Thanks!
No they are not. You can see that mine are like a big globe. Not like hachiya.
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So… my son in law and I did a taste test this evening comparing my sisters persimmons (on top in image above) to another wild one here at my place (on bottom in the image).
We both agreed… my sisters persimmons have a noticably richer caramel like flavor to them… both were very good… but my sisters fruit definately a notch or two up.
My local tree is young and small… and in the shade… they get a very small amount of late evening sun now that I have cleared around them some.
My sisters trees are mature… nice sized trees… getting all day sun.
Note the fruit from my smaller tree even though very soft and ripe looking… and tasting very good… there was some astringency that came on after eating them. Not bad but noticable.
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Hard frost the last few days and now is time to harvest all the Tam Kam nonastringent kaki and grow out 20 seeds of the hybrids. Tam Kam X Jerry’s Lehman Nikita’s Gift male offspring next Spring.
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Here are a couple nonastringent fruit I picked to try. The seeds weren’t dark yet and they weren’t quite sweet enough. Hopefully they’ll be ready in a couple more weeks.
The larger one is 20th Century and the smaller, rounder one is Matsumoto.
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That is the orange Big Mac sandwich.
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Which variety is the pollinator Andrew? Also, how are your coffee cake coming, it’s supposed to be me of your earliest varieties.
American persimmon from a friend. You guys can help me figure out if it is Prok or Yates.
He has a male tree in his yard so all his persimmons have seeds. His tree is over 10 years old. It is productive but the fruit remain small, about 1.5” on average. It is perfumed, very sweet with gooey texture. It took a while for me to get used to the intensely flavorful persimmons (I am used to non-astringent Asian persimmons).
Here is the comparison. My Prok is in the middle between his two persimmons. I think they are all Prok.
My Prok in the pic was from a potted tree. My Prok on in-ground tree are small, the same size as my friend’s.
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Coffeecake is delicious as always. I had some for breakfast the other day. The pollinator I’m using is Cheong Pyong. It has female flowers too and I believe the fruit are astringent until ripe.
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My Nikita’s Gift fruited for the first time last year - most of the immature fruit dropped and only five fruits ripened. This year it’s loaded. The fruits are still firm, but turning orange. They are seeded for me - there’s a big male D. virginiana tree nearby that probably pollinated them. The flavor is excellent - as good or better than most kakis - but I think they taste more like D. kaki than D. virginiana.
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The figs are with or without winter protection? I gave up on protecting mine the last 3 winters and the first year had a reasonable September harvest, the 2nd year had a similar September harvest, as well as a moderate summer crop, and this 3rd year has very little of anything. Only the figs along the west side of a building have ripened so far.
Also how long have the NA persimmons been growing? I was growing several and they were fine for a while, then ~6 years ago we had a couple winters (I think 2 in a row, though it could have been 2 in 3 years) where it got down close to -10F and killed them to the ground. Since then has been fine, but I’ve mostly been planting them at slightly warmer sites. This year, I’ve got 1-3 fruit each of IKKJ, Jiro, and Chinebuli, which may just be a synonym for Jiro, so all 3 could be variants of Jiro. No fruit yet from Tam Kam and Gwang Yang.
I’ve only got one fully American persimmon, H120. I’m not fond of the fruit- even when jelly-like, there is a hint of astringency. I recently made jam out of it, thinking that the cooking would eliminate the astringency., but it is still there. Did I just not cook it long enough, or was I wrong about that approach? If it just needs more time, I could boil the bottles in a water bath for a while…
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I find that if a fruit is astringent when you start cooking it, it’s going to stay astringent. Making something like a jam where you’re intentionally removing water will actually make it worse! The problem with astringency is it requires enzyme activity to go away, and cooking obliterates any enzymes remaining in the fruit. I’m trying to remember if I’ve tried it with persimmons, but that’s been my experience with cooking astringent things.
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Cooking will bring back astringency in all american and hybrid persimmon. The only group that handles cooking well is PCNA kaki.
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Here are Giant Fuyu that I bought at a farmers market in San Francisco. They were very juicy and had the texture of a melting peach or melon.
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These were picked on Oct 9 and allowed to ripen on the counter until last night… delicious, no astringency. My sisters persimmons.
Picked a few today from this little wild american … roadside… just a short walk from my house.
It is loaded… and was last year too.
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@Harbin – Thanks, that’s good information especially because it’s not intuitive. Do you happen to know the mechanism? Like, does cooking break a chemical bond between the tannin and some binding compound?
You didn’t mention PCA kaki. Do you know how those behave?
PCNAs probably cook OK because the astringent compounds are never synthesized in the 1st place.
@BobVance – Thanks, it’s good to know that you can’t quite get H-120 to fully lose its astringency. I had the same problem with Prok. And I can already tell that Kassandra is behaving better.
@ncdabbler – Your tree looks great! But your fruit appears to be at approximately the same stage as my Kassandra. [The fruit on Kassandra are deep orange but still firm. I managed to ripen one almost completely in about a week after bringing it indoors.] So NG is probably too late to ripen well here.
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Wow- that surprised me a bit, as I figured that cooking it would just speed up whatever process happen when it sits on the counter. When making other fruits into jams, the cooking process tends to suppress/eliminate bad flavors (like the cat-pee taste that raw black currants have). But, it’s good to know, so that I don’t waste a bunch of time trying to make it edible…At least it wasn’t a big batch- just ~2 lbs of fruit and a pound of sugar.
I think I must be pretty sensitive to the astringent taste. My wife was OK with them, but neither of my parents liked it either.
Last year, I had a lot of trouble trying to get Nikita’s Gift to be non-astringent. Carbon dioxide didn’t seem to do it last year, but I think I saw something about that not working on American/hybrid persimmons. But, I hope I can find some way to do it (maybe freeze them if all else fails), as the tree has even more fruit this year. And I bet it would have been pretty good- 40 brix, but still astringent was disappointing.
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I tried removing the astringency of firm orange Nikita’s Gift fruit using C02 without success. Giombo fruit in the same batch came out firm and non-astringent. I’m curious if any hybrids respond to C02 treatment, but Nikita’s Gift was the only hybrid I tried last year. (maybe with additional time in C02?) I have a couple of Rosseyanka, JT-02 and Sestronka fruit I could try this year.