There are three ways to dry persimmons: using a food dehydrator, home oven, or air drying. Ripe fruit should be chosen and overripe or ripened fruit should be avoided. Air drying is the best method for flavor, while oven drying is best for quantity. Drying persimmons at home is cheaper and better quality than buying them.
There are basically three different methods used to dry persimmons and each method has its advantages and disadvantages. You can dry persimmons using a food dehydrator, a home oven, or by air drying. It’s best to start with ripe fruit, then clean and cut. Dried persimmons make an excellent snack and are easily added to cake and cookie recipes. You can buy them at some grocery stores, but drying persimmons yourself isn’t difficult, and in most cases, home-dried persimmons are superior in quality to mass-produced ones.
To dry persimmons, choosing the fruit at the right stage of maturity is the first step, and probably the most important. Overripe fruit can begin to rot before the dehydration process is complete, and this is especially true with air drying. Ripened fruit is not recommended because dried fruit will not be as sweet and may even have a bitter taste. Drying-ripe persimmons are typically dark orange in color and soft, but not mushy, to the touch.
Drying persimmons with a food dehydrator is probably the easiest method, however food dehydrators can be expensive and most ones made for home use have limited space. You may need to repeat the process several times if you have a large amount of persimmons to dry. Before drying persimmons in a dehydrator, you should first wash and cut the fruit. The dehydrator is typically set to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) and the persimmons usually need to cook for around 24 hours for complete drying.
To cook dry persimmons, you should follow roughly the same process as you would with a dehydrator. The advantage that oven drying has over a dehydrator is that using a home oven will allow you to dry much more fruit at once. While kiln drying has the benefit of saving time, this may be outweighed by the cost. Running an oven for a 24-hour period will use significantly more electricity than a dehydrator, making the process much more expensive.
If you have the time, air drying persimmons are probably the best method overall. In most cases, due to the time taken in the drying process, the resulting fruit is typically much sweeter and has a bolder flavor. Generally, the most common method of air drying persimmons is to hang the fruit from a wooden rod. The fruit is attached to the rod by wrapping it with a cotton thread. You can hang the rod almost anywhere it’s convenient, and the drying process takes about 30 days, depending on the humidity of the environment.
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