Could you make me some greengage jelly, please?

I'll be making GG jam, GG chutney and stewed GG s for the freezer. I've never made GG jelly but it's a thought. Saves getting all those pits out.

Another idea is fruit leather. I've never made it and when I looked up a recipe it used a food mill and a dehydrator, neither of which I own. Anyone got any tips?

Or anyone made plum cheese?

I've done it once, hazy in memory (apricot, so same neck of the woods—it came out fine and wasn't a horrid amount of work, though small batch), so I searched and found this, better than I could say it:

https://www.realmomnutrition.com/how-to-make-homemade-fruit-leather/

Some things would be hard to use without a mill, like raspberries! I had to look up greengage, but ripe plums, in general, should be easy enoungh to do without one. Just make sure to remove any hard bits near the pit. I don't know what the skins are like, but if they're strong enough, like the red and purple plums I know here, you should be able to scoop them out with a spoon, if you don't want to peel. I have a friend who would put them in the food processor skins and all for the nutrition, but her results are kind of grainy. I think larger flecks of skin from just chopping are less icky, but considering that even without adding sugar, fruit leather is candy, I think making it clear and even and nice is a much better idea. You can just mash the flesh in a cheesecloth lined bowl and strain, or add as much tech as you have and want.

Bounty!

Do you like prunes?

There are dehydrators to be had for not much money, and they work just fine. I had one like this, for around $60 USD - sadly lost it to the hurricane flooding, but would like to get another:

Wow, a nice problem to have.

We grow and eat a lot of raspberries. We just eat the seeds.

I wondered about prunes. I have dried apple slices in my range which also does the heating so even when the oven is off it's always slightly warm from the heating boiler. The range is off for the summer. Perhaps a low electric oven. But it might take a long time.

I'm afraid I am far too lazy to push plums through cheese cloth! I might just cook them up and try a fairly large mesh sieve.

So far I've stewed about 10 kg ready for the freezer. But I don't know what we're going to do when the apples start because we usually stew a lot of them up too. We make a year's worth of breakfast compôte. We've run out of containers hence the odd assortment.

I'm not sure if cooked would make good fruit leather. It's usually made with fresh and relies on the pectin to make it gel. Now that I'm more awake, I'm thinking you have some kind of blender. Is that right? Even if it's small, plums are soft enough to puree pretty fast. And it's puree you want. The water evaporates and the rest becomes the leather. Do you have an AGA? They're practically unheard of here, let alone any others that might be small furnaces, and I didn't think about not having an oven in the Summer. :) If you have a catering style hot tray, it might work. Or if you have any other kind of low and slow cooker, like a smoker. Otherwise, yeah, I'm guessing it's something to try with the apples instead, if your range is lit by the apple harvest.

I do have an oven in the summer, an electric one. I have two ranges. One is a gas Rayburn (similar to an AGA) and the other is a gas hob over an electric oven. I don't have a hot tray. Smokers are rare here, as are dehydrators.

Interesting that you say fruit leathers are not good made with cooked fruit. Most of the recipes I found cook the fruit first and that would certainly make it easier to puree and sieve. It shouldn't affect the working of the pectin. After all you boil jam. I have a blender but the pits would wreck the blades and I'm not going to be pitting many kilos of plums. In fact I don't pit them for jam, compôte or chutney either. It's too slow, messy and wasteful for me. I fish out the pits after boiling. If some get left behind people just have to pick them out.

When you refer to a food mill is that electric? Or manual? I believe I still have my mother's Mouli légumes but I never thought of it as a food mill. But I suppose it is. However I don't think plum pits would be good for it.

What a great "problem" to have! I think I'd make some plum sauce for chicken, then start on jam and chutney, maybe can some for pie? I've never made pie with green gage plums, but I do have a tree which has yet to give me any fruit at all, so maybe someday.

I've never made fruit leather, so I can't weigh in on that, but I'm thinking that summer torte that was so popular here would be awesome with plums.

Happy canning! And freezing and dehydrating and baking and stewing, LOL.

Annie

Well if you have cooked recipes from trustable sources, by all means cook them! I said I wasn't sure if cooked would be good, not that it wouldn't!

I've never even thought of, let alone heard of, the cooked first then pitted method, but I can see where it could make a wheelbarrow full more a lot more approachable. As a teen, I spent a lot of time processing Summer fruits, incessantly cutting, pitting, checking for flaws, sometimes peeling. I appreciate the difference. The only concession I knew was scoring and dunking in boiling prior to peeling.

A Mouli in general is what is meant by most Americans when they said "food mill", though I don't know how the legumes one differs from the general type. I have an OXO which has several hole sizes of changeable bottom.

There’s an Italian tomato mill which separates fruit pulp from seeds and skins and spits them out different chutes. That would be good for milling cooked greengages.

Thanks for all the ideas. Bear in mind I am both lazy and a skinflint, so I doubt I'll be buying any equipment just for these fruit. Nor do I can anything. I do the absolute minimum prep I can get away with, so these plums won't be getting peeled or pitted if I can possibly avoid it. I have around 90 lb of the things and the same amount still on the tree. Today I'll make jam and chutney and see how I get on. I'll probably do a couple of crumbles or sponges too. But baking won't make much of a dent in a wheelbarrow full.

Well, there's always sharing some when you run out of space. Any food banks around?

And I didn't see whether you've tried simply freezing them whole, unprocessed? I used to do that with lemons, limes and tomatoes, just washing and piling them into plastic freezer bags, then used for cooking.

They are already going rotten. That's why you don't see them in the shops. And food banks want stuff which will keep.

I froze some last year. I'll do so again if I run out of ideas and have the space. But both freezers are already pretty full.

So far ...

Chutney

14 jars of chutney, 15 of jam.

Plum cake.

Attempt at fruit leather.

Attempt at prunes but oven was too hot to start with.

Still left. Not to mention an equal amount still on the tree.

Wish me luck.

Best of luck! Wish I were there to help.

All done.

Cake

Plum sauce

Compôte

Phew!

Will probably pick the rest at the weekend. It's less urgent because we've cleared up the broken limbs which were blocking the path.

Wow - that is a lot!

Only other thing I can think of to help is prune/thin that tree before the next fruit set 😄

The tree has pruned itself I'm afraid. Several large limbs completely broken off. I'll be tidying it up at the weekend I hope.

The plum sauce was a big hit. We had some thus evening. It's been requested again.

I've not made plum cheese before, I wish I had that many plums. I have made apple cheese in the past. Cheese is kind of taking a butter past butter and into solid mass. A bit more juice and less solids than a butter. Pretty easy, cooking it forever till it gets right. I think with plums you don't have to pit them, just split them before cooking. You gotta have the skins though, that's where the most pectin is.

Might try a cheese with the next load. I'm still waiting to see if the leather works. It's still fairly liquid.

Lucky you Floral! We have 2 plum trees here (Shiro & Yellow Egg) and rarely get any good fruit due to the many squirrels and the dreaded Plum Curculio pests that thin out the plums to nearly zero every year. I wish that over loaded & broken branches were my problem ;-). Enjoy the rewards of your hard work throughout the coming winter months.

So ... I'm spending a couple of days at a friend's holiday home. "Help yourself to the fruit" they said.

Crabs

Conference (?)Pears

Noid Apples

Damsons

Victoria plums

Aaaaarrrrggghhh.

Actually I can't resist Damsons. They make a fabulous jam. But I must restrain myself with the other stuff. After all I've got another truck load of greengages still on the tree at home.

So, next time you'll know to bring a bushel of greengages to leave for your friends in exhcanged for the damsons. :)

Oh my, for someone who says they are "lazy", that's a lot of work going on and that cake looks delicious.

Annie

Greengage are my all time favourite fruit. We have had several country holiday homes over the years and at each one I’ve tried to grow a greengage with no luck. The tree grows but no fruit and Yes I’ve always planted the correct pollinator nearby. It’s just too hot. I visited down south in Tasmania one summer and was able to taste them again, but once in forty years is not good. not good

Fecund

Brought home another 12 kg today. So far I've just cooked them all up in the preserving pan.

I wish I could sample these legendary plums, but the tree I planted years ago was immediately beset with a lot of foliar diseases I wasn't willing to spray for.

I'm fortunate that this tree is fairly disease free. No foliar issues at all. It's never been sprayed. I never spray anything. The only pest is sometimes birds which eat the baby fruit and brown rot which attacks fruit that is left unpicked.

No, not charcoal briquets. Greengage prunes. They're quite tart but not bad.

Floral - are your trees grafted or own root, or even just seedings from other greengages? You may not know of course, depending on their provenance.

It is (just one tree) Cambridge Gage from a reputable supplier. They are grafted on, I suspect, St. Julien A which belongs to the species Prunus insititia, The rootstock sends up suckers sometimes. The fruit is a small, sour green plum but it's ok for cooking and preserves. I know this because although I cut off the suckers on my plot the neighbouring plot holder doesn't want me to remove the ones that pop up on her allotment. She uses the fruit.

FWIW, a dehydrator has a fan to help remove moisture. I know some ovens have fans - does yours?

Yes, one of them does.

So, here are the results of the fruit leather experiment.

I did it using a combination of an hour in a very low fan oven, leaving it a couple of days, then another oven session.

It's quite tart but tasty. Would be good with a bit of sharp cheese.

That looks great!

Thinking on the sharp cheese, back a dozen years or more, a local store was selling a very fancy French solid fruit gel (more like solid clear jam than pâté de fruits candy--similar but tart and complex flavor) meant for cheese plates and the like. It came in nice jam flavors, and was essentially quarter inch thick fruit leather. :)

Yes, I've had thick fruit jelly with cheese, specifically membrillo, made with quinces. But that has a lot of sugar. Twice as much sugar to fruit as a normal jam. This leather has no added sugar which is good.

Never having seen or eaten fruit leather I wasn't sure if that's how it's supposed to look.

Ah, yes, I've had the quince and a similar guava one. Those French ones were denser, smaller/thinner and solider, and a lot less sugary. Really truly like fat fruit leather. It's hard to tell from your picture, but fruit leather is generally about 1/16"-ish thick and a little rubbery, a bit translucent, and tasting like dried fruit. Without chemicals, it's about that color. :) Rolled up and cut into even-looking strips makes it look nice to eat. Imagining the plum flavor is nice too. :)

Well ... It turns out the fruit leather was a big hit. DGD loved it as did everyone else. I just wish I'd made more. I'm wondering if I can be bothered to try it with the current apple deluge.

Apple fruit leather is yummy! I'd guess it's worth it for the grandchild. :D

Results of apple leather experiment. Easier than the plum leather. But not as zingy. A bit bland.

I took some pictures of one my Green Gage plums when it was overripe, just beyond the peak of ripeness. August 19.

I took several pictures from different angles, and pictures of the fruit cut open.

It tasted like candied plums, or really like cooked apricots, with a tiny bit of green plum flavor.

I'm pretty sure this is the standard green gage variety.

Location is in Olympia, WA. The climate has a shorter summer season but the summers do still get fairly hot here with clear skies.

In my personal opinion, the flavor is "better" and greener when they are picked before they get overripe like this.

The exterior of the fruit had a medium strong fragrant aroma, half like pluots, and half like Myrobalan plum (yellow cherry plum). It almost smells a little nectarine like.

As you can see in the pictures, the green gage plum has reached a level of ripeness where it is completely yellow, even slightly orange-yellow.

I just saw ggs for sale in a greengrocer's. Quite unusual. They were 6.00£ per kilo. So last year I had about £300 worth!!! About $400. We're about half way through this year's season.

You should cut the suckers on your neighbor's allotment and just give her some of your surplus fruit :-)