I want Percy to crawl inside my mouth and die

[JBear]

Maybe this is a silly question, but have ya'll ever had a persimmon? Because, as it turns out, I hadn't until recently, and I've been missing out!

Why did no one ever tell me that persimmons are great? No one in my family ever ate them, so I guess they were just kind of a blind spot for me, but I often try to pick up something random and new to try when grocery shopping (usually from the international food section), and last week was permissions, and man, what a revelation. They're like mangos that aren't a pain in the ass to eat. They taste very similar to a mango (a bit less sweet), but I can just pick one up and eat it like an apple, which is worth a great deal to me. I'm probably going to start buying them every week!

So, has anyone else here never tried a persimmon? Or has anyone else had a similar experience where they discovered a new favourite food that they just never tried before for whatever reason?

 

[Dracula]

To first answer your question, no. I haven't. At least not by itself.

Back in high school, freshman year, the weird history teacher would sometimes give me a ride home. Most days, he would stop in a neighborhood next to the school which had a bunch of persimmon trees. The trees were growing on one of those weird no-man's-land median spaces that only exist in suburban neighborhoods. He'd get out of the car and go pick a bunch of persimmons off the ground and load them into a bag. Then we'd get back on the road.

That's the entirety of my history of persimmons. Maybe I should try one sometime!

 

[ThornGhost]

I had a persimmon tree growing in my yard when I was a kid. I think I probably tried one at some point, but mostly I remember them being very very messy.

 

[Zef]

I love persimmons, but they're usually pretty hard to come by in New England. But then, last month a local grocer got a truckload of Percys so I bought about three pounds, some to eat, but most to make jelly. (And I can resupply relatively easily, as the store keeps getting them.)

I didn't quite get it to congeal at all, but it did make for excellent mermelade and I spread it everywhere. My next attempt will be (cough*choke) salsa, but I need to figure out what other ingredients to add since I doubt onions and/or garlic would mix well with the intense sweetness of the persimmon.

 

[Lady]

It's important to distinguish between Hachi, Fuyu, and American Persimmons.

There are tons of persimmon trees up by my parents' house. The fruits that these american persimmon trees produce are small, grape-sized balls with a large seed inside. Prior to frost, you are well-advised to not let them anywhere near your mouth, as the green fruits (and even the orange) is very astringent.

After frost, the fruits turn purple and wrinkly, and the astringency goes away, and you are left with persimmon flavor, albeit with a large seed taking up most of the volume. Going back to what Thorn Ghost mentioned, after the frost, the flesh gets very gooshy, and as the fruits fall, the ground becomes fraught with squishy fruit bombs.

Turning to Japanese persimmons, these grow much much larger, and don't have to be frosted to reduce the astringency to a point that they are edible. In my experience, it's best to avoid the hachiya variety (these are taller than they are wide), and stick to the fuyu variety (percy-shaped), since the hachiya sitll has a lot of astringency.

 

[JBear]

Ah, I was hoping that someone would drop a knowledge bomb here. I assumed there were different varieties of persimmon, but my grocery store only has the fuyu on offer, so my comments above apply to those. They are sweet, and soft, but not so juicy that they drip when I eat them like an apple. If they were at all messy, I wouldn't be eating them that way!

 

[Violentvixen]

I had no idea there were different kinds! I only had them in Japan and Korea and couldn't tell you which kind it was. Honestly if there wasn't a picture of a persimmon on the package I wouldn't have had a clue I tried it...

 

[Lady]

It's one of the few times you should be happy to see percy 8)

 

[Issun]

Thank you for TT 3.0's most horrifying thread title, JBear. You did it!

I've tried persimmons and they just taste bland and mealy to me. My mom loves 'em though so different strokes.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Thank you for TT 3.0's most horrifying thread title, JBear. You did it!

Talking Time turned into a hardcore vore forum so gradually, I didn't even notice.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I grew up surrounded by persimmons, but never enjoyed them much as a kid. Mostly because I didn't give them much of a chance and always looked at them as old-people food because my baachan had a few trees and always tried to foist them off onto us at the same time as all her other old nisei snacks. They feel pretty nostalgic now though, several decades later. Fuyus are pretty prodigious here in CA's Central Valley. They're stupid expensive at the store, but when they're in season, you can buy whole flats from them out of people's yards for like a few bucks. Grandma used to string up the Hachiya variety (iirc) to dry and eat later. They look nasty like they grow mold on the outside, but what's really happening is the sugars inside begin crystalizing on the outside.

Dried persimmons are actually really sweet and delicious like candy, because the sugars concentrate and they lose a lot of their astringency. We've been making them for the last few months and have several bags of them at this point at home, but we've been doing it in a food dehydrator instead to speed the process up.

 

[Lady]

those dried hachiya look great! That's basically how the american persimmons look after they've been frost-bit (although not as long and not as dry), so it makes me want to try drying them out

 

[Daikaiju]

Sugar fingers.