Plums!

It’s plum season so when you’re finished eating them, try baking with them.

Welcome to newsletter #41!

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This week, I’m setting aside the last in my series on summer vegetables to talk about my early fall favourite fruit: PLUMS!

I was probably in my thirties before I baked a plum. To me, a plum was always something you ate like a peach, in summer, standing over the sink to make sure the juices didn't ruin your shirt. And like cherries, plums oxidize quickly when sliced, so no-can-do in fresh fruit tarts. I stirred up plenty of plum pudding, a Christmas dessert with nary a plum in sight. But most French tarts I made called for poached fruit, like pears and apricots that went directly from the can to the flan, so to speak. So, for me, plums were always for eating, not heating.

But then watching a cooking demonstration by Montreal chef and baker extraordinaire James MacGuire, I had a sort of plum epiphany. MacGuire's menu included a tart made with plums, Italian plums to be specific, the oval, deep-purple ones that came out in late summer. He baked them in a puff pastry shell lined with almond cream, and he didn't arrange them in rows like most obsessive compulsive pastry chefs. He just tossed them with flour and a bit of sugar, plunked them in there, and straight into the oven. I was surprised, but at the same time intrigued, even more so when he pulled that tart out of the oven and the juices bubbling over were scarlet red and abundant. Wow.

Ever since, I rarely eat plums straight up because honestly, they are far better baked.

A plum/almond tart before baking.

And when baking plums, you have a bit more leeway, using up the fruit that either ripens too slowly or get mushy before hitting its flavour potential. So instead of eating them over the sink, I tend to cook them. In combination with other fruit or all alone, plums make terrific pies, cakes, buckles and crumbles.

Plum crumble with ice cream, a terrific late-summer dessert.

Their tartness, smoothed by sweetness, and intense fruitiness results in delicious ice cream, sorbet, granité and - especially - jam. Alsatian pastry chef Christine Ferber combines her local Alsatian Quetsch plums (similar to Italian-style plums) with walnuts, elderberries, honey, mint, vanilla beans or wines made with gewürztraminer or pinot noir grapes. For a quick dessert, take a slice of brioche, butter generously, top with plum sections, fill each cavity with a spoonful of marzipan, sprinkle with sugar and broil until the juices run. For something even easier, sauté the fruit with a bit of sugar and pour over mascarpone or Greek yogurt, top with a drizzle of best olive oil and a few toasted pistachios, and finish with a pinch of sea salt and raw sugar. Yum!

As for which plums to use, you'll find a dozen varieties this time of year at fruit shops like Chez Nino at the Jean-Talon Market, including luscious yellow Golden Globes from Spain or Miels d'automne from California. Plum aficionados consider the tiny Greengage plum (the much-loved Reine-Claude Dorée) to be the ne plus ultra, but you'll have to head to the Southwest of France to sink your teeth into the best. You'll probably find Asian-type plums from California and Ontario, but the Italian plums grown in Quebec are overflowing in the markets in late summer to early fall, as are the small yellow plums from Ontario, similar to the French mirabelles, yet more tart.

A variety of September plums

Chances are you'll spot plums from the world over in your supermarket any time of year, but now's the time to capture the local fruit at its peak. To preserve these babies a little longer, plums can be dried or frozen (remove the stones first) or bottled in sugar syrup, flavoured with a star anise, a cinnamon stick or a vanilla bean. Poached plums work very well in baked fruit tarts and they make a great topping for rice pudding.

Here are two of my favourite plum recipes. The first, a showstopper of a tart, the second, an easy crumble, that shows off this luscious fruit at its best.