PERSIMMONS: DRYING & ALCOHOLIZING TO REMOVE ITS ASTRINGENCY (柿の渋抜き)

We bought a small persimmon tree ten years ago at the autumn festival of Itoshima, and planted in our garden.  It had borne one big fruit when we bought it, and we waited for the fruit to ripen.  But one day we found that it's gone.  There was remnants of the persimmon and I noticed that it was eaten by a crow.

This year was a fruitful year of our persimmon, and we covered the tree with a net last month.
Last weekend, I harvested 46 persimmons.  Its average weight was 200 grammes.  At the same time I pruned tall straight branches.  Only one persimmon was eaten by a crow this time.

This persimmon tastes bitter when it is not ripe, and we tried two methods of making it sweet.

The first method is drying.  After peeling their skin, the persimmons were tied with a string and hung outside under the eaves.  In a few weeks, dry fruit of persimmon (Hoshigaki) will be ready to eat.

The persimmons used for Hoshigaki are astringent persimmons.  There are many cultivars of 'sweet persimmons', however, unlike astringent persimmons, making sweet persimmons into Hoshigaki will not make them sweeter, as the sugar content itself is much higher in astringent persimmons.

Another method is afterripening by alcohol.  Persimmons were stored in a bucket with kitchen papers soaked with alcohol (Japanese clear liquor, shochu). Then, we put a lid on the bucket and sealed up with vinyl tape.  In a few days, we can eat sweet persimmons.

We harvested a lot of plums, blueberries, prunes and persimmons.  What a bumper harvest this year!

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