Plum Sauce

Plum Sauce
1 kg plums
1 cup cider vinegar
1 large onion
6 cloves garlic
3 cm root ginger
1 tsp crushed chillies (more or less to your liking)
6 cloves
2 tsp coriander seed
2 tsp all spice berries
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 cinnamon stick, about 8 cm
1 tsp salt
1 ½ cups brown sugar

Wash the plums and place in a large pot with the vinegar. Cook over a low heat adding and stirring in the other ingredients as they are prepared.
Peel and roughly chop the onions, garlic and ginger. Process in a kitchen whiz until finely chopped. (or finely chop by hand). Add to plums along with the crushed chillies.
Crush the cloves, coriander seed, allspice and peppercorns in a pestle and mortar, (or use a hammer). Add the cinnamon stick broken into small pieces. Heat these spices in a frying pan until they smell aromatic. DO NOT BURN. Add to the mixture.
Place the lid on but slightly ajar and simmer the sauce for 20-30 minutes, until the plums have turned to pulp. At this stage I use a potato masher to crush the plums so as to free the stones etc.
Add the salt and sugar and bringing the mixture back to the boil. Turn off the heat and allow to cool a little (15-30 mins). Push the mixture through a coarse sieve scooping out the stones as you see them. Any left over mixture can then be whizzed in the kitchen whiz again and pushed through the sieve. You should only have about 1/3 cup of waste left. If there is too much waste the sauce won’t be thick enough.
Gently reheat the sauce again, stirring, then pour into heated glass bottles and immediately screw on the hot metal tops tightly. I use oil bottles and orange juice bottles with the screw tops that sort of seal.
Keep in a cool place and refrigerate after opening.

This is a reasonably fun recipe. It is from Alison Holst’s, The Ultimate Collection, cook book. She says you can be sampling this by an hour. It took me longer but then I did change the recipe a bit.