As it turns out, roasting persimmons creates an entirely different food experience!

The last of the summer heat has finally cooled off in the last few days, and Tokyo feels like it’s diving headfirst into fall! We’re excited because one thing we love about fall is how much delicious, fresh, seasonal food there is to eat. Sweet potatoes, chestnuts, apples, matsutake mushrooms, new rice…the list goes on!

And don’t forget persimmons! This mellow-flavored orange fruit sometimes flies under the radar, but it’s a staple fall produce in Japan and a popular autumn snack for many. And it turns out the National Federation of Agricultural Co-operative Associations of Japan (known as Zen-noh for short) has an unexpected recommendation for how best to eat persimmons, which they shared in a viral tweet:

▼ Translation below

The tweet reads:

“I wish I’d known this earlier! Persimmons are delicious roasted.

Simply cut off the end with the stem and toast it in a toaster oven for 10 minutes. It melts into a custard-like consistency that brings out its sweetness. You can also add things like butter or cream cheese to make it a luxury sweet!

In my opinion, roasted persimmons are like Persimmon Revolution 3.0!

There are some bold claims in the tweet, which was posted last week and has now amassed over 73,000 likes and retweets.  The interesting thing is, it wasn’t Zen-noh that came up with the idea of roasting persimmons; it was one of their followers.

We don’t exactly understand why it’s “Persimmon Revolution 3.0”, but it got us sufficiently pumped to try it, since it’s an intriguing new idea. We’ve heard about roasting apples and pears, but we never would have thought about roasting persimmons, so after seeing the tweet we ran off to the store to buy some and try it out.

Obviously, all you need to make roasted persimmons are just persimmons, though you can add butter and cream cheese as a garnish if you like.

It was super easy to make. As recommended, we cut the stem side off, and then copied the tweet’s picture, which had sliced the center into wedges, to make it easy to eat later.

We had an oven, not a toaster oven, so we put them in for 15 minutes instead of the recommended 10…

And it was beautifully roasted! We decided to taste it without any toppings first…and when we did, we had a moment of self-doubt.

Had that, in fact, truly been a persimmon we’d just eaten? It was like eating a persimmon whose persimmon-ness had been completely removed.

You’re probably thinking, “What on earth does that mean?” Essentially, what we’re saying is that by roasting it, the persimmon transformed into something unlike anything we’d ever eaten before.

To start with, the texture was completely different. Persimmons are a crunchy kind of fruit, quite on the firm side, but baking it softens it completely. It becomes so soft you can stick a spoon in it, and when you do, its juices just come spilling out.

As for the flavor, it’s like its sweetness became extra concentrated, but the persimmon flavor became milder. It basically turned into a new fruit that was soft and sweet and totally different from any other kind of fruit out there. It was way more delicious than we ever expected.

Afterward, we tried the recommended toppings: butter, cream cheese, and because we’re extra, ice cream.

They were all excellent matches, but we have to say the best topping was the butter. The intensified sweetness of the roasted persimmon and the light savoriness of the salted butter was the perfect combination. It tasted like a store-bought sweet!

To be honest, not all of us are like persimmons and some of us don’t eat them very often, but we all pretty much decimated the roasted persimmons. They were that good, and that different from raw persimmons. So even if you don’t ordinarily like this fall fruit, you should definitely give them a try roasted!

And if you want to be extra with your fall cuisine, here’s how we made sweet chestnut paste–but be warned, it’s a labor of love!

Source: Twitter/@zennoh_food
Images © SoraNews24
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