greenfig wrote: Sat May 02, 2020 7:58 am
Alan ,
Thanks! It seems your pom is of a small size with hard seeds and not very sweet, correct?
I need to learn what to do with the fruit if not eaten fresh. So far, I tend to only grow soft seeded sweetish varieties because I like to eat them fresh. But as the trees grow, there will be too many to eat fresh.
Unfortunately no one that has tried the fruit, has ever had any store bought fruit, and I have not tasted any of the fruit on any of their plants yet, and so I have no idea what they mean when they try to tell me the level of unsweetness other than less sweet than cranberries which does not say much to me, LOL. Yet it's certainly not a sweet pomegranate.
Seeds are hard, yet not very hard, yet fragile, that is the best way to describe it, in other words you will certainly not break your teeth on them.
I am already thinking up ideas of what to use the fruit for. In Europe they make things with them like Jam and like granita. a cranberry like sauce can be made with the juice if you use a not sweet variety, I bought some pomegranate jam, tasty yet was so much like cranberry that it did not seem appealing on an English muffin or toast. It felt much more like a thanksgiving thing.
A lot of people put the whole arils in chocolate. Candy can be made with the juice, like I bought some pomegranate Salt water Taffy last year, and it was clearly made with pomegranate juice. Ice cream and Gelato are made with it. In Sicily and in Malta they make a liqueur with pomegranates. As far as I know any fruit juice can be turned in to wine.
I'd imagine that you could freeze the juice, I know that in Turkey some companies concentrate (freeze dry) pomegranate juice in to a paste, then as they need it they add water to bottle it up in to juice, just like those frozen cans of juice from the grocery store.
The whole arils can be added to salads, some people even put them in tossed salad. Sadly there are very few recipes using pomegranates in them. I certainly intend on making my own recipes for things like a pasta sauce using pomegranate juice in place of tomatoes, I think that I could manage doing that, it's expensive to buy fresh tomatoes to make home made sauce, and we can not grow tomatoes all year, pomegranates are more healthy for you and making a spicy pasta sauce with it would be a way less boring alternative to using the juice in other ways, since it would taste way different than the juice it's self. Some varieties of pomegranate resembles the taste of red wine too, a common ingredient in a lot of home made pasta sauces. I think that 'Unknown Follybowlius' would make a great choice to use with such a sauce, since it's not so sweet. Someone that I have a lot of respect for, her body has developed an allergy to tomatoes, if she has any she'd need an ambulance, and she loves tomatoes so much, I got to thinking that she can't be the only person that has such an allergy, which convinced me even more to make a pasta sauce with poms. While I was trying to come up with ways to use the excess pomegranate juice that I will eventually have, I started to remember that the juice of some varieties of pomegranate tastes like red wine, and I only like wine in some tomato sauces, that is how the pasta sauce idea came to my mind.
I am rooting a sweet pomegranate variety that has fruit with a very dark purple skin, pomegranates are bigger than the fruit on 'Unknown Follybowlius', yet it's a cold sensitive variety.