Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Taking their skin off

Taking the skin off of plums by hand can be a long task if you've got alot of them to do. 10 lbs to be precise, courtesy of my plum/apple jam from last night. So having learned from my peaches the day prior, I decided to look up how I can do this task more efficiently sans having to buy a machine to do it for me. And I found this technique of boiling and ice water which makes it so fast and so easy I am never going to peel large amounts of fruit by hand again! This technique can be used with tomatoes, peaches, plums and basically any type of fruit/vegetable with a thin skin and fleshy soft interior. I'm going to try it on pears tonight and see if it works on those, since they have more of a fibrous flesh.

Wash and take off the stems, then cut an incision in an X shape on your fruit. It doesn't
have to go very deep, just enough for the skin to be marked.

Then you drop the fruit in a pot of boiling water from 30 seconds to 1 minute, enough for the skin to split open and peel off on its own. This particular plum almost instantaniously split and peeled, while my larger ones took a bit longer than 1 minute. You just have to be careful not to stew your fruit and leave them in there too long.

You then deposit the fruit in a bowl of ice water (note: my ice had almost all melted by the time I took this picture) and leave them there to completely cool down for maybe 5 minutes.

And there you have it, an extremely easy to peel plum ready to be used. This is 100% worth the small effort it took to set it up and then wash afterwards, if only for the fact I dont lose any fruit whatsoever, unlike peeling.

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