Culinary Adventures on a Budget: Persimmons!
Continuing the series of "I'm Broke As Fuck and Need to Eat" culinary exploration, I should mention that I have a persimmon tree in my backyard.
A word about me. The only persimmons I've ever eaten are sliced, dried, and dredged in a powdery white substance that I assume is flour. Not very surprising, considering I'm half Vietnamese. Dried persimmons are a staple in those massive red-bottomed, clear-topped, gold-calligraphied dishes of sweets sold up front and center at every Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean market in the world around the beginning of the Gregorian calendar year, since our lunar new year could be any time from mid-January to mid-February. I have seriously never eaten one fresh. So while I got excited at this tree with its beautiful fruit right outside my house... I hadn't the foggiest frigging idea what to do with any of it. The arachnid insisted on plucking a load straight off the branches, since the tree fairly groaned with the weight of them.
So I've been doing research. The first research I did was simply figuring out how to tell if they're ripe, and how to process them. It turns out you're supposed to wait for them to drop off the tree, and that's the indicator that they're ripe.
When googling "persimmon recipes," I found that the first glut of results were nearly all desserts. I thought persimmon bread sounded promising. So I peeled some of my crop, hacked them up, gave them a whirl in the food processor, and out of curiosity, decided to taste the juice.
The sensation that commenced then can only be described as my mouth imploding. Not the sort of thing I was expecting from such a beautiful pale orange fruit pulp. But, when this powerfully astringent pulp was blended with eggs, oil, turbinado, flour, baking soda, spices, raisins, and walnuts, pure magic happened.
I was rewarded with a gorgeous dark brown bread that's delicately sweet and earthy, with a crisp outer crumb that is reminiscent of baked goods containing molasses/treacle.
I did find a selection of really nice-sounding things on allrecipes.com, such as cake, cheesecake, cookies, pudding, bars, pie, cream (think like a mousse, but without eggs), and upside down cake.
Despite this, I was hoping to find something not sweet to make with them. And yes, I found a few things that sound tasty... the ironic problem being that my hachiyas are so astringent, I don't know if I can make them work with recipes that don't call for loads of sugar.
Today I looked around some more. The first thing I should have done (do as I say, not as I do!) was to determine what varietal of persimmons I was working with. It turns out my persimmons are of the Japanese hachiya (蜂屋) persuasion, which explains the mouth-imploding effect. Apparently if you want sweet persimmons, you get the Japanese fuyu (富有) varietal.
Take, for example, persimmon bacon pasta, which specifically calls for fuyu persimmons.
And so does this recipe for a whole wheat couscous salad.
I got excited when allrecipes.com coughed up a couple of persimmon chutney recipes in their results, but YOU GUESSED IT, they call for fuyu persimmons. The same is true of persimmon butter recipes I'm finding, which is disappointing.The good news is that I did find a persimmon pasta sauce recipe that isn't specific on varietal... however, the fact that it's got so many bitter or sour ingredients just tells me I'd have to really up the amount of honey it calls for.
This arugula persimmon pear salad doesn't specify, either, but I hesitate to use anything but the persimmons that are nearly mush. As for the pear, you may as well keep with the Asian theme and get one of those massive Korean Asian pears that's in season right now.
My next culinary project may very well be a variation on persimmon pie... but only because of a rating attached to the file, which states: "This recipe definitely took longer to cook than advertised. The first time I tried it exactly as mentioned above, and I think there really was just too much cream. I tried it again with an extra egg and only 1 1/2 cups of half and half and it turned out much better (and cooked much faster). I tried it again using 1 1/2 cups condensed milk (instead of half and half) to try to get a silkier consistency, almost like a Key lime pie. It turned out really well, but now it is a little too sweet. I will try it again with the condensed milk, but I will cut down the sugar (and perhaps use a graham cracker crust)."
Too sweet, you say? Maybe this person was using fuyu persimmons and a quick solution would just be to use the hachiya sort!
In closing, I should link to the persimmon bread I ended up making.
I used white raisins soaked in a mixture of spiced and dark rums, by the way. Don't skimp on spices; cheap cinnamon will not cut it. You can just use pumpkin pie spice, if you like. I imagine just using straight ground allspice would work very well, as it does in my British banana tea loaf. I personally go completely to town in my spice cabinet and throw in anything that looks good. I also use a 50-50% mix of wheat and white flours to give pretty much every bread I ever make some heft and density. There's some question as to whether pan material had influence on the final crumb here; I vaguely understand it can and does, but can't remember how. (Thank you, Saveur magazine.) I made my loaf in a Pyrex pan, and that may very well have given the final touch to that "molasses crisp" quality.
Well, then... think maybe I can treat this fruit as a vegetable? What would happen if I tried to stir-fry it??
Next, I may very well research laws concerning foraging in this country. I know in the UK, you can forage even on private land that isn't yours, as long as what you take is growing wild and is for personal (i.e., non-commercial) use. This is important... because, did you know you can eat kudzu? AND that it's rich in vitamin A?? I may get up to some serious budgeting hijinks here...
A word about me. The only persimmons I've ever eaten are sliced, dried, and dredged in a powdery white substance that I assume is flour. Not very surprising, considering I'm half Vietnamese. Dried persimmons are a staple in those massive red-bottomed, clear-topped, gold-calligraphied dishes of sweets sold up front and center at every Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean market in the world around the beginning of the Gregorian calendar year, since our lunar new year could be any time from mid-January to mid-February. I have seriously never eaten one fresh. So while I got excited at this tree with its beautiful fruit right outside my house... I hadn't the foggiest frigging idea what to do with any of it. The arachnid insisted on plucking a load straight off the branches, since the tree fairly groaned with the weight of them.
So I've been doing research. The first research I did was simply figuring out how to tell if they're ripe, and how to process them. It turns out you're supposed to wait for them to drop off the tree, and that's the indicator that they're ripe.
When googling "persimmon recipes," I found that the first glut of results were nearly all desserts. I thought persimmon bread sounded promising. So I peeled some of my crop, hacked them up, gave them a whirl in the food processor, and out of curiosity, decided to taste the juice.
The sensation that commenced then can only be described as my mouth imploding. Not the sort of thing I was expecting from such a beautiful pale orange fruit pulp. But, when this powerfully astringent pulp was blended with eggs, oil, turbinado, flour, baking soda, spices, raisins, and walnuts, pure magic happened.
I was rewarded with a gorgeous dark brown bread that's delicately sweet and earthy, with a crisp outer crumb that is reminiscent of baked goods containing molasses/treacle.
I did find a selection of really nice-sounding things on allrecipes.com, such as cake, cheesecake, cookies, pudding, bars, pie, cream (think like a mousse, but without eggs), and upside down cake.
Despite this, I was hoping to find something not sweet to make with them. And yes, I found a few things that sound tasty... the ironic problem being that my hachiyas are so astringent, I don't know if I can make them work with recipes that don't call for loads of sugar.
Today I looked around some more. The first thing I should have done (do as I say, not as I do!) was to determine what varietal of persimmons I was working with. It turns out my persimmons are of the Japanese hachiya (蜂屋) persuasion, which explains the mouth-imploding effect. Apparently if you want sweet persimmons, you get the Japanese fuyu (富有) varietal.
Take, for example, persimmon bacon pasta, which specifically calls for fuyu persimmons.
And so does this recipe for a whole wheat couscous salad.
I got excited when allrecipes.com coughed up a couple of persimmon chutney recipes in their results, but YOU GUESSED IT, they call for fuyu persimmons. The same is true of persimmon butter recipes I'm finding, which is disappointing.The good news is that I did find a persimmon pasta sauce recipe that isn't specific on varietal... however, the fact that it's got so many bitter or sour ingredients just tells me I'd have to really up the amount of honey it calls for.
This arugula persimmon pear salad doesn't specify, either, but I hesitate to use anything but the persimmons that are nearly mush. As for the pear, you may as well keep with the Asian theme and get one of those massive Korean Asian pears that's in season right now.
My next culinary project may very well be a variation on persimmon pie... but only because of a rating attached to the file, which states: "This recipe definitely took longer to cook than advertised. The first time I tried it exactly as mentioned above, and I think there really was just too much cream. I tried it again with an extra egg and only 1 1/2 cups of half and half and it turned out much better (and cooked much faster). I tried it again using 1 1/2 cups condensed milk (instead of half and half) to try to get a silkier consistency, almost like a Key lime pie. It turned out really well, but now it is a little too sweet. I will try it again with the condensed milk, but I will cut down the sugar (and perhaps use a graham cracker crust)."
Too sweet, you say? Maybe this person was using fuyu persimmons and a quick solution would just be to use the hachiya sort!
In closing, I should link to the persimmon bread I ended up making.
I used white raisins soaked in a mixture of spiced and dark rums, by the way. Don't skimp on spices; cheap cinnamon will not cut it. You can just use pumpkin pie spice, if you like. I imagine just using straight ground allspice would work very well, as it does in my British banana tea loaf. I personally go completely to town in my spice cabinet and throw in anything that looks good. I also use a 50-50% mix of wheat and white flours to give pretty much every bread I ever make some heft and density. There's some question as to whether pan material had influence on the final crumb here; I vaguely understand it can and does, but can't remember how. (Thank you, Saveur magazine.) I made my loaf in a Pyrex pan, and that may very well have given the final touch to that "molasses crisp" quality.
Well, then... think maybe I can treat this fruit as a vegetable? What would happen if I tried to stir-fry it??
Next, I may very well research laws concerning foraging in this country. I know in the UK, you can forage even on private land that isn't yours, as long as what you take is growing wild and is for personal (i.e., non-commercial) use. This is important... because, did you know you can eat kudzu? AND that it's rich in vitamin A?? I may get up to some serious budgeting hijinks here...