Blue Cayenne

Persimmons!

My kitchen fruit bowls are brimming with persimmons this year. 

In the past, finding myself with persimmons in the winter, I’ve pretty much defaulted  to making the usual fruit-cake-like loaves of persimmon bread. Those loaves have been good–sometimes very good–but eventually that iteration of persimmon baking becomes boring.

This year I’m taking some culinary chances.

With wild abandon, I’ve added brilliant orange slices of persimmons to my salads, finding new beauty and interesting new flavor pairings. 

Thanks to yet another great idea from my friend Joyce, I’ve dehydrated persimmons in my oven and added them to my snacking routine. Those little slices make for clean eating and instant gratification when those afternoon food cravings kick in. I’ve also used them to decorate the tops of cakes like  this beauty from Helen Goh’s new cookbook, Baking and The Meaning of Life. (More on that wonderful cookbook  and this recipe soon.)

And…drumroll…I’m now enjoying persimmons in this inspired recipe for Persimmon Cardamom Cake  from The New York Times’ food columnist Eric Kim. Here, persimmons are paired with cardamom for a cake reminiscent of Marian Burros’ iconic plum torte. Just wow!

Eric Kim wrote about this cake in a piece in the New York Times titled “All the Juicy Details of My Five-Year Quest” here. In that piece he describes the lengthy development of this recipe, a cooking journey that led him to discover interesting techniques to maximize this cake’s  flavor and texture. Among those discoveries: Kim baked fat wedges of ripe Fuyu persimmons before adding them to his cake. This pre-baking deliciously concentrated the flavor of the fruit, firmed the persimmons’ texture in a very interesting way, and reduced the volume of the fruits’ juices in the batter thus avoiding a too-moist final product. Also, he whipped heavy cream to soft peaks before  folding it  into the cake batter rather than adding liquid cream to the batter–a step that effectively aerated the batter and also yielded a better crumb. These are techniques I plan to experiment with in other recipes.

Kim, if you are not familiar with his work, is the author of a cookbook titled Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home. You can order the cookbook through your local bookstore or on Amazon here. . He also writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and contributes to the newspaper’s weekly food page where this recipe appeared. Currently, he is set to publish Spaghetti Junction, a collection of his personal essays. The child of immigrants from South Korea, Kim’s life journey is one more American success story.   

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. 

This is quite a good variation on traditional Caesar Salad Dressing, enriched as it is with a ripe oily Haas avocado. 

This recipe is based upon one that appears in America’s Test Kitchen’s The Complete Salad Cookbook. The cookbook is available through your local bookstore or on Amazon here.

Trying as I am to hand on to the last of the fall’s leafy produce, I paired this dressing with a beautiful head of red leaf lettuce I found this morning at my local farmers’ market, a generous handful of grated Parmesan, and a sprinkling of crunchy pepitas. 

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.