Plums!

richard.fine

A neighbour has given me about 2.5kg of plums.

What should I do with them?

Two jars of plum jam are already cooling on the counter; I'm looking for some more modernist things I can try, for fun and practice.

Available equipment:
* Edge vacuum sealer
* thermapen
* 1L whipping siphon (+CO2 and N2O)
* spherification kit
* macerating juicer
* breadmaker and slicer

Plus oven, stove, food processor, microwave, etc. I don't have a water bath or chamber vac (can do short-time SV with edge sealer + monitoring with the thermapen); also no stand mixer/liquid N2O, otherwise I'd try plum ice cream.

richard.fine

Alright, well, in absence of suggestions from the Chefsteps groupmind, I've tried a little bit on my own. Experiment #1:

Puff pastry plum tartlets with nutmeg sweet cream.

Hard to see in that picture but each of those pastry cases contains a spoonful of plum... uh, 'goop.' 18 plum halves, 1tsp sugar, 1tsp vanilla essence, 0.5tsp cinnamon; vacuum-packed and cooked SV for about 4 hours. For the first hour it was at 60C; this didn't really seem to be doing anything, so I raised it to 70C for the next hour; that didn't seem to do much either so I raised it to 80C for the last hour or so, and that seemed to do the trick. That's similar to the temperature used for SV carrots and asparagus, I think? So it makes sense as I guess the cellular substances being broken down are similar? 

Then I stuck it in the blender for a moment, and allll of the texture disappeared... oh well. It's somewhere between a thin jam and a puree, I guess. It's also quite sharp in flavor - I'd expected the plums to be a bit sweeter, but apparently not. Still, I realized this early in the process, so was able to compensate in the cream.

The cream was one small pot (250ml I think?) of single cream, simmered with about 1tsp of nutmeg and 2-3tsp of sugar - I pretty much just added sugar to taste, kinda lost track of how much went in but it wasn't much more than 3tsp. This was decanted into the whipping siphon, charged with two N2O, and shaken up, and then left in the fridge to cool. I was a bit indecisive about this, I think I should have cooled it before adding the N2O - or possibly even before sealing the siphon - as CO2 dissolves more easily in cold liquids, and I'm guessing the same would be true for N2O? 

Once chilled, I charged it with one more N2O for good measure, and tried dispensing a bit. Well, it was definitely thicker than before, but didn't exactly hold its shape like I was expecting - I think this is just because I used single cream rather than whipping cream. Put a dollop of the cream on top of each tartlet - not the easiest thing in the world to work with it turns out, hence the rather large dollop of cream you see on the plate in the back there - and called them done.

They're quite tasty. I could have used more plum sauce in each tartlet - the taste isn't very strong - but the sweet cream balances out the sharp plum quite nicely, and the nutmeg stops the sweet cream from being too boring.