Natural plum juice has a beautiful color - soft burgundy, sometimes with a light lilac hue. Its refreshing taste gives a pleasant sourness. The drink is very fragrant and tonic.
In addition to high palatability, plum juice is very healthy. Nutritionists put it in first place in terms of vitamin composition and benefits for the human body.
Composition and benefits
Plum is very rich in vitamins. According to the content of beta-carotene, ascorbic acid, folic acid, vitamins of group B, it can easily argue with other fruits. It contains a high content of potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, calcium, chlorine, sulfur, and other essential trace elements for the body. Plum is rich in iron, copper, iodine, zinc, manganese, fluorine, chromium, silicon, nickel. Do you know that there are more of these beneficial substances in plums than in apples, pears and apricots?
With such vitamin richness, it has a low calorie content - only 70 kcal per 100 grams of product. Its natural sugars are very easy to digest. Plum is also rich in pectins and fiber.
Plum is very beneficial for the intestines. It acts very delicately, without causing unpleasant or painful sensations. It promotes bile secretion, has disinfecting properties, cleanses the body of toxins, heavy metals and radionuclides, absorbs toxins. Acts as a light diuretic. Plum juice has a beneficial effect on the walls of blood vessels, gives them strength and smoothness, cleanses of cholesterol plaques. Therefore, it is recommended to those who suffer from diseases of the cardiovascular system.
Recommended for diet and baby food.
Buy or cook yourself?
In a rich assortment of store juices, plum is also offered. At first glance it seems that it is much easier to buy a package of a finished product than to independently prepare it. Why waste your time and energy? But there are several undeniable advantages of a home product:
- you are 100% sure of its naturalness,
- you know exactly which ingredients are its ingredients,
- you are sure of its sanitary cleanliness and safety,
- the cost of natural juice is always cheaper.
And the trump card is very simple!
Next, read how to cook plum juice at home, keep it for the winter.
Which plum to choose?
Absolutely any plum is suitable for home production. The main thing is that the fruits are ripe and soft. The ripe the better. The plum should not be spoiled. If you make juice from rotten fruit, it will lose its taste, will be ugly in color and, instead of a tonic aroma, will give off the smell of dampness.
So, we prepare plum juice at home from very ripe fruits of good quality. Before processing, I definitely need to drain the plum, lay it on a clean towel in one layer and let it dry. After this, we proceed to the juiciness.
Basic recipe
Plum juice is prepared as standard for the winter as follows: pour prepared fruit without seeds with water “over the head”. Simmer for 5-10 minutes. Cooking time depends on the type of plum. When cooking, the foam is not removed, but interferes inside with a wooden spoon. After we allow the semi-finished product to cool.
Drain the mass into a colander, when the liquid drains into the substituted container, wipe it thoroughly. Transfer the remaining cake with seeds into another pan, add water and boil again for 7-10 minutes. Strain the cooked pomace through a colander into a container with a wiped plum mass.
The mass will turn out quite thick and very acidic. It must be diluted with plenty of water. Start with 1 liter in 2 cups of concentrate. Try and adjust the acid, add sugar - about 100 g per liter of juice. There are no ready-made standards, we focus on your taste.
Next, put the juice on the fire, after boiling, cook for 5-7 minutes, pour into clean hot cans and roll up.
Plum juice is ready for the winter!
Recipe Options
In the pan with plums, you can add any fruit - apple or pear slices, halves of apricots or peaches, seedless cherries, grapes or chokeberry. Then everything is prepared according to the standard. At the output, we get a combined plum juice.
Experienced cooks suggest adding freshly squeezed orange, grapefruit or tangerine juice. But these are amateur experiments.
Sokovarka will help
Preparing plum juice at home will help a juicer. It consists of a pallet at the bottom, a juice collector in the middle with a silicone hose and a colander on top.
The assembled juicer is placed on the stove, water is poured into the pan, brought to a boil. Prepared plum is poured into a colander, covered with a lid and the cooker is left on low heat. A special clip must be worn on the silicone hose .
After about an hour, the clamp is removed. By this time, juice should already stand out from the plum. If it does not flow, then put on the clip again and let the fruit boil for about 10 minutes. Now the plum juice in the juicer is ready.
Juice is collected in clean hot jars and immediately rolled up. From 4 kg of fruit, approximately 1-1.3 liters of product are obtained.
The plum juice in the juice cooker is transparent, liquid, without pulp and sugar. If there is a desire to make a sweet drink immediately, then it is poured into the dishes, sugar is added at the rate of 100 g per liter and boiled for 5-7 minutes, not longer. Then they close it.
We use a juicer
How else do housewives make plum juice? The recipe for a juicer is as follows. Pass the prepared fruits (washed, dried and pitted) through the juicer once. Boil the collected meal for 10 minutes, pour the resulting broth into a container with juice, add water at a rate of 1: 1. Put on fire, bring to a boil and boil for another 5-7 minutes. Roll up the resulting concentrate in jars.
If you use a juicer, you get plum juice with pulp.
Plum fresh
In season, it is good to cook freshly squeezed plum juice with pulp. To do this, use selected ripe sweet fruits. They are washed, the bones are removed and passed through a juicer. Be sure to dilute with water and sweeten to taste. The vitamin drink is ready!
Tasty and healthy cocktails. The recipe is very simple: take a handful of peeled plums, apples, pears and pass through a screw juicer. You can use half a small beetroot or carrot. The resulting concentrate was diluted with water and sugar was added. Sometimes there is a recommendation to add half a lemon. But plum already gives the cocktail enough acid, so the lemon will be superfluous.
There is a recipe for milk plum shake. Pasteurized milk is added to freshly squeezed juice from plums. They say that it is very tasty. The main thing is not to let the stomach down.
What you should definitely not do is try to make a banana-plum cocktail. There are a lot of pectins in the plum, the drink is already quite thick, and if you add a banana, you get not juice, but fruit puree.
note
- Freshly squeezed plum juice must be diluted with water, otherwise the concentrate will hit the pancreas hard.
- Nutritionists recommend drinking plum fresh no more than twice a week and in reasonable doses: for adults - 200 ml at a time, and for children - no more than 100 ml. Again, this is necessary in order to protect the pancreas from stress.
- It is believed that combined juices not only do not bring benefits, but, on the contrary, are harmful to the body. Why? Because it takes a different time to digest each component and different enzymes are involved in the process. Therefore, it is best to drink single-component juices.
- Patients with diabetes should not drink plum juice in any form.