Harvesting Wild Persimmons

When we bought our land and built our house there were two trees on the property that we immediately noticed - wild persimmon trees.  Each year, at about this time, they load up with fruit.  Unfortunately one of the trees died this past winter, but the other tree is loaded up.  You can see a ripe persimmon in the picture below if you look hard and also a few green ones.

I see a ripe one that'll be falling soon.

As far as picking them, you really don't pick them off the tree.  You pick them off the ground because they fall to the ground when ripe.  My neighbor told me that raccoons used to climb the trees and pick them, but we haven't seen any up there, thank goodness.  Here are a couple of wild persimmons that have fallen to the ground that I'm about to put in a bucket.

Ripe wild persimmons

Now, to give you some perspective, wild persimmons are very small.  They aren't even the size of a golf ball. Their size, coupled with the fact that they are loaded with big seeds might lead you to believe that they are too much trouble to mess with.  Well, you'd be mistaken.  These little rascals are sticky sweet!  We go out every day for a couple of weeks and pick up all that are on the ground.  You have to grab them quickly or the birds will get them or the quality will quickly deteriorate in the hot sun since they are ripened when they fall and hit the ground.  In fact, some burst on impact.  As a side note, they fit nicely in the palm of your hand and can be thrown with laser-like accuracy at unsuspecting people on the lawn mower, making a sticky mess.  Don't ask me how I know that little factoid.

A few ready to bring in and process

Here are some that we are washing now.  Seriously, would you buy something like that at the grocery store? Probably not.  Some are busted.  Some have holes in them from birds pecking them.  They're just ugly.  But don't judge a book by its cover - they are good.  It is interesting how we've been conditioned to purchase perfect, unblemished fruit, when that just doesn't happen very often - at least on our property.  There's always some critter that has gotten to it first.  We simply cut the bad part out - no big deal.

Washing them

The first thing we do is peel the little cap off of the persimmon.  I also have some of the seeds of a busted one in the bowl so you can see the size of the seeds that are in them.  There are a lot of seeds for the size of the fruit.

Caps and Seeds for the compost pile

I used to do this process by hand, squishing the sweet flesh between my fingers to separate the seeds from the flesh, but Tricia perfected a new, cleaner process whereby you throw a few persimmons into a sieve on top of a large measuring cup and use a wooden spoon to break the fruit, stir the fruit and push just the flesh through the sieve and into the measuring cup.

Patricia's Patented Persimmon Process

It doesn't take very long before all that's left in the sieve are the seeds.

If you lift the sieve, you can see the fruit of your labor, pardon the pun.  It is a rich orange color, sort of like apricots and is the consistency of baby food.

Fast forward the process and you have 3 cups of wild persimmon fruit minus the seeds from today's bounty.

Processed Wild Persimmon

One more thing, be sure to scrape the bottom of the sieve as a lot of the sweet, sticky fruit clings to the bottom!

Don't miss out on this!

We make persimmon cake with this and I'll show you the recipe when we make a wild persimmon cake, but the recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of persimmon for one cake.  We pack exactly 1 1/2 cups of persimmon puree into a zip loc freezer bag, so we just thaw one bag each time we want a cake.

Ready to go in the freezer

Just stack them in the freezer and pull out as needed to make a delicious cake.  Stacking them flat to freeze makes them stackable and enables you to open your freezer door without having a frozen bag of persimmon puree fall out and land on your toe.

Six bags of persimmon = 6 cakes

Maybe we'll make a persimmon cake tomorrow...  (Hint, Hint, Tricia)