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New at Red Jacket Orchards: Apple Cider, Harvest Plums, and Jam

Posted by Erin Zimmer, October 5, 2009 at 3:15 PM

[Photographs: Robyn Lee]

Drinking apple cider is like drinking autumn. If I had a choice, I'd spend all of October gulping back the stuff and staring at pumpkins, particularly fat ones. My favorite cider right now is from Red Jacket Orchards, for sale by the jug at the Greenmarkets ($3.50 for a gallon and $1.75 for a quart) and heated up in cups ($1 each). Slow-mulled with Jamaican allspice, cinnamon stick, anise, cloves, and nutmeg, the spiced cider is everything you want liquid autumn to be, and for a little more tang, they also have a straight-up apple one too.

Though apples are hogging up the fruit spotlight this month (as they should), there's also some exciting news in the plum world at Red Jacket Orchards.

They just started selling Harvest Plums ($4 a quart or $1.75 a pound), an orange-fleshed plum that harvests late in the season. "I honestly rode around Brooklyn today making a few deliveries with a basket of these plums riding shotgun and ate at least five of them in the span of an hour. They are just SUBLIME," said Carson Poole, who's been working for the Geneva-based farm for the last three years. The sublimity will be for sale until mid-October.

He and his brother Ethan also concocted a jam made of another plum, the Green Gage plum. Inspired by orchard manager Joe Nicholson, whose mama used to can whole Green Gage plums, the two brothers decided to smash them up and jammify. For $5 a jar, the spreadable fruit is tangy, not too sweet, and almost an army green color. It's just what every piece of toast, bowl of oatmeal, lonely peanut butter sandwich (or just your spoon) needs.

Related: Meet Your Farmers: Joe Nicholson of Red Jacket Orchards

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Tags: apples, cider, farmers' market, fruit, Greenmarket, jam, plums, Red Jacket Orchard