Collecting fruit from public trees in Vienna

The pits

One big disadvantage of fruit trees on public land is that the fruit is generally smaller and there are therefore many more seeds to remove for a given quantity than with farm-raised fruit, and they’re often “cling fruit” which hasn’t been bred so that the stone comes out easily. I’ve tried various things, with varying degrees of success. I bought a “Flotte Lotte” (food mill) at a thrift store, but unfortunately it doesn’t work well with larger fruit stones like in plums; the clearance is too low for anything much bigger than an apple seed and isn’t adjustable. Breaking the fruit up with my electric mixer seemed like a good idea but it just made a (dangerously hot) mess, even on the lowest setting. Picking the seeds out with a combination of a big slotted spoon and a small teaspoon works alright with plums, but becomes far too tedious with something like Kornelkirschen.

The best method I’ve found so far is to cook the fruit for a while, then pile the mixture all into a sieve and use a slotted spoon to churn it around and force it down into the sieve, which sort of replicates the food mill manually. Whatever goes through the sieve or comes up through the spoon can go directly back into the pot; eventually the seeds get rubbed pretty clean and left in the middle. But this method is still a fair amount of work.

Sugar and acid content

I’ve been struggling a bit with getting the right mix of fruit and sugar. A sufficiently high sugar content is apparently important as a preservative. But every time I’ve made jam, I find that the pure cooked fruit has a lovely acidity that just completely disappears once the recommended amount of sugar has been mixed in. Many recipes recommend adding lemons or lemon juice to recover the acidity, which is what I’ve been doing, but this seems backward to me and doesn’t really replace the taste that was lost. If anyone has better ideas that don’t involve keeping all of my jam in a refrigerator, please let me know.