The Plum-Project. Part 1 - The strong stuff.

Brace yourselves for a sequence of non-spoon related posts! Last weekend my sister and I got a chance to pick around 10 kg of plums from our uncles plum-tree. We were a little bit too enthousiastic in picking plums, and therefore we now have to make a lot of things with all the fruit.

Today we made a start with one project. Plum-vodka. This will be our approach of a slivovice-type drink. We decided to experiment with two different approaches to make something good out of this. Approach one is the simple one. We took 200 grams of washed, cleaned and quartered plums, 50 grams of sugar and 400 mL of Vodka. We also added 5 of the plum stones to the mix. This will give the drink a little bit of a bite, so I am told.

We will shake this bottle daily for about two weeks, while we keep it on the counter. After this we will put it in some dark cool place for about 3 months. Then it is a matter of filtering, adding extra sugar if necessary, and bottling it.

Approach two: For this approach we boiled the plums with 100 grams of sugar and a dash of brown sugar. Boiling the fruit will break down the long sugarchains from the cell-walls, and this will result in a richer and sweeter drink. No stones in this mix either.

 We put the boiled mixture in a jar to let it cool. Before you add the vodka it needs to be under 78 degrees C at least, otherwise the ethanol will evaporate. I let it cool untill it was lukewarm, just to be safe. After that the alcohol was added:

We will treat this mix the same as the other one when it comes to shaking and storing. In three months from now we`ll see what both taste like and what they`ll need. We also made sure to document what we were doing now. Keeping a small journal with long-term projects is essential for me, because in three months from now I will not know what my exact plans were for these mixes.

Now there are so many plums left! Tonight we will make a few kilograms of jam, and later this week we will start a batch of wine. It`ll be my first brewing-project, so I am anxious to try this out.