Thoughts on Lactofermented Fuyu and Plums

When the folks at Noma published their guide to fermentation, besides the grasshopper garum, the ferment everyone seemed to be talking about was the lactofermented plums. I’m not sure if it was due to the simplicity of the recipe, because the Amazon preview contained enough information to try it, because of how good the result is, or simply because René Redezepi specifically mentioned lacto plums in many of his press appearances.

Whatever the reason, when René Redezepi recommended trying it in his Reddit AMA, that gave me the push I needed to give it a try. To that end, I set up a jar of plums, one of fuyu persimmons, and one with a mixture of fuyu and plums. I had tried doing lacto-fermented fruits in the past and found that they very easily switch over to alcoholic yeast-dominated ferments, which results in a fruity salty sour boozy ferment. While I suspect that would eventually turn into something along the lines of umesu once some acetobacter find it, it is of limited usefulness before that happens. As a result, I tried to keep a very close eye (and nose) on the ferments to hopefully catch them before much yeast fermentation happened.

At day 7, the fruit were pretty decent, but I decided to let it go for another day to try to get it a bit more fermented. However, at that point, I noticed that the activity in the jars had kicked up dramatically, which had previously been an indicator of alcoholic fermentation starting. Upon giving them a whiff, I thought I detected a faint yeasty alcoholic note, so I decided to refrigerate them at that point.

The resulting ferments were pretty good. I wouldn’t exactly gush about them to the same degree as Redezepi has, but the plums were certainly enjoyable as a sort of sweet/salty/savoury bridge in dishes like vegetable porridges. That said, I found the fuyu persimmons to be usable in the same way, but they were more tasty and held up better. So, I would recommend anybody who enjoyed the lacto plums give that a shot and suggest that anyone attempting lacto plums or fuyu keep a very watchful eye (and nose) on their fermentation as it nears completion.