Charlotte Foraging #2 – American Persimmons (Diospyros virginiana)

I had a run in with an American persimmon a few years ago in late summer. Fool that I am I picked one off the tree, googled it on my iphone and discovered what it was. That’s not too foolish but the foolish part was tasting it BEFORE reading farther to find out that this fruit has to be almost mushy and pulpy before eating. Needless to say I had a huge mouthful of dry. Drinking water was not helpful, I just went “Mmmmhh” for quite awhile. Ray enjoyed himself immensely at my expense.

We saw large Asian persimmons while in Singapore fruit markets but the American cousin is way smaller. Because of the above adventure in foolish eating, I stayed away from them.

Several weeks ago, I spotted a tree on the Greenway, took a photo and asked Marty, my brother-in-foraging, what it was. He said persimmon which immediately gave me flashbacks to my earlier experience.

But reading up on it, I discovered it’s an old time American fruit that was very popular for desserts, puddings and jellies. It is not a cooperative fruit to work with. The time to gather them is after they have fallen off the tree and are ready to rot are allowed to ripen in a paper bag with an apple (my method of choice).

I patiently waited over two weeks with the paper bag getting in the way on the kitchen counter. Things started to get a bit mushy today so I thought I’d try pulping them and making a pie (recipe below). Some were really soft and mushy and the pulp was tasty but some were softening up but tasting these left me with that old dry mouth again. So back in the bag they went.

I did get to strain a dozen or so and got about 4T of pulp and a bunch of seeds. Somewhere I read that these seeds were used for buttons. It must have been during the time buttons were not readily available because I tried about 5 minutes to get one seed out of the pulp. Not a great use of time nowadays.

Anyway, I will try to be patient and wait for the rest to ripen. Then I will try out the following pie recipe. Kind of sounds a little like a pumpkin pie.

Next up – bayberries.