About forty years ago, when visiting friends near Dungannon, Virginia, I asked what fruit were under the big tree in their front yard.  That was my first taste of persimmons.  They were close in flavor to a date, and very sweet.  I loved them.

Once, when hiking in Maryland at a reserve reservoir for the DC water supply, I passed through a field of young persimmons and gorged myself on the sweet fruit.

So when I moved to our acreage in South Carolina I planted a foot-tall sapling.  This is its second year bearing, and it is loaded.  

But what to do with so much fruit?  According to my online search, the skin is inedible (though when I eat it, I eat the whole fruit and spit out the seeds).  The source I read recommended peeling the persimmons and scraping the pulp off the seeds.  An hour of this got me 0.8 ounces (see photo below).  After a complete search online I found only one article on separating the pulp from skin and seed.  A Mother Earth News article recommended using an old fashioned potato ricer.

I rinsed a quart of the fruit in warm water and drained it.  Then I filled the bottom of the ricer with fruit and squeezed.  Sure enough, pulp oozed out of its holes.  I quickly learned that a steady but gentle pressure was needed and that three squeezes would get all that would come.  Between squeezes I stirred the fruit with a table knife and poked at any that hadn't split open.

The result was eight ounces of fruit in an hour.  If you notice in the picture, the fruit color in the earlier attempt is lighter and clearer.  That is because the machine method will render some stem and seed pieces.  These don't affect the flavor.  

As I was finishing, I looked in the corner at the box with our steam juicer and a little light bulb went off.  It did a wonderful job juicing grapes.  Why not persimmons?

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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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