Summertime is harvest time for sweet stone fruits: apricots, peaches, plums, nectarines and plumcots, a hybrid of a plum and an apricot. Plumcots have been around at least since the days of Luther Burbank, who named them. They’re also known as apriplums.
The trouble with stone fruits is that doggone stone. Some stone fruits — the clingstone variety — have pits that are almost impossible to remove. Others — the freestone variety — are a cinch. You simply slice them in half along the natural seam that runs from the top to the bottom of the fruit, then pop out the pit.
Oddly enough, there are usually no labels advising us whether the fruits we’re buying are clingstone or freestone. If indeed you end up with the clingstone guys, don’t despair. Instead of popping the pit out of the flesh, just cut the flesh off the pit.