There is a lot of information on Persimmons, the two main types Fuyu and Hachiya, various recipes, and much more. With respect to the native American variety, most people will know when they are not ripe they are extremely astringent. The taste of the fruit when ripe is quite interesting and flavorful, but the fruit is full of large seeds. Which brings me to the topic of being able to timely process persimmons without the extremely messy process typically experienced.
Persimmons are very soft with slick pulp. They are best peeled, but it can be very tedious, so much as to render the effort greater than the reward. I gathered a lot of persimmons and desired to make persimmon bread which called for one cup of persimmon pulp.
After struggling to peel and gather enough pulp for my recipe I was making very little progress and a huge mess. Then I discovered a technique that allowed me to quickly with minimal effort and no big mess, remove a whole peeled persimmon intact.
A persimmon has a cap at the top. The skin is thin covering the tasty pulp that surrounds several big seeds. At the bottom there is a small point protruding from the skin connecting seeds and skin. Below my knife is directly under the bottom black point. This point must first be cut to separate skin from seeds completely.
Hold the ripe persimmon by its hard cap, upside down. Using a pointed paring knife, cut the bottom point from the seeds to which it is connected.
This will permit the skin to be peeled back down toward the cap like peeling a banana. Work around until all the peeling is pulled down to the cap.
Now you can insert your knife underneath the seeds but above the cap and skin which you pulled down. Cut across and you will have an intact peeled persimmon.
Once I had several peeled persimmons I put them in a strainer and mashed the pulp through leaving the seeds. One might ask why not just cut off the cap and leave the skin on? The skin is thin and can break up and get through the strainer. While a very little might not be noticed, a lot would. Below is strained pulp in a bowl, you can see that the volume of skin, caps and seeds exceeds the pulp.
This is my delicious baked persimmon bread. It was a light orange batter, but turned dark after baked.
It will take a little practice, but this is the only way to quickly and easily produce Persimmon pulp.
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