This has become my go-to tart recipe for baked fruit, as the almond cream bakes into a cake that surrounds the fruit. The first, a showstopper of a tart, the second, a perfectly delicious cake, and the third, an easy crumble, that shows off this luscious fruit at its best. Here are three of my favourite plum recipes. Photo by Lesley Chesterman / Special to Montreal Gazette *** Plum Almond Tart: Serve for dessert with any kind of cream, or with coffee for breakfast. Poached plums work very well in baked fruit tarts and they make a great topping for rice pudding. To preserve these babies a little longer, plums can be dried or frozen (remove the stones first) or bottled in sugar syrup, flavoured with a star anise, a cinnamon stick or a vanilla bean. These are the two varieties I’m baking with.Ĭhances are you’ll spot plums from the world over in your supermarket any time of year, but now’s the time to capture the local fruit at its peak. You’ll probably find Asian-type plums from California and Ontario, but the Italian plums grown in Quebec are overflowing in the markets in late summer to early fall, as are the small yellow plums from Ontario, similar to the French mirabelles, yet more tart. Plum aficionados consider the tiny Greengage plum (the much-loved Reine-Claude Dorée) to be the ne plus ultra, but you’ll have to head to the Southwest of France to sink your teeth into the best. Or how about a plum smoothie with buttermilk and vanilla, or cocktail like a gin fizz made with plums and basil? Yes!Īs for which plums to use, you’ll find a dozen varieties this time of year at fruit shops like Chez Nino at the Jean-Talon Market, including luscious yellow Golden Globes from Spain or Miels d’automne from California. On the website, there’s a recipe for a savoury plum tart enhanced with basil, balsamic vinegar, mascarpone cheese, olive oil, honey and sweet onions to contrast the tart plums. Don’t hesitate to add them to antipasto plates, as well as charcuterie and cheese platters. Plums can play the savoury card, too, in salsas, chutneys and salads, especially when goat’s cheese is involved. For something even easier, sauté the fruit with a bit of sugar and pour over mascarpone or Greek yogurt, top with a drizzle of best olive oil and a few toasted pistachios, and finish a pinch of sea salt and raw sugar. For a quick dessert, take a slice of brioche, butter generously, top with plums, fill each cavity with a spoonful of marzipan, sprinkle with sugar and broil until the juices run. Alsatian pastry chef Christine Ferber combines her local Alsatian Quetsch plums (similar to Italian-style plums) with walnuts, elderberries, honey, mint, vanilla beans or wines made with gewürztraminer or pinot noir grapes. Their tartness, smoothed by sweetness, and intense fruitiness results in delicious ice cream, sorbet, granité and - especially - jam. In combination with other fruit or all alone, plums make terrific pies, cakes, buckles and crumbles. So instead of eating them over the sink, I tend to cook them. The juicy plums of my youth seem to have been replaced by hard fruit that either ripens slowly on my counter, or rots before coming even close to hitting its flavour potential. Wow.Įver since, I rarely eat plums straight up because honestly, they are far better baked or fiddled with. I was surprised, but at the same time intrigued, even more so when he pulled that tart out of the oven and the juices bubbling over were scarlet red and abundant. He just tossed them with flour and a bit of sugar, plunked them in there, and straight into the oven. He baked them in a puff pastry shell lined with almond cream, and he didn’t arrange them like most obsessive compulsive pastry chefs. MacGuire’s menu included a tart made with plums, Italian plums to be specific, the oval, deep-purple ones that came out in late summer. But then watching a cooking demonstration by Montreal chef and baker extraordinaire James MacGuire, I had a sort of plum epiphany.
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