Do you have a surplus of plums and need something tasty to do with them? Learn to make your own prunes for stewing, cakes, baby food, and healthy snacks to enjoy throughout the year! Get started dehydrating with this simple tutorial.
This article has been updated from its original publication in 2014 for better reader experience. Enjoy those prunes! 
More Food Preservation Posts for Later:
Dehydrator vs. Freeze Dryer for Food Storage
Why Make Your Own Prunes?
Rich in vitamins, minerals, fiber and even protein, prunes are a healthy snack for both you and your kids. Learning to make your own prunes isn’t difficult – even the children can help with the process.
If you happen to have plum trees, you may enjoy bumper crops that you need to know how to use up. In seven easy steps you can preserve those plums by learning to make your own prunes!
Having freshly preserved fruits and veggies in your food storage can really give you a nutritional boost throughout the year.
- Damson-type plums make the best prunes because they’re dry and their taste is just divine, sweet with just a tiny tang.
However, you can use any plum you have on hand and in a few easy steps, you’ll have a big batch of healthy, delicious dehydrated plums. Don’t let the harvest pass you by – make your own prunes!
How to Make Your Own Prunes
These simple steps will result in home-preserved batches of fresh prunes. These prunes make great car snacks, and can be used in baked goods.
Use any kind of plum, but the dry Italian plums work best. Dark plums will result in dark plums; light-fleshed plums will result in lighter/tan colored prunes. 
How to Make Your Own Prunes
Ingredients
- 3 lbs Ripe Plums, Washed, Dried, & Halved or Quartered
Instructions
- Rinse the plums gently in a sink of clean water and pat thoroughly dry.
- Slice each plum in halves or quarters.
- For quicker dry time, place your thumb in the back each plum slice (on the outside) and push firmly, making the plum half invert.
- Place each inverted plum half or slice backside-down on dehydrator sheets. Fill each rack fully without overlapping the plums or allowing them to touch.
- Place the racks into the dehydrator and set to 135F/57C for 8-12 hours.
- Allow to cool completely and store in glass jars in a cool, dark place for up to a year.
Notes
- If water droplets form, return the prunes to the dehydrator another hour or more.
Prepare the Dehydrator to Make Prunes
Anytime you plan to dehydrate fruit, it’s a good idea to prepare your dehydrator before you come in with the harvest.
- Ripe fruit has a short shelf life once picked and, if your kitchen is like mine, storage space for fresh fruit is limited.
To Prepare the Dehydrator:
- Clean each rack and be sure to remove all traces of previous preserved foods.
- Also clean the inside of your dehydrator to remove crumbs and other debris.
- Dust the outside of the dehydrator unit, as well, to keep the area clean.
- Assemble your sharpest small knives. Plum skin is strong and thick, and you’ll need to be able to slice through it completely.
- Have enough cutting boards on hand for everyone helping process the plums and be sure to gather the pits into a bowl to toss in the compost.
- Have damp towels nearby to clean your hands often as you process the fruit.
- If you’re using commercial plums, make up a batch of fruit and vegetable wash to remove most pesticides and dirt/dust.
If you don’t have a dehydrator, you can also use your oven at its lowest setting. Be sure to prepare a few baking sheets with parchment paper or a very light coating of quality oil.
A solar oven can also be used for making prunes if it is properly vented. Clean the solar oven thoroughly (why is my solar oven always so filthy?!) and prepare baking sheets accordingly.
- To learn how to use your solar oven as a dehydrator, please visit our post on How to Dehydrate Apple Slices in a Solar Oven.
Prunes are not suitable for freeze drying, but if you may preserve raw plums in a freeze dryer to reconstitute as raw plums.
Prepare Before Processing the Plums
If you have plum trees on your property or are visiting a U-pick farm, be sure to bring your children along. Kids are great at bending and climbing, and will generally make the harvest go much quicker with their enthusiasm.
To harvest, bring with you:
- Smaller buckets with handles. Plums are heavy, and when they’re ripe, they’re also juicy. Too big a bucket will result in plum mush at the bottom of the bucket.
- Long sleeves are helpful to deflect yellow jackets around the fallen fruit. Be watchful when harvesting because those nasty yellow jackets can be a real nuisance. If you have fruit trees at home, be sure to run the chickens in the orchard on a regular basis during the growing season.
- Commercial or homemade wet wipes because plums are a sticky harvest!
Prepare the Plums to Make Your Own Prunes
Use only ripe, firm plums. Italian prune plums are best because their water content is lower than others, but you could try this with any plum.
Rinse the plums gently in a sink of clean water and pat thoroughly dry if you’re concerned about dust. If you’re worried about pesticide residue on commercial plums, use the fruit wash you made up ahead of time.
- Slice each plum in half or quarters. If the pit will pop out at this point, remove it. If it won’t, slice off another section on the plum retaining the pit. You should be able to remove the pit without crushing the fruit at this point. You can dehydrate plums to make your own prunes by halves or slices. Do not dice for traditional prune shape.
- For quicker dry time, place your thumb in the back of one half of plum (on the outside) and push firmly, making the plum half invert. This breaks a few cell walls in the fruit, which creates more avenues from which water can evacuate.
- Place each inverted plum half or slice backside down on your racks or cookie sheets. Fill each rack fully without overlapping the plums or allowing them to touch.
- Dehydrate – see tips below.
Tips for Making Your Own Prunes
- I make sure to dry my prunes only until the water leaves their skins and fleshy parts since I like my prunes to stay chewy. This usually takes 8-12 hours where I live using the electric dehydrator set to 135F/57C.
- Homemade prunes can be preserved at a “raw foods” setting in your dehydrator, if you’d prefer, but it may take up to twice as long. (The oven and solar oven are not flexible with temperatures, FYI.)
As I said, you can dehydrate these in your oven, though they require some special care.
Set the oven as low as it will go, usually around 175F/79C. Over-drying will result in “plum chips” – hmm, that might be good.
- If you have any concern that your prunes may not be completely dry, store your softer batches in the fridge and eat them inside a month. It’s a fine line between still wet and just soft, so do your best to judge and just keep practicing until you get a feel for it. I encourage you to read the troubleshooting tips in Shelle Wells’s fine book, Prepper’s Dehydrator Handbook.
- You can also vent the lid of your solar oven and dry your prunes in there – here’s a post on how we did that with apples.
- Store in an air-tight container in a cool, dark place and enjoy throughout the year!
Things to Do With Homemade Prunes
Apart from the obvious, eating them out of hand as a snack or trail food, there are several things you can do to integrate prunes into your diet.
- Use them as a gentle, natural laxative for you and your kiddos.
- Purposefully over-dry a batch so that they’re a little crispy and blend them to a powder. You can then add water to make an easy baby food. I also sometimes simmer the softer prunes in some filtered water and then pop them into my Vitamix for a spin; this make them a great meal for baby.
- Chop the prunes and add them to any recipe that calls for raisins or dried cherries. We enjoyed them immensely in our oatmeal and Healthy Kid’s Trail Mix.
Things to Do with Plums & Prunes
Luscious Slow Cooker Plum Butter
Plum and Lemon Upside Down Cake with Lavender Whipped Cream
Plum Clafoutis Recipe
Pork Tenderloin with Prune Sauce
Foraging Wild Plums
100% sourdough Chocolate Prunes Bread
Are you a DIY fan and love to MYO in your home and on your homestead? Be sure to check out our book, The Do It Yourself Homestead! With eight chapters on as many topics and over 400 pages of homesteading instruction, there’s sure to be something here for you. If it’s kitchen tips you’re interested in, be sure to send me an email at Tessa@homesteadlady.com for a free sample of The Homestead Kitchen chapter. 
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Thanks for this post – I love both prunes and fresh plums! I would like to grow plums, but aren’t they susceptible to a lot of pests? Have you been able to grow them without pesticides? I’ve tried nectarine trees and they were hit severely with a fungal infection. That’s when we dug them up and planted hazelnuts in their spot. So far, no problems with the nuts. I’ll have to look into plum pests and see if they would do well here.
Where do you live, Janet? My climate is dry (so few fungus issues) and cold in the winter (wipes out a lot of bugs), so its not much of a hassle to grow organic. If you live in a humid climate, just make sure you prune well every year to keep the air circulation high inside your trees. If you have a lot of bug problems, consider running chickens in your orchard area, especially in the early spring (when many bugs emerge from underground) and in the fall (when many bugs go in ground). There are several organic controls you can spray in your orchard, although this can get cost prohibitive if your orchard is large.
I have a prune plum tree that never gets attacked by anything. I never use pesticides. I throw the chicken coop litter on them now, but got great harvests before I ever did even that. The prune plums are sweet and delicious, and do well without any watering whatsoever. I’m in southern Oregon where it never freezes or gets above 90 degrees. If you can grow them in your zone I highly recommend them!
They are the best kind – dry and sweet and hardy! So glad you have one and that it thrives for you.
I pulled some plums out of the freezer just last week and turned them into a sweet and spicy sauce for Chinese food. They were tart Italian plums from a girlfriend’s tree and I waterbathed two jars to give to her as part of her upcoming birthday present. in the fall I foraged a smaller sweeter tree down the road and turned those into plum conserve that is yummy with cheese and warm biscuits. Neither is freestone and I imagine if I tried to pit them for drying they’d get awfully mangled.
I have never tried them but loves healthy and delicious.
Coming from REAL Food Friday. Come-by and visit me.
I enjoyed visiting your site – a site devoted to pizza?! Yes!
Love your idea of making your own prunes. It certainly is a lot healthier doing it yourself than buying them from a grocery store. Thanks for sharing. I am pinnng and shared on google. Visiting from Real Food Friday & co-host.
Thanks for visiting! Yep, a lot healthier and so easy!
thank you for linking up this week with us for MMM link up party!
My little one loves prunes. These would be great to make one year. Thanks for sharing on Tuesday Greens!
I would love to be able to do this, good for you to have inherited some fruit trees. When we were looking for a house that is one thing I wanted, but we got an acre instead. Thanks for sharing again on Real Food Fridays, I enjoy your posts, following on Pintrest.
We love prunes! Our pantry always has a box or two. Kids love it as well. But we found that it can be pretty expensive to keep buying from the grocery so we decided to make them ourselves. We got a food dehydrator and started work. It’s fun and we never ran out of prunes ever since.
Thanks for sharing!
We just planted our first plum tree. So excited. Will pin this for later!
So easy to do, Anna, and the thing I like about plum trees is that they grow! Some fruits can be so fussy but, in my experience, plums are relatively low maintenance.
I love prunes! Especially the chocolate covered ones. 😀 We planted a french plum tree a few years ago. Haven’t had a harvest yet, but waiting for the day we do! I didn’t know that some of them are freestone and I am not sure which my tree is. Thanks for the tutorial!
Fruit trees are an investment in time but it should be so worth it! Freestones rock and I hope that’s what you ended up with but, if not, no biggie. You’re savvy.
Those are Italian Prune Plums. We have one too. They also make excellent jam and plum kutchen.
Thanks for the tip on inverting them- in all the years I never have done that trick.
Thanks so much for your instructions to make prunes. I planted my trees four years ago and am finally reaping the benefits. My plums are completely organic and very ugly. But they taste awesome! I have such a good yield this year that I have to dry some, can some and maybe freeze some. Good eats!
Bwahaha! Yes, Susan, completely ugly is sometimes the trade-off for all our organic practices some years. BUT, taste makes it all worth it. So glad you found the article useful!
Are you canning whole plums or making jam? I’ve been thinking of canning spiced plums for crumbles and coffee cakes since none of us really like plum jam. What do you think?
so we do not need to add anything to make prunes? just remove the pit and dry ’em out? gotta try this!!
Nope, don’t add a thing! Let me know if you try it and whether you decide to dry them soft or hard.
would love to receive those two books !!
Thanks for stopping by, Wolf! To which two books do you refer? Are you wanting a sample from The Do It Yourself Homestead? We’d be happy to send that your way, if that’s what you’re wanting. Just clarify for me and I’ll send that to your inbox.
Thanks so much!
How do you know what type of plums you are buying? In grocery store it say red or black plums?
Very good question, Nancy! You can technically make prunes from any plum, but the best are the dry, rather oblong, dark purple plums – if you can find them. These are the Damson types. Here’s a pretty good breakdown of some typical plums you’ll find at the grocery store. A farmer’s market might be a good place to find different types of plum than the juicy red and black ones from the store. However, like I said, try making prunes from whatever plums you can find and see how it goes.
Another question. Silly one. I want to dehydrate plums, but they become basically prunes. My idea of prunes is something you use when Constitpated. Am I wrong?
Not a silly question at all! Yes, people often use prunes to help keep their gut regulated – though, there are a lot of ways to do that. They’re a very effective but mild help for a baby’s digestion, in particular.
However, prunes can also be used in baked goods and even savory meat dishes and gravies. Anything you might use a dried cherry or cranberry in would taste lovely with chopped prunes, as well. Here are some ideas to get you started. Hope that helps!
We have a few Red Plum trees (30+ years old) and depending on the weather, we may or may not have a bumper crop. When we do have a good one, we make jam and freeze the remaining for later use in jams, preserves, and muffins. We can only jam and freeze so much, so drying them into Prunes is a great idea. My question is after drying, can you vacuum-seal them and store them in the cupboard? Refrigerator? Freezer?? Thank you.
Great questions, Roy! Yes, you can vacuum seal them, which will prolong their shelf life. Be sure to check that they’re completely dry before you seal them, though. A little trick I learned from my friend Shelle, master food preserver at Rockin W Homestead, is to put your dehydrated items into a glass jar with a lid. If you get condensation on the jar, they’re not dehydrated enough and need to be processed a bit more.
General rule of thumb is a year for storing dried fruits and veggies, however I’ve had prunes last beyond five years with no discernible flavor difference. They will start to lose nutritional value as they age, though.
Was that helpful? More questions? Just holler – I wish you a great crop!
I will definitely try this one! I really want to make my own prunes. The store is so far here and and its better if I make it myself. Thank you so much for sharing!
So glad it was helpful! They’re super simple and I hope they turn out well for you.
I’ve just followed these instructions, and made some amazing homemade prunes! Thank you! I was so surprised when they went from that beautiful purple to black as they dried.
My question is, how do I make them ‘stickier’ like the ones you buy in the supermarket? Any advice would be great!
So glad you enjoyed your dried plums! They really are so tasty. Sometimes we dried them in cut pieces and use them instead of raisins.
With home-dehydrating equipment it will be a little more difficult to get the same consistency as a commercially dehydrated plum. If you want them softer, check them more often as they are drying. Stop the dehydrating process before the prunes become brittle. Here’s the trick, though – they need to be completely dehydrated so they won’t spoil. To check for residual humidity, put the prunes into a glass jar with a lid. Watch for any condensation on the jar; if there’s condensation, the prunes aren’t dehydrated enough. If you’re still not sure, put them in the refrigerator and eat them within the month.
If it’s a stickier feel you want for your prunes, you can soak them in apple juice before you dehydrate them and that might get you the feel you’re after.
The best thing to do is to just keep practicing. I dehydrated several batches of apricots one year as I learned what my family liked and what we would use them for – I think it was something like ten batches! You’ll get better each time you do it and, with food, practice means you eat well. 🙂
My kids will be so curious when they hear about this. We have not tried making our own prunes so they will surely have fun with me while making this. Thank you for sharing!
I wish we can grow plums in the Philippines. I bet they taste really good and reading this makes me want to try it more.
Oooh, they are delectable!
Hello, Can I dry the plums without removing the pits. I buy prunes and the pit is in them, How can i do this? Thanks
Good question and I’m not sure of the answer! Commercial packagers also have commercial size dehydrators and I would imagine that the pit would possibly alter the dry time – probably lengthen it. You’d be dehydrating basically two layers of plum plus the pit and my concern would be that you couldn’t be certain if the core of the pit was actually dry. There are various tools that will measure moisture content in materials that might be helpful.
My official recommendation is to follow established guidelines for food dehydration, which you can find here: https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/dry.html
I hope that helps!
Thank you for your info, I will check it out. I will probably just dry them whole and see what happens. I will let you know,Thanks again, Lin
I’ll look forward to it!
We have two Damson plum trees and they are loaded with fruit this year. I would love to receive your free book.
Wonderful, I hope you have fun making prunes from all those great plums! To get the free sample from the book, just let me know what you’re most interested in – healthy recipes, livestock, green living, family life, gardening? As soon as you decide, I’ll email you a section of the book on that topic!
Thanks so much for stopping by!
What temp on the dehydrator? My dehydrator only has temperature settings.
To preserve more of the enzymes and nutrients, you should plan to set the dehydrator at 105-110°F/41-43°C. However, the lower the temperature, the longer the drying time. At this temperature range, you should expect the prune plums to take 20-30 hours depending on the efficiency of your unit, the ambient temperature, and ambient humidity.
If you’d like to speed things up, you can set the unit to 135°F/57°C.
You should really always follow the recommendations in the instructions that came with your unit – some brands are VERY different from others. However, you can use this as a general rule.
Hope that helps!
My prunes are too tart to eat! The flesh inside is sweet but the skins are so tart. Any advice?
Great question! Some varieties are like that. You can peel the plums before you dehydrate them.
The peel has a lot of nutrition, so if you’d like to keep it, you can make stewed prunes instead.
I have it on my list to figure out a spiced honey stewed prunes recipe but I haven’t done it yet!
You could try making a simple sugar syrup or use maple syrup to brush the skins about halfway through the dehydration process. I haven’t done that before, though. If you try it, let me know how it works.
Hi, I have a ton of plumes. (Mid- California in July) Followed this to make prunes. I usually cook into jam without sugar.
What a blessing! I don’t think plums get enough credit in the fruit world – they’re super good for us, tasty, and not fussy to grow. I hope you enjoy your prunes all year long!