From Plum Harvest to Gelato: Making the Most of a Challenging Season

Some seasons don’t go to plan.

This winter felt endless on the farm, rain, mud, and more rain than we knew what to do with. We complained about it constantly, wishing for dry days and firmer ground.

Then it stopped.

Within a couple of months everything dried out. Creeks dropped, soil hardened, and just as the fruit trees really needed consistent water to size up their fruit, it simply wasn’t there.

Our plum harvest came in smaller than usual, but incredibly sweet.

What we lost in size, we gained in flavour.

Ripe plums on the tree ready for picking

Protecting The Harvest

Before we even got to harvesting, there was the job of protecting the fruit.

Birds love plums just as much as we do, so this season we spent time bagging the fruit trees to give the plums a fighting chance. It’s slow, repetitive work, but when your harvest is already limited, every piece of fruit matters.

Covering the trees to protect them from the birds

Why small plums are perfect for gelato

When the plums came in, they were small but packed with flavour. Perfect eating fruit, but also ideal for cooking.

Gelato is one of my favourite ways to use fruit like this. It’s forgiving, flexible, and allows you to adjust sweetness and balance as you go, which is exactly what you need when working with seasonal produce.

Turning our plums into gelato

To make this batch, the plums are cooked down gently with honey, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon juice and a pinch of salt. Cooking concentrates the flavour and removes excess water, which makes a big difference once the mixture is frozen.

This is also the most important tasting stage.

Freezing dulls sweetness, so the cooked plum mixture needs to taste slightly sweeter than you want the final gelato to be. In our case, the tartness came through strongly after cooking, so a little extra honey was added to balance it out.

Once cooled, the plums are blended with milk and cream to form the gelato base.

This years plums are small but super tasty

Using the Ninja Creami for small-batch gelato

For this recipe, we use the Ninja Creami, which works particularly well for small-batch, seasonal fruit gelato. The base is frozen overnight, then spun the next day on gelato mode.

To finish, a simple oat crumble is mixed through for texture.

The final result is creamy, lightly spiced, and has a lovely tart kick, almost like a frozen plum yoghurt, with crisp crumble pieces running through it.

Adding crumble to the Gelato

Watch the full process

I filmed the entire process from harvest to final gelato spin. You can watch the full video below.

For recipes like this, we use the Ninja Creami to turn seasonal fruit into gelato in small batches. It’s become part of our farm-to-table workflow.

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Get the recipe

The full recipe with measurements is available as a printable PDF.

Download the Spiced Plum Crumble Gelato Recipe Card (PDF)

SPICED PLUM CRUMBLE-2.pdf

Download PDF • 3.27MB

Farm-to-table means adapting

This recipe won’t look the same every year.

Some seasons the plums will be bigger.

Some years they’ll be sweeter.

Some years there’s plenty of water, others, there isn’t.

That’s the reality of farm-to-table cooking. You work with what the season gives you, adjust as you go, and sometimes end up with something even better than planned.

Until the next harvest.

Andrea