Dried sour plums (aloo bukhara) substitutes

The most available option and a genuinely good one. Prunes match the size, the leathery chew and the way the fruit slowly softens and thickens a braise.

Best for

khoresh aloo, lamb and chicken braises, Persian and Afghan rice dishes, stuffings, Indian korma

Get the acid right and this is close. Skip it and the dish is unmistakably wrong: sweet, jammy and one-note, more like a dessert sauce than a savoury stew. Prunes are also darker, so your amber-coloured khoresh comes out brown. Add the acid near the end of cooking and taste, since prune sweetness varies a lot by brand.

The best visual and textural match, especially the pale Turkish ones, which are almost exactly the size, colour and chew of yellow aloo bukhara.

Best for

khoresh aloo, chicken and lamb braises, keeping the pale amber colour, rice dishes, Moroccan-style tagines

Sweeter and more honeyed, with a distinct apricot perfume that sour plums do not have, so the dish smells more floral than fruity-sour. Turkish apricots are milder and sweeter than Californian ones, which retain more tartness and are the better pick here if you can find them. As with prunes, the added acid is not optional.

The only easy substitute that is genuinely sour in its own right, so you do not need to correct it with lemon juice.

Best for

when you want real tartness without added acid, rice dishes, chicken braises, sauces where the fruit is meant to dissolve

The sourness register is right, which counts for more than looks. The problem is size: both are much smaller than a plum, so they break down and disappear into the sauce instead of staying as whole soft fruit you can eat with a fork, and both stain the dish red-brown rather than amber. Barberries in particular are very sour, so start at half weight and taste. Add them in the last ten minutes.

An unexpected but effective option, because these actually are sour plums, just preserved with salt instead of dried sweet.

Best for

getting real plum sourness, braises where you control the salt, when nothing else is available, adding depth to a flat stew

Extremely sour and extremely salty, so treat them as a seasoning rather than a fruit. Use one or two, mash them into the braising liquid, and cut the salt elsewhere in the recipe by at least half. You get the puckering plum note but none of the soft whole fruit, and umeboshi carries a faint shiso and pickle aroma that reads as Japanese rather than Persian.

Good in summer when tart plums are cheap. Greengages, damsons and underripe red plums all work, and Persian cooks use fresh sour plums (gojeh sabz) in season anyway.

Best for

summer cooking, when good tart plums are in season, lighter, fresher braises, sauces

Fresh fruit is far less concentrated, holds a lot of water and collapses quickly, so the stew ends up looser and the fruit turns to pulp rather than staying as recognisable pieces. Add them late, cut back the other liquid, and expect a brighter, jammier result. Ripe supermarket plums are too sweet; you want ones that make you wince.

The least-bad option when you have no dried fruit at all. It supplies the sourness and some of the sticky body the plums would have given.

Best for

emergencies, heavier lamb and beef braises, southern Iranian and Indian dishes, correcting a stew that tastes flat

The sourness is right but the flavour is not: tamarind is darker, deeper and distinctly date-like, so the dish stops tasting of plum entirely and takes on a brown, molasses-edged character. You also lose the pieces of soft fruit, which in khoresh aloo are half of what people are eating. Fine in a robust braise, wrong in a delicate chicken dish.