kind classics: all about umeboshi plums
Since umeboshi plums are one of the pricier superhero foods, I wanted to share some useful tips with you about how to eat them and make them last awhile. The most important thing to know is that they are medicinal...so a little goes a long way!
How Do You Eat Them?
First of all, one package of umeboshi plums should last for a long time. The cool thing about them is that you never use the whole plum at one time. You only want to use it for medicinal purposes, so about a quarter or a half of a plum at a time is fine. You can add it to tea, as in my Hangover Tea, or sprinkle a diced up piece of plum on hot cereal...or you can just eat it by itself. You can also suck on the pit when you're not feeling well, and forgive the salty-sour taste. Just remember that it's healing you!
Check out my nourishing nishime here!
Are There Any Substitutions?
Some people have asked if you can replace the umeboshi plum with ume vinegar and tamari...the answer, unfortunately, is no. Ume vinegar is for cooking purposes only. It's not medicinal; it's salty and concentrated and yummy, but not medicinal. If you're trying to get the medicinal benefit, you have to use the plum. Tamari is also for cooking purposes only. That said, there's nothing wrong with using tamari and ume vinegar for flavor. You can use tamari to replace shoyu, too. But it's not medicinal, it's just for taste!
What about ume paste? That doesn't count either! It's good, but it's not the same as the plum. It's not bad for you in any shape or form - ume paste would be better than nothing. It's just too concentrated, so you get too much salt, and it's not medicinal. Of all things ume, the only thing that will give you the real medicinal value is the actual plum.
How Often Do You Buy Them?
I order plums very rarely...I don't have them everyday. Rather, I eat a small piece of plum a few times a week. You don't need to have them everyday unless you are eating really crazy bad things. For example, you would never want to have the hangover tea consistently, every single day for a year. You just want to use umeboshi plums medicinally, in very small amounts. So, next time you are looking at the umeboshi plums in the store and they seem really expensive, remember how long they last! I order mine in bulk from Goldmine Natural Foods, then keep them in the fridge.
Have you experimented with umeboshi plums yet?
More kind foods from The Kind Life:
kind eats: apricots are in season!
garden gourmet: my edible garden
kind classics: coroccan couscous with saffron
kind eats: naughty, flirty cookie dough truffles
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18 comments
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This new site is Plum diddllee plush Alicia. Great work! And these plums are good inside and out. It can get messy out wards use though.(FYI). -
oh i never will forget my first umeboshi plum... i didn't like it. but now i do!!!
pls have i kind look at my blog
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Forgot to add, are you making miso soup with the Barley Miso? I like to add baby bok choy, cubed tofu, brown rice noodles, wakame & shitakes to my soup when I make it. And you can also sprinkle some finely chopped green onion (green part mostly) & a little drizzle of toasted sesame oil on top before serving....so good!
And I've been meaning to try making a miso salad dressing, so there's another idea for you.
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Ummm, I could easily eat 2 or 3 whole ones, but don't because of the high sodium, so I guess I can't understand why some people don't like these. Bretzel, one thing you might try is putting these (mashed up bits) in some sushi rolls, just the rice, nori & mashed plum down the center. You can sometimes find these on the menu in Japanese restaurants.
Also, I find the Eden brand a much better flavor than some of the ones you find in Asian stores (which have msg & other added ingredients).
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hi! I bought some of these but I couldn´t stand the taste on my otherwise wonderful barley porridge:-( any suggestions on how to hide the taste and still get the benefits? many thanks!
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Smiley, I don't think you need to freeze them. They will stay for months and months in the fridge as long as they are covered and don't dry out. I've had tubs of paste last me many months without a problem, and my guess is the whole plums would last even longer (mashing any fruit or veggie makes it easier for microbes to do their dirty work). Between the salt and the shiso leaf used to process them, they are very stable.
Also, the prices on the Goldmine site seem very good to me, and they should be updating the nutritional information any time now, if not already. Their customer service got back to me very quickly.
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If you buy them at an asian grocery store they are much less expensive than a health food store or whole foods
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I take a couple of plums and pinch them into little specks to put in my tofu and rice. But now with the Fukushima thing, I really don't feel all that comfortable buying any food things from Japan.
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This post could not have come at a better time. I have debated buying the plums for a while now but could not justify the price. I finally took the plunge and bought them today. I'm looking forward to putting some pieces on my oatmeal tomorrow morning! :)
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I have a question about these things that I have been wondering for some time... Do they go bad? How long do they last in the fridge?
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thanks for all the information alicia, this post was so informative! i've always wondered how to eat those tricky little things :)
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Sorry, that should have been the same # of portions for both 4 ounces and 2.2 pounds (aka, 1 kilo).
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According to the nutritional information provided on the Goldmine website [although I have my doubts, see note below], one ume plum contains 640 mg of sodium, or 27% of your daily allotment. You said you eat only a quarter, so that's 160 mg of sodium.
I've been using ume paste for years. I am a salt vampire myself; I have always craved salt over sugar. I was once prescribed potato chips by an ER doctor!! [I had a tendency toward low sodium levels even as a meat/cheese eater.]
Even I never use more than 1/2 tsp of ume paste, whether it's on rice or in a soup broth when I don't feel well. According to Goldmine, 1/2 tsp of their paste is only 170 mg of sodium. And whatever you put it in, you absolutely don't need any other salt added. And I generally use less than that. A couple of onigiri require only a thin smeared on line of ume paste to season the entire batch.
I really don't see a significant difference based solely on sodium levels [10 mg is less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the daily sodium recommendation] that condemns ume paste to a mere seasoning and somehow inferior to a whole plum. I should note, however, that I buy my ume from a different source (directly from one of the suppliers I do see on Goldmine's page).
Now for the note: The company has merely copied over the serving information for each weight of whole plums, so that 4 oz of ume plums have 46 servings (1 plum = 1 serving), as does 8 pounds of them. I'm going to write the company about this; I'm not normally That Person who hounds companies about every little typo, but since umeboshi in any form are expensive, they should get the nutritional information and portion size correct.
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Umeboshi is good to prevent heat exhaustion too. I also put Umeboshi in Bento to keep other food fresh. I buy them from Eden.
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thanks for this - i just found those in my health food store and was a bit jolted by the price! thinking about it this way encourages me to give them a try! (I have also enjoyed finding out how long my MISO lasts me!)
Speaking of Miso - I bought South River's 3-year-barley Miso and have no idea what to do with it (I don't care for it on my toast as I did with the red-pepper Miso....)...any thoughts??
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Thank you so much for this post Alicia! I had been trying to figure out where to find Umeboshi plums for a while now!! And now I know!
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