Prunes - the most tasty natural delicacy which besides is also useful for health. However to make it, having dried up plum, not any grade of this fruit will approach.
Prunes are the fruits which are dried up on special technology blue, or house, plums.
Drying of prunes
Process of drying of plum for receiving prunes demands respect for a certain sequence of actions. Otherwise the result will be far from those prunes which can be bought in the markets and in shops: fruits will turn out rigid, overdried and tasteless.
The plums which are originally picked from a tree it is necessary to sustain some time in any rather volume container: the total weight of the fruits which are in it has to be from 10 to 15 kilograms. It will provide to plum necessary softness which then will become property of prunes. However you shouldn't store collected fruits more than three days - they can begin to spoil.
After keeping of plum it is necessary to wash out and remove stones. It is also useful to make sorting of fruits so that to unite them in the categories approximately identical by the size. It is necessary to provide to fruits approximately equal time of drying, without having overdried smaller plums and having avoided a nedosushka of large. After washing and sorting of plum it is necessary to pour very hot water that will give them additional softness, and then to process one-percentage solution of caustic soda. These measures are necessary completely to clean a fruit surface, having removed from it the wax layer preventing drying and to achieve education on its surface of small cracks through which water will come out evenly.
Suitable grades of plum
At the same time, success of process of preparation of prunes depends not only on correctness of respect for technology, but also from quality of initial raw materials. For this reason it is so important to choose a grade which will be the most suitable for this purpose for preparation of prunes. All grades of these fruits existing today can be divided into four large groups - "Hungarians", "Reine claude", "Mirabelle plums" and "Egg" plums. Each of them has the features, and owing to the characteristics of plum, the "Hungarians" belonging to group of grades are considered the most suitable for production of prunes. They are rather dense and fleshy, have large fruits and contain rather small amount of moisture that allows to receive in acceptable time limits from them quality prunes. In turn, in group of grades of "Hungarian" the experts allocate several concrete grades which are most often used by production of prunes. "The Italian Hungarian" and also "the Azhansky Hungarian" and "The violet Hungarian" treat them.