Chinese plum sauce is a fruity, sweet, mildly spiced condiment that’s simple to prepare at home. This recipe for the plum sauce is a great way to preserve summer’s plums throughout winter.
What Is Chinese Plum Sauce?
Chinese plum sauce can be described as a silky, sticky, and delicious condiment. It provides the perfect balance of tartness, sweetness, and spices to the food served.
It’s not as tart and sweet in the same way as sweet and acidic sauce. It’s more of a plum sauce with a less sweet and sour flavor. It’s also a thick jammy sauce that stands up well to spreading and basting.
Red plums lend the sauce the darker color of purple. However, you can also use golden plums to get a lighter hue.
What Is Chinese Plum Sauce Made Of?
The plum sauce is usually made of a couple of essential ingredients:
Sometimes, you may even see plum sauce derived from other fruits, mostly an apricot. It is sometimes created from a mixture of apricots and plums.
Adding spices to the plum sauce, such as star anise, garlic, and Chinese five-spice powder, is also commonplace. The other seasonings add different variations to the sauce’s flavor and can vary according to the preferences of the person making it.
How Do You Make Plum Sauce?
The procedure to make Chinese plum sauce is easy.
Cook your fruit and add seasonings.
Puree the fruit until it is smooth.
The puree is cooked again until it is thick and jammy.
This is a highly similar process to making any other jam but with one difference.
To get the most smooth sauce from plums, cooking them to soften their skins is necessary. The softened plums are blended to make the perfect blend.
The mixture is cooked as you would when you were to create a jam and then simmered until it’s thick and covers the spoon’s back.
The plum sauce can be canned in the same manner you would prepare any other jam to make it suitable for canning. It is, therefore, the ideal way to store the plums’ summer harvest to make a sauce with many applications.
Uses For Plum Sauce
There is a myriad of delightful ways to make use of plum sauce!
As a sauce for moo shu.
A sauce that dips wontons, egg rolls, spring rolls, and dumplings.
A sauce to finish the roasted duck, chicken, shrimp, or pork.
With rice or noodles.
For a stir-fry sauce.
A dressing for an Asian salad.
Basting sauce to cook the duck or chicken pork while they cook.
Are Plum Sauce And Duck Sauce The Same Thing?
Technically speaking, it is any sauce specifically designed to accompany a duck.
It is also common to have duck steamed and plums with sauce.
It’s not a requirement.
This is why you’ll see various sauces with flavors known as “duck sauce.”
Hoisin Sauce is thick and rich in flavor, similar to a Chinese BBQ sauce.
Are Plum Sauce And Hoisin Sauce The Same Thing?
Hoisin sauce and plum sauces are different sauces.
Hoisin sauce is a highly thick sauce, like molasses, with a rich sweetness.
A lot of the recipes for hoisin sauce, as well as plum sauce, are similar, and that’s probably the reason for the confusion originates.
But they’re distinct. If you know what to look for, It’s easy to differentiate the two.
If your sauce is thick, rich, and sweet, it’s more than a Chinese barbecue sauce. That’s hoisin sauce.
If it’s fruity, lighter sweet/tart, and tastes more like jam, then it’s a plum sauce.
Our Plum Sauce Recipe
Our recipe for plum sauce yields about the equivalent of one-cup sauce. If you’d like to make a more significant amount of spice to the can, you need to make the recipe larger. (We attempted to make it simple to scale up by using just one pound of plums.
We used apple cider vinegar to make our sauce since it imparts a lovely fruity taste and is popular in your pantry.
However, rice vinegar could be an excellent option and will make the sauce more of a brighter, lighter taste. If you are a fan of rice vinegar, make sure to try it out with this dish!
If you’d like to try this dish to keep the summer plums, have a review of the tutorial on canning for the most basic canning steps.
Chinese Plum Sauce
Chinese plum sauce is the ideal recipe for preserving summer plums in a soft, sweet, lightly spiced sauce with many uses.
Ingredients
1 lb of plums with pits and cut
1/4 c apple cider vinegar
1/2 1 c brown sugar
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 1/2 Tbsp fresh ginger, minced
One clove of garlic, minced
1/2 star anise
1/8 tsp dried chile flakes
Instructions
Combine chopped and pitted plums and the other ingredients in a medium-sized saucepan. Bring the elements to a boil on medium-high temperature.
Reduce the temperature to medium and simmer, covering, until the skins of the plums are incredibly soft, about 20 minutes.
Take the pan off the flame and take out any half-star anise. Blend the mixture using an electric blender until smooth. (Or allow the mixture to cool slightly, then transfer it to a blender until soft).
Bring the sauce back to the pan and boil over medium-high heat, stirring frequently to avoid sticking. Cook until the sauce becomes rich and sticky, approximately 20 minutes. *
Remove from the heat and allow to cool if refrigerating for three weeks or more.
If you are canning your sauce, you can it when your sauce’s hot, using the boiling water method of canning.
