Dried persimmons

Our friend Max gave us a lot of persimmons. The hachiya type. The type I don’t like! But with a whole brown grocery bag full of them, what’s a girl to do? I peeled them, strung them up, and watched them rot. This wasn’t a random act of persimmon hatred, but of love. The plan was to make hoshigaki, whole dried persimmons. I heard about how to do it from a blog called bunnyfoot, but she never said how they turned out. Here’s the deal.
This should be done in November (oops).
Peel the not quite soft fruit.
Tie them with a string (in my case dental floss and baling string)
Hang them somewhere where they get sun and a breeze (oops).
They should develop a white coating. This happened to mine and even fruit flies stayed away because of the astrigency.
After a few days, massage them. I just prodded mine, but in Japan, people really get into it and massage for about 5 minutes every day for weeks. You can feel stuff breaking down inside.
After a week or two, mine started to drip a bit. Sweet fluid. Must have been the lame massaging….
The fruit–which looks very festive, by the way, starts to turn a dark orange color.
After a month, they were ready–I stuck them in a food dehydrator to make sure to get all the water out.
How do they taste? Chewy, sweet, like candy. Really good sliced thin and served with goat cheese (preferably ones that were smuggled from France!)