I Love Food and Intend to Discuss It. Probably Often. . .

. . . but today we will start simply with one of yesterday's scores: organic red and black plums for two bucks a pound. When midsummer fruits hit their peak and prices drop, I can't resist buying a heavy stash and preparing some to store. Peaches and nectarines are great for slicing and freezing -- I love to make smoothies in fall and winter with them when summer warmth and all it produces seem a distant memory -- but I've learned that dehydrating stone fruits at low temperatures yields a divine little candy that, for all my aims at keeping the food around a little longer, disappears rapidly.

Plums blew my mind the first time I dehydrated them because they end up nothing like prunes, or the dried plums you can buy from marketers who have decided that the term prunes frightens people baffled by the connotations of the signifier instead of concerning themselves with that actually signified, which is regardless of what you call it quite delicious. However, store-bought dried fruit--with added preservatives and other additives to maintain color, unnecessary sugars, all of uncertain origins--often pales in comparison to the brilliant stuff you can make yourself. This becomes most obvious in midsummer plums, with their tart little skins and luscious, delicately sweet centers. As they dry out the juicy flesh goes not black but golden and translucent. Most astounding, however, is the way that the tartness and delicate sweetness is not transformed but maintained in the finished product: the dried plum still tastes like a fresh plum! It lacks only the water and the mass, and without these things the result is a condensed, glorious plum flavor.

I cut these up to about a quarter of an inch thickness and dehydrated them in my Excalibur at 104 degrees or so for 16 or 18 hours, somewhere in there. I threw just a few nectarine slices in, too. And just so you know, I had a cantaloupe that needed to be dealt with or tossed the other day, so I sliced the whole thing up up and dried out slices of that, too, which also tastes like heaven.