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What are pluots and why are they so good? – Professing Plums

In 1990, after years of tinkering at his nursery in California’s Central Valley, Floyd Zaiger offered growers and gardeners a new fruit, the progeny of a plum and apricot called the pluot. Zaiger’s new fruit would be the best selling fruit in the plum category within 20 years.

The idea of crossing a plum and an apricot wasn’t Zaiger’s innovation nor was it a particularly new idea. Luther Burbank, mixed up the pollen from the two trees and came up with a plumcot. The resulting fruit - half plum, half apricot was sweeter than a plum, which is strange considering sweet isn’t the first word most people would use to describe an apricot. (Dried, Turkish and Jam are the 3 most common responses to apricot according to my completely made up on the spot survey.)

The pluot extrapolates plumcot's success - the stone fruit is 75% plum and 25% apricot abd is even sweeter and juicer than a plumcot. A faint knowledge of recessive genes, selective breeding and Gregor Mendel does little to help me understand how this equation works but I try not to worry my pretty head about things and just appreciate the fruit.

In addition to pluots and plumcots there are plucots and apriums (75% apricot, 25% plum). Many of these hybrid combinations are trademarked - both the scions that are sold in nurseries and to growers and the resulting fruit, whose copyrighted name is then promoted, adding value to the fruit in the marketplace. In addition to the different combinations of plum & apricot, breeders & growers also offer different varieties of pluots, plucots and plumcots.

Flavorosa looks like a plum, but lacks its acidic flavor. The Dapple Dandy, sometimes packaged and sold as Dinosaur Eggs, although they aren’t eggs at all, let alone dino-like, is a purplish and yellow-specked fruit that could be the sweetest of the hybrids. Flavor Queen is green on the outside, yellow on the inside and tasty all over. Its mate, the Flavor King sounds all hyperbolic and [stuff] but the taste walks the walk - The fruit which looks like Burbank’s Santa Rosa Plum is sweet but complex; delicious and juicy enough to warrant a bib.

The plum/pluot season is pretty much over in California. As is true for so much other produce available in the US, the Central Valley supplies the lion’s share of plums and plum progeny to the rest of the country. Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin and Michigan’s season all run a little later in the year and if you are fortunate enough to be near any of those states, you can still enjoy the fruit of the tree.