Around three years ago, I had a chance encounter with Keith Goyden from Pão Bakery who amongst other things, works to revive lost grains and to restore the art of cultivating and foraging especially near the Himalayas. Before meeting Keith, I had never heard of persimmons, let alone hoshigaki - the art of drying persimmons in the traditional Japanese way to resemble and evoke flavours of a date.
A popular tea-time dessert in Japan, hoshigaki was now practiced in small batches in and around Mukteshwar. Much was forgotten till I travelled to Istanbul the same year and spotted hoshigaki in the city's famous dried fruits markets; a prized Japanese treasure half way across the world. It's true when they say that travel shapes the mind because my second spotting was at Naar, Prateek Sadhu's touted restaurant. By this time, I had found a lead at Kilmora Gram Udyog and had started the process of understanding if hoshigaki, possible only with a specific, oblong variety of persimmons called Hachiya, could even be achieved at scale.
The first two years working with Anamika Das who heads KGU came with its fair share of trust and patience. Natural produce may not always work the way we envision it to and so was true when the first two batches failed miserably. But a lot is learned in failure and with each passing year, we understand better on how to adapt the process to its current environment as well as to unpredictable weather patterns. In the third year, I made a trip to the hills of Uttrakhand and finally have laid my hands on produce that is a little closer to the original. I remind myself that is only half the battle won as we figure scalability, quality and taste but here are to some exciting times that future has in store!