Enjoying the Season by Turning our Harvested Fruit into Delicious Apple, Pear, and Plum Sauces. Nothing Like It!

A tradition like no other occurs every September in our humble, little Bainbridge home. It’s the harvesting, peeling, slicing and cutting of our fruit tree bounty.

We suspect that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of families on the island that grow fruit and vegetables and preserve them in some fashion over the winter, whether it’s turning cucumbers into pickles and pickle brine, or apples into apple sauce, as we enjoy doing.

Like many of you, we have a vegetable garden, where we grow any number of recognizable veggies – tomatoes, kale, sugar beans, asparagus, squash, beats and the like, with limited success, depending on the heat and sunshine we receive. We also grow raspberries, and an assortment of herbs, not to mention plants, such as Jasmine, Hellebores, Hosta’s, and Lilias, among many others that I personally can’t begin to name. (Ask my wife, she’s the resident expert and the person with the real green thumb around our haunt!).

By far our most productive plantings are our three wonderful fruit trees. While we cajole our veggies, plants and flowers with fertilize, topsoil, and tendering loving care, our fruit trees need very little caring, and they turn out some magnificent fruit year in and year. We planted five dwarf fruit trees some 15 years ago. Only three of them survived. Some harsh winters and some aggressive male Deers, aka Bucks, who enjoyed rubbing their antlers on their virgin-like trunks, did in the other two.

Our three remaining trees have provided a bounty of pears, plums and apples that require no more than watering – consistently – and trimming off waterspouts in the off season. Typically for us, our plum tree ripens first in late August and early September. We hurry as quickly as we can to beat the crows and other birds to the ripening fruit. We do the same with the pears that tend to ripen a few weeks later, and likewise with the apples, which are hitting their stride right about now.

With each fruit harvest (we estimate we grow 300 plums and about the same number of pears. Apples usually exceed that number), we cut up the individual pieces and remove the pits and core before placing them in a Dutch oven, or a big pot, if you will. We put them in with their skins still on. Once the pot or oven is full of the cut-up pieces of fruit, we fill the pot about halfway full of water and begin to heat it.

We do the same with each species. Putting the stovetop on high, we let the fruit come to a boil, stirring all the while, and gradually reducing the fire. For apples we usually add cinnamon for flavor but do not add anything to the plums or the pears, letting the natural sugars take over. Once the fruit has boiled down – it’s takes less than an hour – we take it off the fire and let it cool. Sometimes we put it in the refrigerator overnight. Other times, we just leave out on the counter.

To make a great sauce, like the ones we have enjoyed for several years, you need an immersion blender, something we call a “stick blender.” You can buy one on Amazon for under $20. This little tool is something of a game changer for making sauces, or soups, or whatever. In about three minutes, the blender transforms the fruit – even with skins showing – into a very edible sauce that you can eat by itself or put on ice-cream, oatmeal, or serve as a side dish with a favorite meat recipe.

We pour our fruit into recycled Yogurt and Cottage Cheese containers and freeze it for eating during late fall, winter, spring and, even into the following summer. It’s a great treat that reminds you of warmer days ahead when you’re scooping some plum sauce on your cereal in the dead of winter. We’ve done something similar with blackberries in the past as well, picking them off of the vines and then placing them on cookie sheets and putting them in the freezer. Once frozen, we pour the whole berries into the aforementioned containers and store them in the freezer for later eating. Unfortunately, this was not a good year for blackberries.

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