I only had a little over 2 c. of persimmon pulp so I halved the other ingredients accordingly and this was excellent! As good as pumpkin butter which we love. GardeningJan
Fuzzy was a good way to describe this jam. I did let the persimmons ripen and it is still fuzzy.The cream cheese did not help. Any ideas on how to save six jars of jam?
This was quite good. I have enjoyed it along with cream cheese on whole wheat bread. (The cream cheese cuts some of the "fuzzy" flavor if you didn't have the patience to let your persimmons ripen completely:)
Two suggestions: 1) Do NOT place hot jars or ANY glass jars in the freezer. They WILL break! 2) For problems with astringency ("fuzziness" try this trick from a United States Department of Agriculture Farmer s Bulletin of 1915: Since heat makes the astringency of the persimmon more apparent it is always well to add one-half teaspoonful of baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) to each cupful of persimmon pulp in all recipes where the fruit is subjected to heat. Although it has been proved by experiment that the soda may be omitted if the fruit is entirely free from astringency it is better to use it until one is sure of the quality of the persimmon pulp.
There are wild persimmon trees growing in the forest all around my home. When I go jogging on the trails in the fall I enjoy stopping to snack on a few. The trees right next to the lake always have the plumpest juiciest fruit. There's such a surplus that I've wanted to make recipes with them for a while. I've made this recipe a few times now in half batches. The first time my jam turned tannic and puckery to the taste fluffy in texture. The other times I made it the results were wonderful! To deseed and remove the skins I push the persimmons through a fine strainer. Instead of boiling for thirty minutes I heat on medium low stirring constantly. Right before the mixture starts boiling just as the bottom begins to stick and thicken quickly (can't take more than ten minutes though I didn't time it) I remove the jam from the heat and divide it among my canning jars. I think this yields wonderful results. Freezer jams don't even need to boil to stay fresh. The freezer does this for you. I'd take this jam undercooked over overcooked any day.
I just finished putting up my batch I snitched some and it was delicious! I had 6 cups of puree left the sugar at 3 cups (a little shy actually) didn't have enough lemon juice from my lemon so used a lime and an orange to finish out the 1/4 cup juice. My persimmons were almost all good and ripe but a few were very firm.
There are different types of persimmons: fuyu which can be eaten firm and look like a tomato; hachiya which is not edible until fully ripen and naturally crack and looks like a giant acorn. This recipe should work well for the fuyu type. I followed a recipe that has almost the same ingredients with added pectin and I canned them in a water bath. They came out a delicious jam a bit tasting like pumpkin butter. I never tried making jam out of the hachiya type. They are too sweet to be processed - I feel any processing is a waste of this fruit. The trouble with hachiya is they are quite unpleasant if not fully ripen. However here is a trick: freeze hachiya persimmons that are not fully ripe. Te freezing process destroy the tannin and they can be eaten as is when thawed.
I have a persimmon tree so I am well aware of how horrible (tannic) they can taste when not fully ripe so I used extremely ripe persimmons and made sure to remove the skins. Still the end result tasted A) TOO sweet B) slightly fuzzy. I am wondering if it had to do with the type of persimmon I used - the type that needs to be extremely soft in order to eat which are also extremely sweet naturally... maybe that's why this recipe didn't work out for me?
