Prunes are a delicious natural delicacy that is also good for your health. However, in order to make it by drying the plum, not every variety of this fruit is suitable.
Prunes are fruits of blue or homemade plums dried using a special technology.
Drying prunes
The process of drying plums to obtain prunes requires adherence to a certain sequence of actions. Otherwise, the result will be far from the prunes that can be purchased in the markets and in stores: the fruits will turn out to be tough, dry and tasteless.
Initially, plums collected from the tree must be kept for some time in any sufficiently large container: the total weight of the fruits in it should be from 10 to 15 kilograms. This will provide the plum with the necessary softness, which will then become the property of the prune. However, do not store the harvested fruits for more than three days - they can start to deteriorate.
After the plum has matured, it must be rinsed and pitted. It is also helpful to sort the fruits in such a way as to group them into categories that are about the same size. This is necessary in order to provide the fruits with approximately equal drying time, without overdrying smaller plums and avoiding underdrying large ones.
After washing and sorting, plums should be doused with very hot water, which will give them extra softness, and then treated with a 1% solution of caustic soda. These measures are necessary in order to completely clean the surface of the fruit, removing the wax layer from it, which interferes with drying, and to achieve the formation of small cracks on its surface, through which water will come out evenly.
Suitable varieties of plum
At the same time, the success of the process of preparing prunes depends not only on the correct observance of the technology, but also on the quality of the initial raw materials. That is why it is so important to choose a variety for preparing prunes that will be most suitable for this purpose.
All currently existing varieties of these fruits are usually divided into four large groups - "Vengerki", "Renklody", "Mirabeli" and "Egg" plums. Each of them has its own characteristics, and due to their characteristics, it is plums belonging to the group of varieties "Vengerka" that are considered the most suitable for making prunes. They are quite dense and fleshy, have large fruits and contain a relatively small amount of moisture, which makes it possible to obtain high-quality prunes from them within an acceptable time frame.
In turn, in the group of varieties "Vengerka", experts identify several specific varieties that are most often used in the production of prunes. These include “Italian Hungarian”, as well as “Azhanskaya Hungarian” and “Purple Hungarian”.
