My love affair with persimmons

Enclosed: a napa cabbage and persimmon geotjeori recipe and a hidden B&B rec in the Korean countryside!

I’ve been feeling greater momentum to put pen to paper these days. I suppose that’s good for you and for me, right? I always forget how empowering this exercise can be — what, on surface, appears to be just the mere stringing of words and sentences turns out to be a silent transfer of energy from the metaphysical into the physical. Anyway, if my previous post was all about the squash, this week’s story is about two boxes of persimmons I received from a friend — still very much on the page for Fall. I’ve finally gone through both boxes, and found it apt to enclose another recipe using the golden-hued orb while we’re at it!

Persimmons always stop my sister and I in our tracks. Persimmons are either: astringent (like the Hachiya variety) — meaning they can only be savored when fully ripened because of high tannin levels — or non-astringent (like the crunchier Fuyu variety) which can be readily consumed. There are several persimmon varietals you might often spot at a market: 1) dan-gam (in Korean) / fuyu persimmons (in Japanese), whose crunchy and firm exterior make them a great addition to salad; 2) daebonggam in Korean (Hachiya persimmons); 3) hong-si in Korean (essentially a “soft persimmon”), which describes its level of ripeness rather than a species per se and; 4) got-gam in Korean (essentially “dried persimmon”) that has been hung and left in the late fall / early winter to arrive at a dry, jerky-like state. I also love that the fruit can be enjoyed across its spectrum of “ripeness” — crunchy Fuyu slices in a salad (perhaps with endive leaves tossed liberally with fresh herbs, thin shards of pecorino sardo and olive oil!), ripe and jammy Hachiya’s enjoyed as a condiment alongside Greek yogurt (one of my favorite breakfast combinations — see below!), and then its dried form that often gets transformed into the perfect sweet treat ala a Turkish delight when sliced open, then rolled up with nuts and such (gotgam hodu mari).

Of course, this story wouldn’t be complete if I don’t proceed to share some Proustian food-related memory jolt surrounding the fruit. You must know my modus operandi a little too well, now. There are many, in fact. Time spent over savoring tea and her handmade persimmons with a potter’s hut we stumbled across by chance one winter in the folk village of Andong, South Korea. Or the other time we bought a bag for next to nothing in Dali, Yunnan from an octagenarian lady who painstakingly dried them herself. More recently, we stayed at a two-room inn in Sancheong (nestled at the foothills of the Jirisan area in South Korea) and Marie, the innkeeper, too, served us frozen persimmon she’d preserved the winter before for tea after dinner. When she found out we adored the fruit, she proceeded to slide another rendition of the fruit in our breakfast the next morning — dried gotgam slivers slathered in spicy, sweet gochujang she’d fermented herself too. To be downed with a neat selection of other banchan atop a blank canvas of mushroom porridge.

I thought I’d found paradise on earth when Sonia and I (unintentionally) trespassed this artist’s hut. She told us she’d decided to pursue a slower life in Andong after some years of living in Seoul and she still continues to make ceramics here. She proceeded to invite us into her house and we enjoyed sword bean tea, along with persimmons she’d dried that season on all her dishware. The sky was piercingly blue on this sun-drenched Winter morning — I’ll never forget.

Sonia in a persimmon-dyed dress we found in Yunnan last December on our maiden trip — caught munching on these morsels of saccharine sweetness, of course!

Marie the innkeeper, who extended hospitality and generosity time and again with all the different types of persimmon she laid on our table. I will slide details of our inn at the bottom of this post should anyone be so willing and interested to make the trek to Sancheong. She told us that the roads leading to her humble inn are lined with countless rows of persimmon trees (bearing the Gojong-si variety, named after one of the emperors) and so, drying these to be packaged for sale are a massive yearly undertaking for her husband and her.

In this spirit of sharing and caring (it does happen to be Thanksgiving after all, a holiday I do pine for), I come bearing a gift of a recipe — for none other than a napa cabbage and persimmon geotjeori (ie. Fresh kimchi, the kind you can dig into almost immediately as opposed to having to wait for it to ripen / ferment). I made this for dinner one day when my friends Jovanka and Andre came for dinner one night while visiting from Jakarta. I prepared an elaborate Korean spread that night, meaning for this cabbage and persimmon geotjeori to pair with thin slices bossam (Korean pork belly that I braise on a bed of onion, leeks and apples for close to an hour) in a wrap. The symphony of flavors that hits when you get the sweetness from the persimmon-spiked geotjeori, unctuous pork belly and the slight astringency of the perilla wrapper is like no other.

Napa and cabbage persimmon geotjeori

Ingredients :

• One large ripe Hachiya persimmon, flesh scooped out and skin/pit removed — can add more if you desire

• Half a head of Napa cabbage, leaves cut lengthwise roughly into 1-inch strips

• 3 tbsp of gochugaru — adjust accordingly based on your spice tolerance

• 2 cloves of garlic, smashed and minced into a paste

• 2-3 tbsp of tuna sauce (fish sauce will do) — taste to adjust

• 1 tbsp of Maesil (plum syrup) — okay to omit if you don’t have this in your pantry

• 1/4 cup of salt, to quickly pickle the cabbage strips

• Sesame seeds, to garnish

• Optional add-ins you can throw in that I didn’t have: chives, spring onions, radish, mustard leaves

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1. Salt the cabbage strips and leave to rest for 30-45 mins. You want to retain the sweet, inherently crunchy texture of the napa cabbage so we won’t leave it hanging in the salt for too long lest it wilts beyond our desire.

2. Rinse the cabbage with water and dry thoroughly.

3. In a separate bowl, prepare the paste — gochugaru, the garlic paste, tuna sauce, plum syrup and the ripe persimmon. Slather, mix and spread generously with the cabbage leaves.

4. I like to pop this back into the fridge so all the flavors can sit a little longer + you get to enjoy it slightly cold. Garnish with sesame seeds to serve!

Now, wasn’t that so simple?! Or if you’re not the kimchi-making sort, just tear these open and lay them over your morning yogurt bowls and/or olive oil cake like we did here.

Just two of infinite ways to enjoy nature’s nectar today…

Tangentially, I’ve decided to open up my dining table in the month of December for an IRL Holiday Edition Salt Salon! If you are in Singapore and want a seat at the table, strangers are more than welcome — all the more I want to be cooking for you to get to know everyone who has shown interest and love so far. I really do appreciate it. Menu will be Italian-ish…and dishes will likely be enjoyed family-style because that’s our favorite way to dine. Can’t wait to add some additional cheer to your holiday season!

Last but not least, here are more details relating to the lovely bed & breakfast in Sancheong I shared about earlier:

Marie’s Kitchen / 마리의 부엌

176 Dongdang-ri, Sicheon-myeon, Sancheong-gun, Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea

Sonia and I spent a balmy summer night here this past August. Marie makes most things from scratch — like the acorn jelly (dotorimuk) salad with powder from foraged acorns, and the endless namul varieties she picks in the mountains flanked with all her ferments (kimchi and jangs, alike)! I’m itching to return one spring so we can forage for the spring namul, and then prepare and savor them at their peak — together, as she promised!

Till next time,

Sarah