Autumn olive fruit leather
Remember how I wrote
about sampling some Autumn
Olive fruits a
couple of months ago? I liked the flavor initially, but not the
aftertaste. So I wasn't too keen on trying my movie star
neighbor's Autumn Olive fruit leather. Boy was I wrong! The
beautiful leather was sweet, tart, and delicious, with no strange
aftertaste at all.
My neighbor's recipe is
almost too simple to post about. He just sent the fruits through
a foley mill to remove the seeds and mash them up, then dried them in
his dehydrator. No added lemon juice or sweetener of any
sort. I'm only guessing, but I suspect the aftertaste I 
didn't like was in the seeds,
which is why the leather was pure ambrosia.
As a side note, our
neighbor loves his American Harvest dehydrator. It's round like
those cheap ones that do nothing, but has heating elements at the top
and a fan to force air through the trays. If you don't want to
spring for the top of the line Excalibur
dehydrator we chose,
this might be a good second best.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I know that people in parts of Asia considered dried persimmons to be a staple food for a long time. I haven't tried it, though....
You might look for different varieties too. The native American persimmons are astringent if not entirely ripe, and some are more astringent than others. Perhaps if you tried a named variety?