So many pips

"Discard the plum pits, but leave the skin on" Kitchn

That quote at the top comes from a recipe for wild plum jam - some of which I have just made. It's my second batch so far and hopefully there are at least two more to come. I have the fruit of one tree awaiting cooking and hopefully at least one, maybe two or more three trees to go. It all depends on the birds. Who will get there first? And this is important for the topic in hand. Getting the pips out.

How dare a recipe for wild plum jam start with that bald statement - 'discard the plum pits'. For a start you need the plum pits for the pectin to make the jam set, though I guess the if you have by some miracle managed to remove the pips then you could always tie them in some muslin. And secondly because they are small, and also because they are not ripe (remember the birds - you have to get there first), the flesh is still clinging to the pip.

To start at the beginning wild plums - not the big ones you buy in the supermarket - are very small - about the size of a cherry. And if you pick them whilst they are still somewhat underripe - well, as I have already said, you have to or the birds will get them, then they are even smaller. Here one day, gone the next, as far as these beautiful fruit are concerned. The pips are bigger than orange pips but not big at all - not even as big as an almond. The picture above is a pretty good one.

Until now I have laboriously removed the pips, by hand. First I cook the plums in a little water until they are very soft, which doesn't actually take very long. And you have to be careful not to burn them whilst you are doing this as well because you don't want to add too much water or it will take forever for the jam to reach setting point. So you stir virtually all the time whilst they are cooking. Then I remove the pan from the heat and laboriously, small teaspoon in one hand and cup in another, remove all the pips. I filled a mug sized cup this morning. I dredge through the pot in a fairly systematic way, and if you are lucky most of the pips have become detached from the fruit. But there are so many of them. And some of them still cling to the fruit a bit. I think it took me the best part of an hour to do this morning's batch. Then you add the sugar, etc.

So I decided to see how others had done it.

Well there are mini hand-held machines for depipping cherries and other small fruit. I do actually have one which was sold as an olive pipper, and I guess this would work. But it's really not very efficient - you have to get the fruit in just the right position. And I'm guessing that if your plums are not really ripe - mine never are - then the pip will not detach itself very easily. Plus you might lose some of the precious juice along the way. I did watch a YouTube video that demonstrated with a rather sturdier looking gadget, but I noticed that even then the demonstrator had to fiddle a bit to get the plum to fit in. Just as slow as fishing the pips out really.

The other thing that is often suggested is to put the cooked fruit through a colander or sieve. Indeed David thought this might be a good idea. But I thought not as I thought you would have to get the size of the hole right or nothing would go through but the juice. And indeed I am right for I found another bit of advice on a blog called Tea Time with Annie Kate, in which she said:

"Well, there I stood, picking away at the mess in my colander. I had boiled the plums as the recipe said, and then strained them through a colander to get the pits out, as the recipe had said. The trouble was that a good deal of plum was left with the pits and it was impossible to separate them, although I was trying."

So her 14 year old daughter came to the rescue with a slightly different solution.

"She skimmed some of the pits out of the simmering plum mixture, rattled them on the slotted spoon with a few flicks of her wrist, and soon had clean pits in the spoon with all the good stuff left behind in the pan."

So I guess I might try that, although I'm not really convinced. I reckon some of the flesh is still going to cling to some of the pips and so I shall have to do that bit by hand. Mind you the author says, that after they experimented for some time, she came up with another midway step.

"When the skins are beginning to split, use a hand mixer to break up all the plums. I did it right in the pan while they were simmering. Note that I used a hand-held mixer on low speed, not a hand blender."

Which sounds a bit risky to me. Don't you run the risk of breaking either your mixer or the pips? And if you break the pips then that would be a disaster. And my new hand mixer does not have a slow speed, it just has very fast and super fast. Which is not good and I should have checked that somehow before buying it. In a similar vein I also saw another blogger who used a potato masher to separate out the pips from the plums. Well that might be better, but you'd still have to trawl through the mashed fruit to find the pips. Maybe then the slotted spoon would be a good idea.

The slotted spoon thing might be worth a try though. You'd need pretty big holes or, like the colander, most of the plum would stay on the spoon.

And what do the commercial plum jam makers do? Well I guess they've got riper and bigger fruit, and I also guess they have clever machines that do it all. Or else they cook it and then strain it so that you've got a finer jelly.

They certainly don't make jam from wild plums. But they make the best jam. Because they are somewhat sour you can add quite a lot of sugar, which helps the setting process, and the jam still doesn't taste of just sugar. It's refreshing, tart, and yummy. It's just a pity that they ripen just a week or so before Christmas when so many other things are happening.

POSTSCRIPT - The slotted spoon thing worked. Well you still had to sort of pick the pips out of the spoon. But yes it was faster. I used a standard kind of slotted spoon, but next time I think I might try the Chinese wok sieve kind of thing that I bought recently. That's deeper and bigger and with slightly bigger holes, so I think the pips would not slide off it.