Make Umeboshi

Food as touchstones to our people and a recipe

Twenty-four years ago (gulp), the first spring we lived on this patch of ground we call home, we planted six tiny French prune plum trees because I loved and missed my grandmother’s zwetschgendatschi, a Bavarian plum cake made with fresh prune plums. (More about that when they are fully ripe and the letter P comes around.)

I was overzealous, one tree would be more than ample for a dozen or more plum cakes. The trees grew and grew and now we have hundreds of pounds of plums to process and share every year. Many become a plum paste, long-cooked, lightly fermented, and then canned to preserve it. (So much to share when we are at letter P…)

We fermented them into wine, more than once, but prune wine is not a thing for a reason. Prune cider isn’t either. Prune plum vinegar is delicious, but how much can you really use? Sometimes in the spring we harvest a few jars worth of tiny green immature plums and cure them like olives, and they are a great analog. However, that doesn’t put a dent in the quantity in the fall that cluster like grapes on thin branches, pulled to weeping by the thousands of teardrop-shaped purple plums. Before we go too much further, I must add for most uses they need to have the stone removed one little plum at a time. This is an arduous labor. (Audio books for the win here.)

In hopes of fewer plums in the fall, we also have stripped early flowers off the trees, salting them in the style of sakura no shiozuke (salt-cured cherry blossoms) and using them as delicious wild yeast starters. And yet, we have never tried to make umeboshi with these plums. That is happening now. This is one of those times where in my mind umeboshi is a specific plum variety. That has kept me from trying umeboshi with the prune plums for at least a dozen years. And yet, I had no problem adding koji to the fermented paste that I made to create a prune tasty paste. It is amazing but not owning a restaurant or small business to use the 2-gallons I made moves slowly in my home. Whole fresh prune plums in Shio Koji is just weird. This summer I toured with Mara Jane King and we talked about my plums. She has made salted plums, umeboshi style with prune plums and says they are super tasty and prune-y.