Batch of fresh organic Plums from iSayOrganic. Sitting in the refrigerator for a day after they’ve been washed.
Slice each plum through the middle ( if you have the patience ). Or you could just squeeze with your fingers without slicing, to separate the pit and the pulp. The trick with the non-slicing approach is that a soft Plum might burst and you’ll have plum stains on your shirt / apron / whatever you’re wearing.
Separation of the pulp and the pit is easier after slicing.
Then you squash them with you fingers and pick out the skins. You could just put everything in a blender to make it faster / easier or you could put the above content through a sieve. I choose to pick them out by hand because for me, making something to eat is more like therapy and I enjoy doing it slowly, methodically. I don’t spend too much time in the kitchen though. HE is the chef, I’m not. Hence I can do whatever little I do, leisurely.
We pick out the skins because they’re usually the most sour part of the fruit and after they’re separated from the rest of the pulp and you get them in your mouth as just the skin, it’s not a very pleasant taste. But this is again personal, as most food should be, and it’s entirely up to you.
A lot of people would probably prefer to cook the pulp with sugar before they add it to the popsicles too.
I had already prepared a batch of hung curd / yoghurt. A couple of jars of Danone, put in a piece of cloth, hung over the container and placed in the refrigerator. The water that drips out, in itself, is very refreshing to drink straight from the container with no additions. Especially in the summers.
The yoghurt’s consistency is almost like soft cheese at this point and I always end up eating quite a bit of it by peeling it off the insides of the cloth it was hung in.
Add the yoghurt to the pulp.
Again you could put this in a blender but I prefer to find some pieces of plum in my popsicles and prefer the consistency to be a tad rough around the edges. I used a potato masher to mix the yoghurt with the pulp.
When it’s mixed up properly, it’s time to add some honey. This is also organic honey from iSayOrganics : Batth Natural Farms from Amritsar in Punjab.
Most organic honeys have their own flavor, so if you’re looking at retaining any plum flavor at all, you’re better off adding sugar instead of honey. I try my best to not use sugar in anything I prepare and you could call it food-blasphemy that I don’t keep the flavors intact but popsicles are to be sucked on to give a nice cooling effect and bit of sugary goodness and flavors are no big deal.
Such beautiful texture to this honey. Sigh. I love it.
Most potato masher action and once the honey is mixed in properly, you can get a taste to see if you need more.
And then off the mixture goes into popsicle molds. It’s been such a task finding these in online stores in India but I finally found this one set that wasn’t bad at all. Tupperware from SnapDeal.
And it’s finally ready!
Sweet and sour and healthy and cooling. So much awesome for the summers. And there are so many combinations one could try. Chikoos, mangoes, peaches – add a bit of coconut milk… the permutations and combinations are endless!
Cheers to popsicles! Cheers to summers!
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