Pluot....(not plumcots or apriums...)....

OK, so I went to the supermarket today and found strange fruit. It looked like a plum to me, but it was called a "pluot". I bought some; they tasted like plums, too. OK to me, not great.

I thought I was crazy; maybe it was a misprint, or something on sales from Mr. Pluot (or maybe even a new planet?). So, I googled it and found out that pluots have been around since 2003 - maybe this is old news. It says that pluots are a 60/40 cross of plums and apricots.

However, I found out that is important to distinquish "pluot from "plumcots."(I think like 50/50) Also they distinguish pluots from "apriums" (which is 40/60 plum apricots). These are trademark fruits....I'm still wondering about plutocrats....

So who else knows about these or other "fake fruits",or maybe designer fruits (like designer drugs......)?

They aren't Fake. Plucots are 75% plum and 25% Apricot...and Apriums are the reverse, 75% Apricot and 25% Plum. These are the result of hybridization, not a grafted or mutated line. Zaiger Genetics in Modesto,CA developed both strains and holds a trademark for APRIUM. He markets them thru many nursery wholesalers. For me that means Stark Brothers in Missouri.
We had 2 Apriums and 5 Apricots, and 2 Plucots with 2 Santa Rosa plums in our little orchard on the High Desert of SoCal. They were in their 10th season when we left.
The Aprium looks like a large Apricot. It tends to be a bit earlier than most Apricots, which caused some loss to frost there on the desert. (4000' elevation). It has a reddish tinge to the inner golden 'meat' of the fruit and is very sweet, even when not quite ripe.
The Plucots didn't fair as well, and seemed to be a bit less hardy in the desert climate (drip-irrigation for all trees required). They looked like their Plum cousins (dark smooth blue-purple skin) the inside had the yellow tinged pulp one sees in a Green Gauge(sp?)Plum. They tasted like a Plum-Apricot mix, where the Aprium was more a sweeter Apricot.
We do not have an Aprium here in Indiana as the frost is to late in the season for the fruit to survive. I wish we did. We got tons of great fruit from those trees and made all kinds of neat preserves with it.
Jungle Jims has the Pluots quite often, but I haven't tried them.

AL" Thanks for the info. Hope I didn't sound insulting, calling these fruits "fake". I'm a city girl, waddda I know. I found it rather fascinating to learn about these fruit and vegetable combinations! (I guess I still thought a pineapple was an apple that came from a pine tree!!)