Don't pass up the Pluots

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, fruits

First, the word Pluot is pronounced "ploo-ott". In the past year or two, most such fruits have been termed Plumicot instead.

Second, the stone fruits—peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots and cherries—are like dogs. All dogs are the same species, and all can interbreed, although a chihuahua-mastiff cross is a bit hard to either conceive or carry to term. So, although there are quite a number of species names for the trees, they can all interbreed, though some crosses are also harder than others (and in the whole book I didn't read of a single cross involving a cherry; a quick search of the Web located a few).

I don't recall seeing any fruit with a Pluot sticker on it before last year. It took me a bit to figure it out. Like Chip Brantley, I at first thought it was French and so pronounced "ploo-oh". He has his own funny story about that in the book: The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds, and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot. It is a quirky memoir that primarily relates the author's journey through a year of visiting fruit growers in California's Central Valley, where the majority of the country's stone fruits are grown.

Along the way we find there are hundreds of kinds of plums, and about 200 that make it to store shelves through the year. When you look at the produce tables, you see typically three bins for plums: Red, Black and either Purple or Green. Maybe there's a fourth bin for a specialty variety at a higher price. Each of the three actually contains three or four varieties that look alike but taste a little different. Every week, the varieties are different because the harvest of any variety is very short. So you see three bins, but over the four or five months they carry plums, each will have presented fifty to seventy different varieties.

For years, looks trumped taste. I've had many a plum that was no sweeter than a bad watermelon. Growers call them "cardboard". But there is a strengthening movement toward taste. If you buy a variety plum the day it goes on the shelf, it'll induce you to go back for more.

Brantley writes in lyrical terms about tasting plums. We all know what a wine tasting event is like: swirl a glass, smell it, take a bit of a sip, swirl it over the tongue, then spit it out. Repeat with next glass. When the growers visit a plum/apricot/whatever breeder, the drill is similar. Seldom does one swallow the bite. If you are going to taste thirty varieties in a forenoon, you can't keep them all down! You save the swallowing experience for the taste that makes you write lyrical prose. Based on such tasting events, growers decide which new varieties to buy and plant. Many new varieties appear every year.

The stone fruit business is brutal. Particularly in recent years, the huge stores like Wal-Mart have tended to buy at a certain rate regardless of the harvest. In a "perfect" year like 2007—perfect for the trees, that is—only a third of the crop got to the stores. There was so much fruit, of such wonderful quality, that they could not sell it all, prices fell, and most growers let half or more of their harvest fall off the trees unpicked.

I recall that year, the first time I saw a Pluot. We bought some that were on sale. They weren't just good, they were Wow-Good! But my wife buys by price. Not on sale? No sale. I don't recall the Summer of 2008, but this past Summer, just ending, we bought plums a few times, and they were very good. I don't know how things looked from the growers' end, though.

That is the problem. People don't buy plums regularly. They are still thought of as a specialty fruit. I eat an apple every day, and usually a banana also; an orange or two or three weekly, and pears almost daily when they are in season. Stone fruits of all kinds, perhaps two or three one week, then three weeks before we buy more. Somehow, the old saw "An Apple a day keeps the doctor away" has really stuck with people. I do have to add a word here: an apple almost never drips on my pants, while I have to eat stone fruits over a paper towel. Call me a klutz.

There is one trend that may push plums and plum crosses (Plumicots, etc.) a little deeper into the national consciousness. The red-fleshed ones in particular are good for the heart. They have as much as four times the antioxidant power of a glass of red wine. The growers and marketers are trying to capitalize on this, and if they can keep up the taste, they could have a winner.

Although taste (actually flavor) is more than sweetness, the sugar content is what holds the experience together. Sugar content is measured as "degrees Brix" or °Bx. A fruit whose juice measures 10°Bx ("ten bricks") contains ten percent sugar. Such a plum would be called cardboard. Ten to twenty years ago, "good" plums "bricked out" at 14-16. This year's Pluot (a patented name by the way) or Plumicot could have 20-24°Bx. Then there's the acid level. It needs to be low, but not zero. So-called "eating lemons" can have 18°Bx but the acid covers the sweetness. A plum without acid may as well be a mouthful of sugar water.

Though the Pluot was patented in the 1990s, the name seems to be on the way out, in favor of Plumicot (not patented), and a host of crosses that growers, tiring of the name game, are just calling Plums. Whatever they're called, now that growers are chasing flavor, they're bound to be good.