What's the difference between pluots and plumcots?

In late June, an editor at Bon Appétit appeared on The Early Show to talk about the pluot, a fruit available throughout the summer that she described as a plum-apricot hybrid consisting of "75 percent plum." She had three different fruits with her, which she identified as a Razmataz, a Mango Tango, and a Dinosaur Egg. "They're all pluots—just like you would have a McIntosh and a Cortland. They're varieties."

A few days later, a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "The pluot's flavor characteristics are dominated by the plum, which accounts for about three-quarters of its parentage, but it has the mouthfeel of the apricot. Pluots are not to be confused with plumcots, another plum-apricot hybrid, developed by Luther Burbank, which usually are not as sweet as the pluot."

Then, in early July, a writer for NPR's "Kitchen Window" column elaborated on pluots vs. plumcots: "More than a century ago, horticulturalist Luther Burbank bred the plumcot with a 50-50 plum and apricot split. However, it was Floyd Zaiger who … bred the plumcot with a plum to create the pluot—three-fifths plum and two-fifths apricot—and coined the trademarked moniker. While the plumcot is a simple plum and apricot cross, pluots… are the result of intricate crossbreeding over several generations."

So what exactly is a pluot? Seventy-five percent plum and 25 percent apricot? Or 60 percent plum and 40 percent apricot? And how is a pluot different from a plumcot?

It's complicated.

Plant breeder Luther Burbank, who died in 1926, was indeed the first person to successfully cross plums with apricots in the late 19^th century, releasing a handful of half-plum, half-apricot hybrids. He called these hybrids plumcots.

Floyd Zaiger and his breeding company, Zaiger Genetics, used Burbank's work as a foundation for much of their own experimentation with plum-apricot hybrids. In the 1980s, they released two 50-50 plumcot varieties, Plum Parfait and Flavorella. But plumcots suffered from a bad reputation among stone-fruit growers for being tough to grow, harvest, and ship, and while Plum Parfait and Flavorella were much tastier than some of the older plumcots, they were still temperamental.

Also, as a rule, the term "plumcot" referred only to half-plum, half-apricot hybrids. So as the Zaigers began backcrossing plumcots with plums to create more complex hybrids (with varying ratios of plum to apricot), they wanted to market them with a different name—one that wouldn't be tarnished by the notoriety of plumcots. Zaiger thus trademarked the name pluot (pronounced plew-ott) in 1990. (They renewed the trademark in 2007.)

As the Zaigers have continued to cross and backcross their increasingly complex hybrids, they've released dozens of pluots, each with a slightly different lineage. While it's surely true that one variety's family tree shakes out around 75 percent plum to 25 percent apricot (or even 60 percent and 40 percent), it's not correct to say that all pluots are three-quarters plum and one-quarter apricot (or three-fifths and two-fifths). Best just to say that pluots are mostly plum and leave it at that.

This misunderstanding over the pluot's makeup is most probably due to marketing. In the late 1990s, as pluots were moving from farmers' markets to supermarkets, globalism was expanding our options in the produce section. At the same time, plum growers were favoring larger and hardier varieties at the expense of flavor. As commercially grown plums became less tasty, Americans were eating fewer and fewer of them. In order to avoid the plum's bad name, and to command a higher price for Zaiger's new varieties, stone fruit growers and marketers decided it would be beneficial to distinguish the pluot as something entirely distinct from the plum.