Sometimes preserving doesn’t work out…

This is an amusing story from Roots, Game and Trail:

Upon tasting my first persimmon, I had a vision for preserving this sweet, creamy fruit. I imagined a thick, apricot colored jam, filled with exotic spices and smeared on warm sourdough bread. It took two years to attempt this vision, a vision that was met with a reality check. Instead of a sweet, creamy jam, what I got was a grainy, tannic, mouth-drying- pulp. I was perplexed at how a fruit that was so sweet and delightful when fresh could transform into a gritty mess. Persimmons remain the most challenging wild food I’ve preserved and what follows are the successes and failures experienced in taming this wild food.

Back in December, as Rob wrote in “A December Hunt for Wild Edibles in the Pineywoods of Texas,” we happened upon our largest collection of persimmons to date, 25 pounds! The sweet gooey fruit was hanging from the trees, encapsulated in a papery thin skin that burst when the fruit hit the ground. We gently shook the trees and the persimmons rained down around us.  Some exploded on impact, while others rolled to a stop or met their fate in the Neches River. We painstakingly collected the gooey fruit in the plastic bags we had handy, and carried out our bounty. 

Once home, the real work began. The persimmons had to be cleaned of all the sticks, dirt, and leathery fruit stems swimming in the bags. This task was made all the more challenging by the state of the fruit. A majority of the persimmons had ruptured on the journey out, and our plastic bags were filled with a conglomeration of sweet pulp, stems, skins, and seeds.

I missed out on the first two rounds of persimmon cleaning but Madi, Ross and Rob seemed to have had a really great time with it! Their smiles and joy seemed endless as they separated the pulp and debris by hand. Here was learned the importance of having the proper tools!  A sieve, mesh bag, and electric juicer were all employed, with limited success, to separate the pulp from the seeds and skins.  After all of this, I broke down and purchased a food mill; a tool which streamlined the separation process to give us the thick, sweet, pulp we desired. We are eternally grateful to its inventor. 

With the auburn pulp successfully attained and the hardest part seemingly over, I reasoned to put the pulp in a pot with water, sugar and spices and simmer until the alchemy was complete. Wow, was I ever wrong!  While this method can be employed for nearly every fruit and berry that I can think of, the persimmon defies the norm. Water is no friend of the persimmon. The two come together like vinegar and milk, seriously. Water causes the persimmon puree to curdle, then become gritty and astringent. It is the astringency that made the taste test especially unpleasant.  A small taste immediately drew all of the moisture from your mouth and left you with a dry film on your teeth and tongue…

The story just gets worse, reminding me of our most recent failure.

We were given a 5-gallon bucket of lemons, and Rachel decided it would be wonderful to turn them into Limoncello.

We bought pure grain alcohol (everclear), and she starting zesting the lemons. But when she tasted the zest, it was terrible! Horribly bitter!

We looked online to see if there were other reports of bitter zest, and sites agreed that it was due to grating the white interior pith into the zest, instead of just the bare outer layer of skin.

But that wasn’t it. No matter how thin we zested, the lemon zest was still horribly bitter.

As a test, we soaked some in everclear, then I thinned it with a little water a day later and tasted the liquor. It was still horrendously bitter.

The next day I went and bought Eureka lemon, brought it home, and sliced a sliver of zest from it with a knife. It was tangy, lemony and… zesty. Not nasty and bitter.

Our lemons just didn’t have good zest, even though they tasted fine inside and made good juice.

Sometimes these things happen. We’ve had produce rot before we got it processed, we’ve had ferments turn awful, we’ve made lousy cheese, we’ve spoiled soups and sauces and entire meals. Try, try again.

I once tried to make fish soup.

It was disgusting.

And a couple of weeks ago, Rachel made a pumpkin curry.

It was also disgusting.

Yet you’ll have successes too, and the more things you try, the more you discover what works. That’s how Rachel wrote her cookbook! Test, test, test. And occasionally throw a batch of something to the pigs. Or the chickens. Or the dog.

Or, if all else fails, the compost pile.