Plum Sorbet

Our neighborhood was a Santa Rosa plum orchard in the 1940s, and last month we discovered that one of the trees in our backyard is a plum tree. It is so old that one of our neighbors thinks it might be from the original orchard. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know our tree makes the sweetest, most delicious plums I’ve ever had. Whenever I eat them I hear William Carlos Williams saying, “They taste good to her, they taste good to her, they taste good to her.”

Our tree is almost empty now, but most nights for the past couple weeks Chris and I have been out picking a few dozen plums while the sun sets. It’s been one of my favorite things we’ve ever done together.

After a few harvests we had hundreds of plums and no idea what to do with them. I made one small batch of chocolate plum jam, but we packed most of them into lunch sacks and gave them away. Also, over the weekend, my sister and I picked a few plums together and juiced them to make a plum sorbet.

Plum Sorbet

We started with about 25 plums, and my sister and I crushed them by hand, removing the skins and pits as we went. We strained the fruit through a sieve until we had 1 quart plum juice. This juice is pretty sweet so we only used a half a cup of sugar, but this is a judgment-free zone if you decide to add way more than that. I stirred in the juice of half a lemon (probably two tablespoons). We poured everything into the ice cream maker, and let it run until we had a nice, sorbet texture, then we let it set in the freezer overnight.

It’s definitely a minimalist recipe, so the sorbet tastes exactly like a fresh plum, “so sweet and so cold.”

lovelovelove,

britt