Sweet and Sour Plum Sauce

Regular readers will know that we have two plum trees in our front yard. This was the first year in recent memory that we got a great harvest from the smaller, Japanese-type plum tree. With such a great haul, we needed to use them up quickly.

What we ended up doing was making plum sauce! My favourite dip with fried foods, like spring rolls, tempura shrimp, chicken fingers, etc. is a papaya mustard from a Jean-Georges Vongerichten cookbook. But I also have a fun preserving book called Batch which featured this savory sauce.

Starting with a puree of pitted plums (skins on!), you add in lots of assertive ingredients: cider vinegar, honey, rum, soy, garlic, ginger. Then dashes of spices like cinnamon, cayenne and cloves.

It’s interesting how two cooks can “follow” the same recipe and end up with two different tasting end results: Dr. S’ version was more tart as she used cider vinegar as written. In my batch, I skipped the vinegar (I worried that the plums were too tart already) but mine used an older knob of ginger, so its flavour came out more.