Oh my! You might have read my post about me getting to teach a Nia class in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, for those of you that might not be familiar, is a beach town in California. It is not very far from me, but I still don’t get over there often. The place where Nia is held over there is lovely. My student and I usually make a day of it when we go over the hill. The last time we went we stopped and had breakfast at a place serving daily toast. That started my fascination with what I call “Fancy Toast” – click here for the post on Fancy Toast. I have tried it with pears and I like it much better with persimmons, which is funny because that was a substitution on the part of the restaurant owner. But the persimmons have to be REALLY, REALLY, REALLY ripe. At the point where they are almost mushy and a little slippery to cut up. Since I eat the Fancy Toast all the time — because I just happened to have had a few persimmons — I thought I would look into the nutritional value of persimmons.
The ones that I have been using are the flat-ish kind. I hear they are the Asian persimmons. According to a document from the California Department of Public Health a medium (168g) persimmon has 118 calories, only 3 of which are from fat. With the following percentages of the government daily values:
Total Fat: 0g 0%
Saturated Fat: 0g 0%
Trans Fat: 0g
Cholesterol: 0mg 0%
Sodium: 2mg 0%
Total Carbohydrate: 31g 10%
Dietary Fiber: 6g 24%
Sugars: 21g
Protein: 1g
Vitamin A 55% / Vitamin C 21% / Calcium 1% / Iron 1%
Persimmons have a lot of sugar and relatively no protein. But a nice amount of fiber and a good amount of Vitamin C, but even better amount of Vitamin A.
Remember, also, that colorful fruit has carotenoids which provide the orange color in the fruits. And the carotenoids act as antioxidants in your body, meaning they attack harmful free radicals that damage tissues throughout your body.
Most of the recipes I saw called for persimmon puree which is a combination of cooking and blending. So I like the idea of putting them on my toast, I cut up the raw fruit and pile it on top, making it “fancy” or putting them raw into a salad. I actually have not tried them in a salad because I have used them all on my toast!
There are two varieties, the Hachiya and the Fuyu. The Hachiya is the taller of the two, with the Fuyu being more flat. The Hachiya is used more for baking whereas the Fuyu is the one that people eat raw. The document I mentioned states “The Fuyu was developed by breeding out the tannic acid from the Hachiya, making it more appealing to taste and easier to eat whole and raw.”
Have you tried making and eating the Fancy Toast? What else do people do with persimmons? Do you have a persimmon recipe?
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