Business calls. I’ll be out all day. Back with lots more about pudding on Monday. Great weekends all around!

It’s obvious, right? The hachiya persimmon on the left is bright orange, firm and smooth while the one on the left is darker and starting to look like a balloon with some of the air let out. The skin looks a little loose, plus it dimples under the slightest pressure. That persimmon is ready to […]

…you can drink persimmons too? Plenty of Americans in the East and Southeast once did. As mentioned, persimmons, when ripe, are incredibly sweet fruits. Only dates contains more natural glucose. And where there is sugar there is (at least potentially) alcohol, yes? Those who were with me through last month’s posts on apple cider know […]

Or at least that was the conventional wisdom back around the turn of the century in American persimmon country. Most people, it seems, had either forgotten or never knew all the potential uses for the persimmon. One region that never seems to have forgotten is southern Indiana. Especially the town of Mitchell, which hosts a […]

Not the cartoon character, the writer. Some scholars speculate that the persimmon was the fruit that the “lotus eaters” ate in The Odyssey. As you may recall from high school lit class, the land of the lotus eaters was one of the stops Odysseus made on his meandering trip home from Troy. On landing, his […]

The missus never goes anywhere without noticing sweet things to eat. It’s one of the reasons I married her. In addition to last week’s knishes, she snapped a few pix of some interesting baking action in Manhattan. The first one isn’t new, but it’s one of my must-eats whenever I get back to New York: […]

It’s a St. Louis thing, and boy do they love it. It can be deliciously rich or way, WAY over the top depending on where you get it. This week’s New York Times food section has a good article on the subject if you’re interested.

Most of the non-native persimmons that North Americans find in stores — when they find them at all — are hachiya persimmons. They’re astringent, which isn’t a bad thing so long as you consume them when they’re ripe. But then that’s the problem. Not so much that astringent persimmons don’t ripen, but that there’s no […]

Persimmons come in two different types: astringent and non-astringent. Astringent varieties taste pretty much the way they sound: mouth-puckering to the point of inedibility — at least if they aren’t completely ripe. It’s the tannins, you see. Phenolic compounds that are enjoyable in small amounts (say, in good red wine) but offensive in concentration. When […]