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2 December, 2002

CRAZY FOR KAKI

I am just about sick of kaki, and I'm not talking khaki, the color, or khakis, the pants. I'm talking kaki, the fruit.

I've had them just about every day for the past month, eating them whole or sliced, dried in a dehydrator, and even baked in bread. We still have a handful left that are getting mushy that must be finished. It's a good thing I like the damned things so much.

I should explain, since non-Japanese won't know that kaki is Japanese for persimmons. And, I guess I should explain further, since most non-Japanese have probably never had a persimmon, that it is a seasonal fruit that looks like a bright-orange tomato and has the texture and inside color of a cantaloupe but tastes like a slightly spicy, slightly butternut-squashy sweet custard. As you can see, a kaki is hard to describe.

Making it even more difficult to describe (and one reason that non-initiates steer clear from the wonders of kaki) is that unless the fruit is ripe, biting into some varieties of persimmon can cause a horrible astringent reaction, like you just stuffed an entire bag of cotton balls into your mouth. It makes you pucker up with a hard-to-describe - there's that word again - bitterness. Anyone who tries a persimmon from a supermarket's "exotic fruits" display alongside starfruit, ugly fruit, passion fruit, pomegranate, kumquats, plantains and blood oranges, is gambling on their readiness. They can be lusciously sweet or… aaaaaarrg!

As the Japanese say with zen-like resignation: zannen-deshita, or too bad.

Like them or not, most Asians know about persimmons. The fruit is native to Asia, and was first cultivated in China before it spread to Korea and Japan. They're given as gifts during the holidays by Asians in a variety of forms, including shriveled and scary-looking but deliciously chewy dried whole fruits.

The humble kaki was first introduced to America by Commodore Matthew C. Perry in the mid-1800s, when he opened Japan to world trade. Of the two kinds that are most common in the US, the hachiya persimmon, which looks like a pointed fat upside-down teardrop, is the kind that zaps your mouth if eaten too early. The California-grown fuyu kaki, which is flatter and looks more like an orange tomato, is supposed to be sweet and free of the zapping tendency.

Zap or not, most Americans today are still strangers to kaki, and it's their loss.

I grew up eating them right off a tree in my front yard in Tokyo when I was a child, but ever since, they've been scarce in my life. I don't remember having a lot of kaki when my family lived in northern Virginia, and persimmons don't grow here in Colorado. They need the warmth and mild winters of places like California. Every once in a while I gambled on the ones on sale at supermarkets, with predictably uneven results. After a while, I stopped buying them.

Little did I know that within Denver's Japanese American community, there is a kaki network that supplies families' desires for the fruit every year.

Erin's family is typical, in that they receive boxes of kaki from friends and relatives on the West Coast, who gather the fruit up from their own trees or get them for much more affordable prices than in the Rocky Mountain region. And, since we were driving to California on a business trip, we were entrusted with the task of buying some ourselves and bringing the loot back.

While in the San Francisco area, we bought a box of fuyu kaki from the organic market in Berkeley where Erin's uncle Keary buys kaki very year to ship to Colorado. I was amazed at the variety even within the fuyu type: the market sold small, medium and large-sized fuyu kaki, and also stocked super-sized fruit for a premium price that were the size of softballs. We tried some of the giant ones (they were great) but settled on the box of mediums.

Little did I know that within Denver's Japanese American community, there is a kaki network that supplies families' desires for the meaty fruit every year.

On our way back to Colorado, we visited Geo and Eiko, relatives in Sacramento, and the couple gave us a couple of boxes of homegrown kaki they'd received from their own network of friends and family. They had so much, the insisted, that they wouldn't miss the ones they gave us.

As luck would have it, Erin's folks in the meantime received several boxes and crates from other people in California - this year must have been a great harvest for kaki, and all during autumn FederalExpress and UPS drivers across the US must have dreaded seeing packages from California. We stored them all in the garage.

As they reached the perfect point between firm and soft, we ate the kaki whole like apples, or peeled and sliced them into elegant little presentations. We had them with meals. We had them as desserts. We had them as snacks. We had them while we watched TV. We had them all the time.

And, after we had them all the time, we still had plenty more to have. Now it was getting to be a race against time - would we finish the fruit before they spoiled?

So we gathered up the best of the rest, peeled and sliced them thinly and stacked them in Erin's dehydrators. Now we had bags of dried kaki, but at least they wouldn't go bad.

We still had a couple dozen kaki or more lurking out in the garage. So Erin searched the Internet for recipes and came up with a persimmon bundt cake recipe that used up some of the surplus for Thanksgiving. Then we went through half of the rest modifying the cake recipe to make cute little loaves of kaki bread. We have another batch of bread to make, and then they'll go into the freezer.

We'll still have a few fruit to eat while watching TV for the next few nights, but at least we've managed to use up the bounty of kaki for this year. I'm just glad I won't have to look at a kaki again until next October.

The next Japanese American network I want to crack is the matsutake mushroom hunters….