Sweet Persimmon and Toasted Walnut Bread
Randy Mayor; Jan Gautro
This simple quick bread uses sweet and spicy persimmon puree. We liked the slightly tart flavor from the golden raisins, but omit them if your prefer.
How to Make It
Step 1
Preheat oven to 350°.
Step 2
Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl; stir with a whisk.
Step 3
Combine sugar and next 5 ingredients (through eggs) in a medium bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until blended. Add persimmon mixture to flour mixture, stirring just until blended. Stir in walnuts and golden raisins. Spoon batter into 2 (8 x 4-inch) loaf pans coated with cooking spray. Bake at 350° for 45 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in pans 10 minutes on a wire rack; remove from pans. Cool the loaves completely on wire rack.
Step 4
Persimmon Puree Pointers. Ripe Hachiya puree is easy to make by following these tips:
Step 5
To speed the ripening process, freeze the fruit overnight or until solid. Thaw the persimmon; when soft, it will be sweeter and less astringent.
Step 6
Cut the ripe fruit in half. Scoop the pulp out with a spoon.
Step 7
To achieve an even consistency, place the flesh in a mini-chopper and process until smooth. This ensures the persimmon puree will incorporate evenly into batters.
msrd2b's Review
This bread is a great use of persimmons, but I have an issue with the recipe. The final product is not as pretty as I hoped since the bread does not rise much. As the photo shows, when sliced the bread looks like the size of a biscotti. The "batter" is nearly the consistency of a dough, so this is understandable. Next time I will bake the entire batch in one loaf pan. I would say to decrease the temperature by 25 degrees and watch like a hawk to determine when it's done. If you do bake in two pans, check the bread around 20-25 minutes. My bread was done at 30 minutes and a tad dry around the edges, so it could have come out even earlier. This also may have been due to using Stevia for Baking in place of half of the sugar.
ShayHable's Review
Delicious! I haven't done much with persimmons, and I didn't think they would have enough flavor to carry a bread. But the bread is great. It kind of tastes like a cookie, so I imagine you could decrease the sugar to 3/4 or 2/3 cup. I replaced 1 c. flour with whole wheat flour but otherwise followed the recipe. Would definitely make it again, maybe even experiment with other fruit purees (or sweet potato) when persimmons are not available.
jujabbo's Review
I really like this bread and have made it many times as I have a huge persimmon tree. I plan on making this recipe at least a few more times this week. I leave some muffins out and freeze the rest for later. To make it more nutritious, I either replace all the white flour with whole wheat pastry flour, or I sub 1/3 of the white flour with flax meal, wheat germ, and oat bran.
carolfitz's Review