Dried persimmon
Persimmon dried whole until it frosts over with its own crystallised sugar, and the fruit at the centre of Korean sujeonggwa. Persimmon leaf already holds a page here; this is the other product of the same tree and it behaves nothing like the leaf.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Diospyros kaki
- Family
- Ebenaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- China; long cultivated in China, Japan and Korea, and now in Spain and Israel
- Drunk in
- Korea, Japan, Shaanxi, China
Character
Intensely sweet and sticky with a date-like caramel depth. In a drink it supplies sweetness and body rather than acidity, which is why sujeonggwa balances it with ginger and cinnamon rather than with anything sour.
Notes: date, caramel, dried apricot, honey
History
Drying is what makes astringent persimmon cultivars edible at all: the tannins that make a raw fruit impossible to eat are bound up as the fruit dries, which is a piece of food technology rather than a preference. That is why the astringent cultivars, not the crisp sweet ones, are the ones hung up to dry.
How it is drunk
In Korea gotgam is simmered with cinnamon and ginger into sujeonggwa, a cold spiced punch served at holidays and after meals with pine nuts floated on top. In Japan hoshigaki is a winter confection made at home and given as a gift. In China dried persimmon is eaten and steeped, and the cakes are a northern winter staple.
Production
Fruit is peeled and hung in cold dry air for weeks and massaged periodically to break down the flesh. A white bloom of crystallised sugar rises to the surface of a properly dried fruit and is the sign of a good one — it is sugar, not mould, and mistaking it costs people a good deal of fruit.
Preparation
Decoction · Cold infusion
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 15 min
What gets confused
Astringent and non-astringent cultivars are effectively different ingredients for this purpose — hachiya-type fruit is what is dried and fuyu-type fruit is what is eaten crisp. Persimmon leaf is a separate infusion with a separate record. The white surface bloom is crystallised sugar.
Common mistakes
- Discarding fruit with a white bloom on it. That is the sugar and it is the mark of good material.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Dried persimmon is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.