelling at me from beyond the grave that umeboshi with unripe fruit has too-hard skins, but I frankly don't care. Japanese ume plums are hard, and also to me are a lot more like little apricots than plums (they get fuzzyish when ripe), and if I'm going to use smooth-skinned plums then I'm going to make accommodations. In fact if I had a surplus of unripe apricots I would totally use them instead of plums.
Anyway, even when they're ripe, the plums traditionally used for umeboshi and umeshu are not sweet. So I really look for the hardest, smallest early plums I can find (usually where I live, they're yellow plums-- not least of all because the skins are not dark purple- nothing wrong with that, but I like the traditional red look that I can get with the yellow plums).
Thanks for reminding me, come october I should be able to find the first ones, and I will make umeboshi this year.

By the time I got to this project, the plums on our "volunteer" plum tree, were starting to ripen. Maybe next year I'll try unripe yellow plums - I didn't want them too big, but if they're still at the "harder and greener" stage described by Tereza, they'd also still be smaller.

I'm lousy at following instructions, partly because I usually don't have exactly what would be needed. So, no crock, but I do have a wide mouth 1 liter canning jar with an air-lock. With our currently expanding fruit fly visitors, an air-lock seemed like a good idea.

So I weighed the fruit that would fit in the jar with some headspace. 478 grams
Then I weighed 47.8 grams of pickling salt.
But, in r ranson's first post, she said she wouldn't soak them again as some of the fruit split, but then in her video, she showed them being soaked, drained, and the salt added. So she didn't as how she'd integrate the salt and the water without soaking them... nor did she show how to keep them under brine for the fermenting period - maybe they don't need to be???

Too bad - too late - I added water to the salt as my salt was much coarser than in the video. I don't have shiso either, so I will get what I will get...

So here's what I started with, except the water:


And here's what it looks like in the jar.


I liked the idea of cleaning the crock (or in my case, jar) with Sake, but I don't have that either. Hopefully 30 year-old rum will be an adequate substitute!

the plums will release their water when they are put in with the salt. I layer them and put a weight on top (bag with water or beans). It usually takes about a week for that liquid ("umezu") to come out.

I might not use sake, I'd be concerned that the alcohol level is too low, but to be honest if you're cleaning everything there is so much salt that it probably doesn't matter... I was taught to use "white liquor" (like a potato vodka) or gin to rinse the vessel and the plums, but now I usually use cheap vodka instead (all about 37% alcohol), if I bother at all. This site is a good summary of my process. https://www.chopstickchronicles.com/umeboshi-homemade/

There is a bonus link on that page for making a mock umeboshi out of rhubarb. Where I live, immigrants from Japan instead adapted a hibiscus flower bud (roselle, jamaica)-- ume are hard to find and everyone comes up with something. I really enjoy the fruit with the pit, so I keep using tart plums, but I'd totally consider making some from rhubarb too.

Tereza Okava wrote:

I layer them and put a weight on top (bag with water or beans). It usually takes about a week for that liquid ("umezu") to come out.

OK, that was totally not clear to me. Most of the naturally fermented foods I've made, have liquid from the beginning. So what I've started, is more of a "sauerkraut" made with plums?

Good thing there are more plums on the tree, more salt in the cupboard, and more jars in the closet! I will see if I can't try again...

Jay Angler wrote:So what I've started, is more of a "sauerkraut" made with plums?

EXACTLY! Or if you've ever made pickled lemons or limes.

Hopefully it still works out, this sort of experimentation sometimes leads to lucky (and delicious) accidents!

This year I simply threw my fallen green apricots into the leftover brine from some pickled beets. I just remembered (thanks), and decided to try them. I guess they've been in there a couple of months. Odd, mildly beety flavor. Too mild for umeboshi, though a lovely deep pink, and a decent texture. I'll add some shiso and taste them again in a few weeks. Even if they're not right they're much more pleasant than fresh hard green apricots.

Tereza Okava wrote:the plums will release their water when they are put in with the salt. I layer them and put a weight on top (bag with water or beans). It usually takes about a week for that liquid ("umezu") to come out.

I picked some more plums and put them in a 1.7 liter jar with ~20% salt. I double bagged some dried peas as a weight, but wasn't convinced it was heavy enough, so I added a jar of water. I just don't have an ideal container for it - the jar mouth is to narrow compared to the widest part of the jar. But all I've got to loose is some salt and some plums, so we will wait and watch!

As you said, I may get lucky and they will taste delicious. I'll think positive thoughts at them as I walk by!

Oh, I did say I wasn't going to soak then and then I did soak them.  That's why I write things down... it's just a pitty I don't read what I wrote when I need it.

Keeping in mind, I don't have a guide who makes their own...

I don't tend to use a heavy weight.  I usually just use a plate but this year I used heavier weights and they are releasing much more juice.  It's almost ready to dry and then put back in jars and cover with the salty juice.  

I just checked on my two experiments.

The lacto fermented with salt water ones are done and I've put them in the fridge. They don't taste like ume boshi, but they taste mild and edible, and not unreasonably salty considering the hot weather we've been having.

The mixed with 20% of weight with pickling salt ones that I didn't post a picture off, have about 1 1/2" of liquid at the bottom which represents about 1/3 of the height of fruit. The higher fruit still has visible salt clinging to it. I'm still not convinced my weight is adequate to get the result we want, but it hasn't been that long.

I think mine is about a week overdone as it smells more like yeast ferment than lacto.  But the taste is good, so I'll keep going and add more salt when putting it in jars.

I failed to take into account how hot it is this year.  We are usually cooling down by now, but summer arrived about three weeks ago and we aren't getting the cooler nights like we should.

r ranson wrote:I failed to take into account how hot it is this year.  We are usually cooling down by now, but summer arrived about three weeks ago and we aren't getting the cooler nights like we should.

I've been caught by that when trying to ferment things. Usually my house is on the cool side for fermenting, but sometimes it gets hot like this and things take half the time I expect!

video four

Thought you might like to know the results of another rather haphazard experiment.
I had about a quart and a half of ripe plums that were more than what we were going to eat from our little plum tree. I put them in a jar. I wish I could remember whether I layered them with salt. I think it more likely that I used a 10% brine. It fermented enthusiastically in my cool (high 60's) kitchen. I burped the jar frequently and it smelled good and made a big red mess. This was probably in early July or mid June.
It has been sitting ever since. The fermentation has slowed and almost stopped.
I finally tried one. Plump, tough skin, too soft inside - good reason to use just salt or/and unripe, hard plums. (That's the next experiment if I remember.) (But I don't like using the unripe plums. The tree is too small, I don't know yet how many are excess.)
Really nice taste. Sour, sweet, plummy, pickly. Much better than the ones I left in the leftover pickled beet brine.
No need for shiso, plenty good plain. (The shiso is in the fridge, I forgot to add it when I picked it. It never seems to be ready when the plums are.)
Probably would have been better a few weeks ago, the smell is not as nice as when it was bubbling away.

Here are two pictures where I followed the "just add salt" and weight it down recipe:
At 2 weeks, you can see some juice forming (there was no juice at the beginning)


At 3 weeks the juice is covering all the plums, but the top ones were still looking totally round, and there's still a fair bit of undissolved salt visible, so I decided to let them go to 4 weeks before trying the next step.


My gut feeling is that my weight isn't heavy enough, but I don't really have any way to decide what is "heavy enough" - there's a bag of dried peas because it could go through the neck of the bottle and then spread out to cover the plums, and on top of that is a small jar with some water in it, but I'm not sure the peas are spreading that weight out, or just adding that weight to the center.

They may not turn out to be something that qualifies as "ume boshi", mind you, I haven't tasted the real thing in 45 years, so I have no real way to judge either. However, if they're edible, it would be one more way to preserve some of them which doesn't involve turning them into jam!

I think "heavy enough" is simply sufficient to keep the water level above the food. I don't think it's about compressing the food. And even if it were, a bag of peas is probably better distributed than most weights. I use a mesh disc with a rock on top.

Ellen Lewis wrote:I think "heavy enough" is simply sufficient to keep the water level above the food. I don't think it's about compressing the food. And even if it were, a bag of peas is probably better distributed than most weights. I use a mesh disc with a rock on top.

In most situations, I agree this is the case. With proper ume boshi, the recipe had me starting with *no* liquid - so is the liquid is created by oozing out of the plums due to the weight or is it a chemical reaction of the salt drawing the liquid out of the plums in which *more* weight won't make any difference.   I don't know enough to even guess whether the kitchen chemistry is option 1, option 2 or a third option I haven't thought of!

Usually a plate is heavy enough.

The presoaking seems to make them ooze more juice.   Maybe that is why we do it?

I think it's the osmotic pressure of the salt drawing the water out through the skin. The plums simply oozing, or worse, being squashed by the weight, would have small breaks in the skin, which would make the plums prone to decay until the brine was high enough to cover, and actively fermenting. Whereas the osmotic pressure draws the water gradually and directly through the skin without breaking it, so there are no cracks in the skin to give fungi or unwanted bacteria a foothold. You also get a more consistent result.

r ranson wrote:Usually a plate is heavy enough. The presoaking seems to make them ooze more juice.   Maybe that is why we do it?

I think I also was expecting too much, too soon. Dates/time are not my strong suit, and I think my pictures are really more representative of 1 week and 2 weeks and a bit, but somehow I confused a week. If a plate works for you, then what I've used should be enough.

Ellen Lewis wrote: I think it's the osmotic pressure of the salt drawing the water out through the skin. The plums simply oozing, or worse, being squashed by the weight, would have small breaks in the skin, which would make the plums prone to decay until the brine was high enough to cover...

There is certainly no sign of the fruit splitting, nor any sign of decay, but with the salt there, I think mold would have a tough time anyway!

I'll give them another week or so, and stomp on my impatience to taste one!

Several people have complained of the brined plums being "mushy", but not about the flavour. One friend felt they'd make a good topping for something like a cheese-cake, but I don't tend to make things that are as sweet as that. That just means that I get to eat them all myself!

I haven't downloaded the pictures yet, but today I fished out the salted plums and laid them in a sieve. Then I put them on a silicone mesh sheet in my food dryer. (Not anywhere near as fancy as the one in Raven's videos, but it was free and it works.) Raven's video said 30C for 6 hours. The lowest my dryer will go is 35C, but hopefully that will do the job. At about 3 hours, I rotated them to their other side so the bottom would dry.

The juice is incredibly salty, but I'm sure it's full of healthy microbes, so I will try to think up some uses for it. I don't tend to use a lot of salt in things, but I'm sure you wonderful permies will make some suggestions???

I just came across this way of making salted plums, where they suggest you dry the plums first:
Salted plums
INGREDIENTS
Firm, medium-sized tart plums
Good-quality table salt
METHOD
Cut plums in half and remove the stone.
Arrange on trays without overlapping, leaving
a little room around each piece.
Choose your form of drying and dry until the
plums are crinkly, half their original size but
still chewy with good texture.
Place in a bowl and coat well with your
choice of salt, working the salt into the fruit
with your fingers.
Once coated, place in clean dry jars before
sealing and storing in a cool, dry place.
Perfect to use as a condiment in Japanese inspired rice dishes. Wipe off excess salt
before serving.

Maybe I'll try this approach as well - variety is the spice of life!

Going down a rabbit hole looking at the salted plums and apricots, now I saw salted mango, so many things to try. Make some Li Hing Mui powder this summer maybe. Grocery shopping today, I'll find something to experiment with. The brine sounds like an interesting addition to a BBQ sauce.

A year ago I said:

This year I simply threw my fallen green apricots into the leftover brine from some pickled beets. I just remembered and decided to try them. I guess they've been in there a couple of months. Odd, mildly beety flavor. Too mild for umeboshi, though a lovely deep pink, and a decent texture.

I just found these in the back of the fridge. Here's the report:
The really green little apricots that fell too early to eat were quite interesting.
Wonderfully crunchy, with a mild pickly taste. The beet color and flavor are gone. Ugly color. Would have had better flavor with shiso, but still a nice addition to my rice at lunch. The pit is soft enough to eat, with a mild almond flavor. The woody shell of the pit was chewable. I liked it. Some people wouldn't.
The somewhat green, almost full sized ones were not crunchy, they were soft, even the skin. The pit was not edible. The flavor was more interesting than the hard ones, both fruitier and more sour.

Is that time of the year again, the wild plums are starting to get some color. Not quite ripe yet, which seems to be what the recipe calls for.

I’m going to give it a try.