Hello Everyone!!  More fruits in season and this time it is the peach palm which is also known as pejibaye (Bactris gasipaes).  These palms are an essential for anyone looking to grow lots of food for themselves.  They start bearing within 3 to 5 years of planting and can produce for up to 75 years.  It is a significant crop because it produces edible peach palm fruits, heart of palm and flowers.  The heart of palm can be harvested from suckers so you need not lose the whole tree to procure this food (compare this to the cohune palm in Belize which is traditionally cut down for this ).

Today we harvested a single bunch of this fruit; one bunch weighed 10kgs (22lbs).  We have about 20 more bunches to harvest and this is only from 2 trees.  We probably have about 20 pejibaye trees on the farm so you can imagine the amount of food that we can harvest from them eventually.  It will end up being a significant staple for us.  Plus it will feed the rest of the animals.

To be honest, we have had problems eating peach palms and we have not been especially enamored by the texture.  We find them stodgy, fibrous and difficult to digest.  To prepare them, we halve the fruit, take out the seed and boil them in a vat of water for a couple of hours (I have read that they are boiled for 5 hours but if you did that, they would just turn to mush).  The result is a carbohydrate which is not bad tasting (maybe at a push like sweet potato) but really heavy on the stomach.  You certainly could not eat an entire plateful of them!

Anyway, today we decided to do some experimentation in order to find a way that we could eat peach palm so we took a bunch of peach palm, de-seeded them and boiled them.

To get a good homogeneous mash, we then put them through a meat grinder (blender was too small for the large quantities).

We took a third of this to sun-dry.  Another third was just bagged and frozen and the last third, we made into peach palm paste (like lotus seed paste or red bean paste) for Chinese sweets like mochi balls and Moon Cakes.  This was the result…we even stamped them to make them look authentic.  The sweet paste actually tastes very good (yay…a success) and the added sugar seems to make it more digestible.

Watch this space for more peach palm recipes and experimentation!

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