Processing Persimmons

Around this time every year, little orange persimmons start falling from the skies in our side yard. I'm talking about wild persimmons.  I've posted about these before, but perhaps someone's just started following us.  The wild persimmons are a little smaller than a golf ball and a chock-full of big seeds. As a result, most people might not bother with them.

We like to make a persimmon cake with them so we gather them up and package them.  One of Benjamin's chores this time of year is to go pick the freshly fallen persimmons before the birds get them.  Once ripened, they'll fall into the soft grass beneath the trees.  They are very, very sweet.  My neighbor told me in the past he caught a family of raccoons in the tree picking the sweet fruit.

Wild Persimmon that just hit the ground

He'll pluck the cap off of them and bring them inside, dumping them into a colander, and wash them off.  The fruit sometimes will burst and the inside of the fruit is very sticky.  Little pieces of grass will stick to the fruit, so we wash all of that off.

One day's harvest

We'll batch process them by putting a few of them in a fine-meshed sieve placed over a measuring cup and use a wooden spoon to mash the fruit, pushing the sticky pureed fruit through the sieve and into the measuring cup.  You can see that the sieve holds the seeds and skin back.  We'll scoop all that into the compost bucket.

The sieve stops the seeds from going through

Here's the bottom of the sieve.  Noting but sticky sweet fruit dripping into the measuring cup.

Pureed Persimmon

After a short task of hand-processing, this is what is left - seedless persimmon puree.  We'll do this every day for a week or so while the fruit from our tree is falling.  

Now as discussed, we used this to make a delicious cake.  The recipe for persimmon cake calls for 1 and 1/2 cups of persimmon puree, so we'll freeze individual packages containing that amount and stack them in the freezer flat like below.  Once frozen we'll move them to the freezer outside.  We can look in the freezer and determine how many cakes we'll be looking forward to! 

A future persimmon cake

Here's the post from last year that contains the recipe: Recipe for Persimmon Cake