Shrimp Quesadillas & The Perfect Fruit

Dan picked me up from work today, and we swung by the store to get some tortillas, pre-cooked shrimp, and a tomato. With leftover pepper jack, onion, and avocado at home, I thought quesadillas would be a great way to use up those ingredients.

While we were at the store, I spotted the "plums" section of the produce area, and given that I just finished Chip Brantley's The Perfect Fruit - a book about pluots, I wanted to see if I'd learned enough to pick out a great tasting piece of fruit.

I was so excited when I looked at the labels and immediately recognized the farms from the book. David Jackson's Family Tree Farms seemed to be well represented, and happened to be one of the farms Brantley spent the most time visiting. One particular piece of fruit caught my attention - a nearly black, small, soft stone fruit with a dusty, slightly fuzzy surface. On it was a sticker indicating it was called a black velvet apricot, and was part of the Sugar Tree line - a variety of stone fruits exclusive to the Jackson family, who have been working to bring sweetness and flavor back to plums by working with breeders. The Sugar Tree line in particular represents exceptionally sweet fruit - as measured by their Brix rating.

At checkout, it put a little smile on my face to see the fruit's code ring up as a "plumcot", which is the term now being used for plum apricot hybrids because of marketing problems with the hard to pronounce "pluot" moniker.

Biting into my little black velvet fruit I could immediately tell the difference between this special little plumcot and commercial plums of my past. It was sweet, with a little tartness from the skin, and incredibly juicy.

I highly recommend checking out Brantley's book. It's really a love story, beginning with his first taste of a pluot, which sent him on a quest to find the source. He meets with breeders, farmers, and marketers, discovering the sometimes politically charged history of stone fruits, and discussing the challenges faced by the industry and changes brewing to try to improve that situation. His writing is a great balance of educational fact-finding and his personal experiences, sensations, and emotions along the way. Brantley does a great job of starting the book as an outsider, not even knowing how to say the word "pluot", and brings us along as he becomes something of an expert - ultimately imparting that wisdom to the reader along the way. Or at least, as much of it as can be gained without tasting hundreds of pieces of fruit first hand, walking the orchards, and shaking the hands of the farmers and breeders.

Sadly - I gobbled up the plumcot before snapping a photo, since I was so excited to try it. But you can be sure I'll be trying more this Summer.