Wild Plum Leather
Tart plum puree dried into sheets. Snack it if you can take the sourness, or drop it into a pot to sour a stew.
- calories
- 90
- weight
- 1 oz
- cal / oz
- 90
- protein
- 1 g
- serves
- 8, scales
- prep
- 30 min
- cook
- 0 min
- total time
- 30 min
- water
- none
- cost
- $
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Snack
- No cook
- Backpacking
- Thru-hike
- Bikepacking
- Day hike
- Canoe / raft
- Car camping
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
- Gluten free
- Dairy free
- Nut free
- Eat in the bag
- Dehydrate ahead
- Shelf stable
- Basic
Ingredients
| Wild plums | 3 lb | Prunus americana or any tart wild plum; ripe, stems off |
|---|---|---|
| Water | 1/2 cup | only enough to keep the pot from scorching |
| Sugar | 2 tbsp | optional, and only if you want this as a snack rather than a soup souring agent |
Method
- At home: pit the plums. Skins stay in — drying is what tames them.
- Put the fruit in a pot with the water. Cover and cook over low heat until the flesh collapses, about 15 minutes.
- Blend the whole lot, skins included, into a smooth puree. Taste it. Add the sugar now if you are ever going to.
- Spread the puree onto silicone mats or lined dehydrator trays, roughly an eighth of an inch thick and even edge to edge.
- Dry at 135F until the sheet is leathery and no longer tacky in the middle, 6 to 10 hours. An oven on its lowest setting with the door cracked also works.
- Peel the sheets off while still warm, cut into strips, and roll each strip in parchment.
- In camp: eat a strip as is, or tear one into a simmering pot of stew or broth and stir until it dissolves.
Wild plums have good flesh and bad skins — tough, and tannic enough to dry out your mouth. Cooking and pureeing breaks the skins down instead of throwing them away, and something about the drying knocks the tannin back further. You end up carrying the whole fruit at a fraction of the weight.
This is sour, not sweet, so treat it as two things. It is a snack if you like sour, and it is an acid you can carry at zero risk of leaking. A strip stirred into a stew does what a lemon would, which is the traditional use in Georgian cooking. Sugar is optional and pushes it toward the snack end; leave it out if you mostly want the sour.
Packing
Roll the strips in parchment and stack them in a zip bag. They stay flexible in warm weather and go stiff in the cold; a stiff strip softens in a pocket.
Variations
- Tear a strip into a beef or lentil stew for sourness without carrying vinegar or lemon.
- Any tart stone fruit works. Sour cherries and underripe apricots dry the same way.
- Stir a pinch of chili and salt into the puree before spreading for a savory sheet.
https://foragerchef.com/wild-plum-leather-tkelapi