Ume Jam

In my vast encyclopedic knowledge of all things Japan-related (ouch, I think I just strained something), I know of the existence of umeboshi (Japanese pickled plums) and umeshuu (Japanese plum wine). I have tried both. Umeboshi are homely-looking dried or preserved little fruits that are immensely sour and tasty. Salty, sweet, sour, and purportedly extremely good for you. However, one thing I have learned in my time here that anything traditionally Japanese will be introduced to you as ‘good for you’. Onsen, umeboshi, umeshuu, sake, anything soy, green tea (not originally from Japan, but traditional anyway), any Japanese vegetable… I cannot honestly think of an exception right now. It doesn’t matter what it is, if it comes from Japan, someone somewhere, maybe not the same person each time, will tell you it’s a health treatment. However, it does seem that with umeboshi, at least some of the praise for its healthy benefits are genuine. They also keep forever. They are the Japanese Twinkie. Due to the extremely acidic nature of the fruit and the salting, they keep until Doomsday or until stepped on by Godzilla. Also, realizing how incredibly hot, humid, and disgusting this area is, I can really appreciate both a taste for sour foods and the feeling that these sour foods are curative. Note to self, stay in Hokkaido next time you’re here in the summer.

Anyhoo… I love sour things. I eat lemon slices. I like lemonade that feels like a chemical peel for my mouth. I adore vinegar, and will eat salt and vinegar potato chips until I get holes in my cheeks. Yesterday I ate egg salad and got phlegmy, so I decided to gargle some vinegar straight and swallow a bit. Worked pretty well, actually. Don’t get me started on my love for vinegar, though, that goes beyond gustatory appreciation and into other topics like house cleaning and making volcanoes. So, it’s no surprise I like umeboshi. I had been seeing ume in the grocery store for a few days, mostly in incredibly ginormous and expensive packaging (not pricey for the quantity, but we’re talking packages weighing dozen of kilos here). I finally found small bags and thought, these smell amazing, I’ll wait till they get ripe and eat them. I love sour things! Also, fruit is bizarrely expensive here, and I was desperate for a cheap fix. Bananas are cheap here too, but ask my mother about the complicated neurosis I have about bananas.

Fortunately, I met Erina on the way home, who expressed surprise that I had bought ume. She asked me what I was going to do with them, and seemed a bit taken aback that I planned to eat them. My suspicions piqued, I googled them at home when I had internet. I tried one beforehand, it was sour but tasty in a dry acidy kind of way. Apparently, ume are not for raw consumption, as they are mildly toxic, and more than mildly if the pit cracks inside the fruit. Good to know. I never felt an ill effect, but I ate only one of the little green buggers, and it sounds like they’ll empty your insides rather than do damage anyway.

So, I had a couple of pounds of ume, and I was damned if I was going to let my poor decision waste my three dollars. Fun as making umeshuu or umeboshi sound, both take a couple of months to produce. Hmmpf. Most sauces are apparently made with the actually pickled ume. Making the refreshing summer juice sounded more timely, but not as much fun. It is, however, tasty, and includes a hint of brown vinegar.

After seeing elusive mentions of sauces and jams, I finally found a couple of recipes, located here and here. Bless you, ladies, you saved my three dollars. Of course, I spent $12 on the other things needed for the recipe, but I needed another pot anyway, and the other two bucks was just on sugar and a cheap masher, but that is another matter. So I decided to make jam and document the results.

I’ve never made jam alone. I vaguely remember a big convoluted process from my childhood involving crabapples and trying my mother’s patience, but not a whole lot of culinary experience in the jarring or canning department. Being in a foreign country with a low budget and ill-equipped kitchen sounds like a GREAT way to get started, eh? Actually, one of the things that had me settle on this jam was that it sounded ridiculously easy and fairly moron-proof. You need a pot, a stirring implement, a mushing implement, jars, a strainer, a steel, enamel, or glass pot, water, ume, and sugar. I may be able to avoid screwing this one up. Plus, I got to threaten the fruit with a masher as they sat in my pantry corner (size, 4 inches by 4 inches), innocent of their impending jammy fate. I love menacing produce with odd-looking items. I should probably get out more.

Okay, you also do need a bit of salt, but frankly, if you are not the type of person to have salt handy, why are you trying to make jam in the first place? Go away now and buy a container of Morton’s. It’s cheap, and you can use it as a scouring agent when you are in a pinch.

A note, before we begin, about ume. Most people know that ume means ‘Japanese plum’. Most of us have heard of ‘plum wine’. Umeboshi are referred to, even by Japanese people speaking English, as pickled plums. Apparently, ume are not actually plums. They are much closer to apricots, and on seeing them up close, it makes sense. They do have a sour, plummish taste, but the texture, size, and shape are much closer to apricots. Also, they are fuzzy. Seriously, they look amazing when you first put them in water. I am so easily amused… especially by fuzz. There are different types of ume, many fit for raw consumption, but the type used for umeboshi and homemade ‘plum’ wine are usually identifiable by the fact that they are tiny and sold in huge quantities while bright green. You want them mostly green for this recipe, too, but some yellow and orange spots are fine. They will smell sweet, earthy, and juicy and ask you to eat them. They do not taste like they smell until you cook them, so don’t be fooled. They lie!

Making ume jam

TIME (you need to soak the fruit overnight, and while the actual involved time is minimal, the fruit needs to boil for a long time, so plan this for a day you don’t need to leave for several hours, especially if you’re working with a *cough* ‘stove’ like mine).

1 kg approx ume, green (whole fruit with pits)

Wash and drain ume, removing calyx/stem with toothpick. The ends should look like this:

Soak overnight

Soak in salt water ~1 hour.

Drain, rinse

Put into pan, cover with cold water

Slowly bring to a boil

(During this time, make sure your jars are ready, clean, and washed)

Drain and rinse pan. Make sure to show off your incredible photography skills.

This is what the picture looks like when your lens fogs up. Go me.

Beware of ghost plums!

Put fruit back in pan and cover with cold water

Bring to a boil again

Fruit should be starting to burst skin and get mushy

Smells amazing!

Drain, rinse pan and fruit

Leave to cool until you can touch the fruit (this is very important)

Once fruit is cool and drained, pour back into the pan

Wash your hands well and dry with paper towel

Get your potato musher and mush fruit to your taste (I like chunky jam). Feel free to express your violent side. If you’re ending up with plum chunks everywhere, you might want to find ways to let your violent side out more often.

Now for the weird part. The most efficient way to get out the pits is with your hands. Ume are a clingstone fruit. They have trouble letting go, in other words. This is why we washed our hands carefully.

Don’t be shy. Get your hands into that mush and dig around for the pits. Carefully squeeze as much pulp as possible off of them. Be careful! The pointy ends of the pits are REALLY SHARP. When you consider that this fruit is highly acidic, you’re going to feel all those little scratches. Also be aware this is a very slippery process, during which time you will accidentally (or deliberately) shoot pits into the wall and look like you have been wrist deep in a used baby diaper.

I definitely noticed the fruit’s naturally acidity when my hands started to feel a bit… burny. Nothing bad or damaging, just a slight tingle that told me I was probably right to double check the web and err on the side of caution not eating them raw in any significant quantity. However, despite my huge case of prune hands, my skin feels absolutely amazing right now. It also smells really damn good. Yes Mum, I did wash afterwards.

I recommend inviting others in at this point to observe the carnage and laugh at how much the proto jam looks like baby poop. I really I have a very appetizing style, here, but really… look at it! However, it smells nothing like poop. If the smell does remind you of poop, you either have some bad ume or need to see a doctor.

I used the word poop three times in that last paragraph. Don’t you just love me? Now you realize why my family is reluctant to eat dinner with me.

Anyway, there was a train of thought somewhere back there. Okay. Once you are confident you have removed all of the hidden pits, you can pretend to keep looking for them for a few minutes while you play around in the mush. It’s really kind of fun. Go ahead, live a little. And for the record, if your masher is anything like mine, it makes a great pulp squeegee for your hands. Don’t want to waste that fruit goo, after all.

After you’ve washed your hands, located the pits that pinged off (insert deity of your choice) knows where, and disposed of the pits (if you like sour, go ahead and lick one of the pits, it’s tasty… just watch the pointy part!), go find your sugar. I chose to use brown sugar because I like it better, and while it doesn’t matter much, my completely unfounded hypothesis is that the darker taste of the light brown sugar complements the sour and bitter notes of the ume better. I have this weird… grudge against white sugar in anything except tea most of the time. I have no clear guidelines about how much sugar to use. According to the sources, you should probably have about the same weight in sugar as you have in fruit pulp available. Keep in mind I have no idea how much fruit I actually had, and this seems a pretty flexible recipe. I like things tart, and I ended up using about 275-300 grams of sugar. Basically, dump in a bit at a time and taste it until it tastes good. Somewhere, my mother is laughing at me, as I have always gotten on her case about culinary guesstimates, having never had the ability to visualize ‘about a third of a cup’.

Anyway, my jam ended up puckerrific, which is how I like it, but sweet lovers will want to add a significant amount of sugar, as the pulp is very sour and a little bitter. Once it tastes good, turn on the heat and slowly bring the pulp to a boil, stirring constantly except when you take pictures and giggle about how much it looks like poop (you thought I was off that subject, didn’t you? You trust me entirely too much). Now, I suspect my marvelous little ‘burner’ is a contributing factor in why my jam is a cloudy brown instead of a nice clear green. However, I’m working with a hot plate with 6 temperature selections and three actual settings ‘HOT, meh kinda warm, and ‘why waste the current, it’s actually warmer outside’. Anyway, slowly bring the pulp to a boil. Once it is boiling, cook for 10-15 minutes, stirring constantly. I was warned about foam, but had no problems, I suspect this is because I did not add much sugar. If foaming occurs, apparently you should either scrape the foam off with a ladle and discard it (patient Japanese method) or put in a tiny pat of butter (impatiently inventive Western method, as from Blue Lotus).

After 10-15 minutes, turn the heat off, but keep stirring until the jam is no longer bubbling when you pause. Now, there is a proper method for jarring jam for storage. I don’t know it. I have jars and lids. I bought them. They are jars. Apparently, that’s how they do it here anyway; this is refrigerator jam, it’s meant to be eaten fast, and since it can’t really be stored at room temp, ‘dump it in a clean jar and put the lid on’ is an acceptable method. By all means, do it the right way if you insist.

Now you have jam. Put it in the fridge. Tell yourself you should do your dishes, but wander off and blog for a while first. I’ll let you know if I’ve poisoned myself with this experiment later.

*****

Nope, no poison! I am still here. The jam turned out mighty tasty. Very sour, but Jason and I have been enjoying it greatly!

We’ve been enjoying the jam on bread, but the sites I linked also suggested the jam on vanilla yogurt, or as a glaze for ribs. If I had any conceivable way of making ribs, I’d give it a go, but frankly, boiling the water for these plums was enough of a chore for my kitchen.

Anyway, I rate the jam experiment as a success. Too bad I liked it so much… finding these in the states will be a pain.