I’m looking to buy a machine to process American Persimmon, Medlar, ect. At the moment I’m leaning toward the electric Roma tomato strainer. Does anyone have suggestions for anything else that would work as good or better?
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I would also be interested in seeing people’s answers . In a few years my orchard should be producing amounts that justify stepping up from a collander.
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Interested here too… hopefully in a few years I need the same.
I have a manual crank roma food mill… that I have not tried yet. Looks like it would work well enough for processing smaller batches.
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Same here. I’ve got a very productive Kasandra, with other trees coming. As I’m also growing PVNA type Kakis, the Kasandra fruit are heavily seeded. “Get rid of the PVNAs,” you say? But I found the seeded Kasandra fruit more tasty.
So far, the fresh fruit is awesome, but the dried fruit only so-so. As the fruit dries, the flesh almost disappears, so what’s left is mainly seeds and skin. It’s still sweet – the sugar is preserved. But it’s tough sorting the wheat from the chaff, whether in your hand or your mouth.
The best dried product has been a fruit leather. That’s after removing the seeds manually and blending the skin / pulp with an immersion blender. It would be MUCH easier if I had a machine that could just separate the seeds, which are large, hard, and plentiful – up to 8 per fruit.
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I am not speaking from experience, solely from research that I did years ago, but the vintage Foley food mills which can be found on eBay were said to be very good, even better than their present machines [edit: I wish to specify that I was not researching them for use with the fruits that are specifically mentioned in this thread but that I believe that it might have been for use with tomatoes]. I have not yet purchased and tested one out for myself though.
(screenshot of the first “used condition” result from an eBay search just now)
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I’ve used an old mill like that, unsure of the antiquity if it or the brand, but we went back to a collander after one batch. The collander seems a little wasteful, but the mill we used was way worse. It skipped over seeds and left a ton of pulp mixed up with them on the bottom.
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My sister has one of those vitage foley food mills and she likes it and uses it often for smaller batches of fruit.
Below is what I bought a few years back… but have not tested yet. It is actually a Weston product.
It comes with a screen tube that is good for tomatoes… but you can purchase additional screens… and they have one called the pumpkin screen… that I bet would work well for persimmons. Similar seed size…
They have another screen for fruit with pits… like cherries… which might also work for persimmons.
The hopper on this thing could easily hold a gallon of persimmons.
I will find out some day (year) soon hopefully how long it takes to process a gallon.
TNHunter
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This one looks good. Idk what brand/model, but someone may recognize it, or you could email Jesse to find out.
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I should clarify the food mill was being used with persimmons. Smaller seeded fruit would probably be fine. I bet it’s killer for applesauce.
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@Lucky_P … I think that is the same or very similar to my Weston contraption.
The screen they have in place looks to be the one for tomatoes… it looks the same as the one I have now.
Nice to see it in operation… and it looks to be doing a good job.
It did a good job of filtering the skin and seeds out… leaving you with some nice pulp.
TNHunter
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I think that Jesse said in comments on his FB page that he ran the seeds through a second time to extract more pulp.
I don’t recall for sure, but he - or someone else in a similar thread - indicated that they’d cut an inch off one end of the plastic auger to accomodate the seeds.
I think I read years go Jerry Lehman wrote about using one if those Roma food mills. He recommended using a grape screen, but you had to cut some of the end off to allow the seeds to exit. I wonder if the pumpkin screen was made after he wrote that and fixed the problems the grape screen had with persimmons.
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The electric version of that is what I was thinking about buying. The video is gone, but I saw a video of a nursery using one. They were dumping gallons of persimmons in and it appeared to be working great. Theirs was the Roma, but Weston bought them out. I’ve also heard that you had to cut the last quarter inch off the auger to let the seeds through. I was hoping someone would produce some other options to compare, but it’s looking like that might be the best route.
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The manual machines are fine for this purpose, but be aware if using augur-type electric-powered machines. I had thought my Omega juicer would break down medlar pips, but no, the pips nearly broke down the cone screen of the Omega. So began the messy process of removing the pips by hand. Then the machine did a fine job of puree-ing.
I paused the video at 0:24 and was able to see enough of the name stamped beside the drive handle that I could find it online as a “Johnny Apple Sauce Maker & Food Strainer.”
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High School students. The late Jerry Lehman was said to hire them to process persimmons at his Terre Haute, IN farm. He did something like 1000 lbs a year apparently.
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Persimmon pulp mixed with vanilla yogurt is good stuff.
For processing a very small batch… like a snack for one or two… a potato ricer works pretty good on a dozen or so americans.
I got that potato ricer at a dept store on sale for 5 bucks.
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It is! I have an older version that I inherited from my mom and so far, I’ve made apple sauce and pear sauce. I have tried to track down the larger pumpkin screens but they are hard to get and S&H costs as much as the screen itself.
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Mine is a “Squeezo” that was purchased through Garden Way (now Gardener’s Supply) back in the seventies! It only came with the “tomato” screen and when I tracked down other screens made for this model they were “Out of Stock”.