Why should summer be so much fun with caprese salads? Make a persimmon salad in the fall and winter and make it Caprese style with basil and mozzarella!
Skip to the recipe for persimmon salad, otherwise read on about how we even got all these persimmon salad on the market!
So.
How’s the spring onions and celery that you put in a mason jar of water on your kitchen counter in April?
To the right.
If I have learned anything from the last few months of a global pandemic, and hopefully others have learned, it is that I am ready to pay someone A million dollars a week to wash my dishes.
I have also learned that food is difficult to grow and produce and often, as most of the time, the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables, and dairy products obviously the most important product for survival, Wine.
Can you even imagine the variety of foods you eat, grow and produce every day ?! I grew six sugar pea plants in the spring, harvested three sugar peas, was absolutely thrilled, and then discovered that it was literally THREE SNAPPER PEAS. That’s not even a bite, let alone a single meal.
Fortunately, we don’t have to try to survive only on what we can grow ourselves. The Golden State of California does about 147% of the work for us.
GROW GROW, BACK TO CALI CALI
California alone grows one-third of the vegetables and two-thirds of the fruits and nuts we get here in the United States, making it the leading agricultural state in the country. California is that too sole Production of almonds, walnuts, olives, artichokes, dates, raisin grapes, kiwis (who would have thought that ?!), adhesive stone peaches, pomegranates and sweet rice.
A few weeks ago I took an Agri tour of California that included leafy vegetable farms in the Imperial Valley of Southern California; Sweet potatoes, some of those specialties like persimmons and pomegranates, olive oil, and dairies in the San Joaquin Valley; and California wine country. Our Agri-Tour group met farmers and producers and learned about a wide variety of products grown in California, as well as the mission-critical importance of sustainability in agriculture.
IT’S SO EASY TO BE GREEN
Due to the changing climates of Northern and Southern California, leafy greens grow throughout the state year round and account for approximately 90% of all leafy greens grown in the United States. The executive director of the California Grown Organization, Cher Watte Angulo, spoke to us about a field of red lettuce with Mexico over her shoulder; That far south is the Imperial Valley of California.
ONE POTATO, TWO POTATOES, SWEET POTATOES MORE
Jason Tucker is a second generation sweet potato farmer, and his sister Amberley Mininger and husband Brad Ralls are sweet potato growers and processors. Mininger Foods produces pre-peeled and sliced sweet potatoes for grocery stores, which makes our way from the farm to the table even easier.
Sweet potatoes are considered a superfood, and shockingly, a purple sweet potato contains more of the antioxidant anthocyanin, ounce for ounce, than a blueberry. Sweet potatoes are fat and cholesterol free and are a solid source of fiber.
The warm, dry climate of the San Joaquin Valley makes California sweet potatoes even better. The sweet potatoes can stay on their vines and “harden” (similar to “ripen”) directly in the ground without chemicals, instead of in storage sheds after the harvest.
Try this triple-whipped sweet potato recipe with their California-grown sweet potatoes!
KC and the SUNSHINE BRANDS
KC Cornwell’s Loquaci Home Ranch in Madera, California in the San Joaquin Valley produces citrus fruits, grapes, and specialty products like persimmons and pomegranates (which are listed in the recipe below). From KC, we learned that California grows a significant proportion of the country’s specialty crops, including:
- 80% of all fresh citrus fruits marketed in the US, plus over 92% of lemons,
- 97% of the country’s prunes and 44% of its prunes in the world,
- over 99% of the fresh grapes in the United States,
- 100% of the nation’s pomegranates
Pomegranates are one of my all-time favorite fruits in case you couldn’t spot my almost daily social media posts about them and my addiction to pomegranate salsa. Am I Obsessed with Pomegranates being a Superfood? Is it that you are unfortunately close by name to one of my puppeteers (Pomerania)? We will never know. What we do, however to do What is known is that pomegranate seeds contain both the pomegranate seed and the juice of the fruit, wrapped in a thin membrane, and that the solid core inside contains punic acid, a bioactive compound related to alpha-lionleic acid, one of the “healthy ones.” “” Fatty acids.
Pomegranates (and persimmons) are part of the persimmon salad recipe below. Also try the autumn farmers market salad with maple and citrus vinaigrette
EVERYTHING IN THE DAIRY FAMILY
If you thought it would be difficult to grow celery and green onions again, try raising a dairy cow in your yard so you can make cheese.
Okay so don’t try that.
California dairies lead the rest of the nation in sustainable milk production and are number one in milk, ice cream, and butter; they are the second largest producer of cheese and yogurt.
Ninety-nine percent of California’s dairies are family-owned, such as the Fiscalini Family Dairy, based in Modesto, California, which also makes its own cheese. Fiscalini mainly makes cheddar cheese, and what is now one of my favorite cheeses, ‘San Joaquin Gold’, a 12 to 16 month old Italian cheese that is a little parmesan, a little cheddar, in the picture above left. It’s perfect for a cheese platter.
There are Californian manufacturers that make mozzarella-style cheese, which is an ingredient in the persimmon salad recipe below!
If you really want to bet on California cheese, check out this guide to the best wine and cheese pairings that include California cheeses and Central Coast wines.
OLIVE YOU SO MUCH
Like any good food blogger, I am obsessed with olive oil for both cooking and health / medicinal uses.
Rolland Rosenthal of the Rosenthal Olive Ranch practices high-density hedge row breeding for its Californian olives, which enables maximum yields and mechanical harvesting, which increases food safety. While over 75 varieties of olives for olive oil are grown in California, three varieties are grown in the hedge-row style that Rosenthal uses: Arbequina, Arbosana, and Koroneiki.
I used Rosenthal Ranch organic extra virgin olive oil for the persimmon salad recipe below.
#CAGrown donates fresh products and groceries
One last but very important thing! Every year California farmers donate over 160 million pounds of fresh produce and groceries to chalkboards. This year California Grown has pledged to donate an additional 1 pound of groceries for every post on social media using the hashtag #CAGrown. Do something with California Grown products, post a photo and tag it. If you have any ideas send me a message and we can brainstorm or do the fall caprese below or branch it out. Feel free to re-share my photo and recipe below (of course with the appropriate picture credits)
Print recipe
Persimmon salad with pomegranate, also known as the fall caprese recipe
Servings: 4th Servings
ingredients
- 4-6 cups wild rocket or other bitter green to balance the sweetness and tartness
- 1 Cup Pomegranate Salsa
- 2 Fuyu kakis 1 peeled and cut into wedges, the other cut into thin rings on the sides
- 1 large ball of fresh mozzarella cheese cut in rounds ¼ inch wide
- 2 tablespoon California extra virgin olive oil plus more to taste
- Juice of half a lemon
- flaky sea salt fresh cracked black pepper to taste
- optional: 2-4 ounces ham Pomegranate molasses
instructions
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Place wild arugula or other bitter vegetables on a platter or shallow bowl. Arrange alternating persimmon and mozzarella slices on top of the rocket and add a rocket or baby spinach in between.
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Arrange peeled persimmon wedges and, if necessary, prosciutto around the persimmon / mozzarella. Arrange the pomegranate salsa on a plate. Drizzle everything with olive oil, lemon juice and sea salt.
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Pomegranate molasses is a thick syrup made from reduced pomegranate juice and lemon juice. It works in this recipe the way a balsamic glaze would work on a tomato-based caprese.
RESOURCES and NOTES
- Persimmon. Two types of persimmon are grown in California: Fuyu and Hachiya. Fuyu kakis are firm, round, tomato-shaped or mini-pumpkin-shaped fruits pictured directly above; they are eaten solid, and the skin is generally edible. Hachiya kakis are larger and shaped like a gentle inverted triangle; they are eaten when they are very very soft. In fact, Hachiya kakis taste terrible when they’re not nearly ripe. Use fuyu kakis for this recipe.
- Pomegranate Salsa. You don’t have to make pomegranate salsa just for this caprese. You can toss a cup of bare pomegranate seeds on the platter, but know you’ll miss the flavors of onions / shallots and fresh parsley. Just take the extra five minutes to make the pomegranate salsa.
- Mozzarella. Use a scoop of mozzarella, which comes in a container in a brine. Burrata or even stracciatella (other cheeses similar to mozzarella) work too as their flavor profile is similar but a different “cottage cheese that screams” texture I HATE, but it’s your dish, you do it.
- Olive oil. I used Rosenthal Ranch organic extra virgin olive oil for both the pomegranate salsa and the drizzle on Caprese California
- Pomegranate molasses is a dark, sweet, thick syrup made from pomegranate juice that is bottled in Middle Eastern markets. This is what I have in my fridge door: Corta’s pomegranate molasses
- I also made my own pomegranate molasses! {Homemade Pomegranate Molasses Recipe here}
- All products come from California, from local farmers’ markets in Los Angeles, or organically grown at the Whole Foods Market
- Prosciutto It’s not grown in California, but damn who wants to start a prosciutto farm with me.
