From Eat the Weeds and other things, too
by Green Deane
Pindo Palm: Jelly, Wine and Good Eats
Butia capitata
Pindo Palm, Jelly Palm
Soon
it will be time to go to the cemeteries. My visits are not memorial but
rather culinary: I’ve got jelly, wine and nibbling on my mind.
Pindo
Palms are a common landscape plant in Florida cemeteries. In fact, they
are a very common landscape plant in southern climes and most owners
are glad to give you the fruit from them, and surprised to know they
are edible.
Banana yellow, sweet and tart at the same time, Pindo
Palms are the lost fruit, once the stable of every southern yard that
didn’t dip below 12º F degrees or so. Now it’s
considered a tree that creates a mess on lawns. Indeed, one of the
common complaints about the Pindo Palm is that it produces too much
fruit… Think about that: Only a nation with yards of
decapitated grass and an obesity epidemic would think a plant
produces too much food.
Look for short spines on each side of the frond
The
fruit of Pindo Palms are often called palm dates and were used to make
jelly because they contain a good amount of pectic. That same pectin
makes for a cloudy wine, the other common use and name for the plant,
Wine Palm. Its botanical name is Butia capitata (BEW-tee-uh kap-ih-TAY-tuh.) Butia is a Portuguese corruption of an aboriginal term meaning “spiny.” Capitata
is Latin, meaning “with a dense head” referring to the seed
heads (see photo.) The name Pindo comes from the town of Pindo in
southern Brazil where the palm is native. Its common local name is
Yatay. Butia’s habitat is grasslands, dry woodlands and savannahs
of South America. It ranges across northern Argentina, southern Brazil,
Paraguay and Uruguay. Besides Florida, it’s a popular landscape
plant throughout the Gulf and southeastern Atlantic coastal regions and
northern California, places that are subject to only occasional
frosts. It is reported in isolated microclimes in North Carolina,
Washington DC and British Columbia.
Ripe Pindo Palm fruit
When
I was a foreign exchange student teaching in London back in the Dark
Ages I took a trip to Cornwall and the Scilly Islands. I still have
pictures of Pindo Palms growing there. I suspect the fruit of the B. capitata
was made into jelly more often than pies et cetera because eating it is
similar to eating sugar cane, in that it is tasty but very
fibrous. Some people can swallow the fiber and have no tummy
problems, in others it can upset stomachs. So, chewing the fruit and
spitting out the fiber is accepted practice. Try only one at first,
they don’t agree with everyone. One writer said they have a
“terrific taste that starts out like apple and transforms to tart
tropical flavors as it tantalizes the tongue.” To me they taste
like a banana and a nectarine put together. Of course, once you have
juice from the palm many things can be made from it and no southern
home should be without a jelly palm. They are inexpensive, hardy, showy
and bountiful. Incidentally, the seeds are about 45% oil and are used
in some countries to make margarine. The core of the tree is also
edible, as like the cabbage palm, but that also kills the tree so
reserve that for palms only slated for development execution.
Lastly,
don’t confuse the fruit of the Queen Palm with the Pindo
Palm. While the resemblance is superficial, and the Queen Palm
usually much taller, they make a similar stalk of fruit and lose them
the same way. The Queen Palm’s fruit when ripe is always orange
to red in color. The Pindo Palm fruit, however, is always yellow, and
when very ripe very yellow but not orange.
Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile
Identification:
An evergreen tree growing to 20 by 12 feet, a long spike of green fruit
— see upper right — turing yellow then dropping, ripe fruit
very fragrant. Note the spines on the fronds in the upper right
picture. Fronds are very long.
Time of Year: Evergreen, fruits in late spring in Florida.
Environment: Landscape plant that likes full sun,sandy well-drained soil but needs moisture, grows fuller if in partial shade.
Method of preparation: Fresh fruit off the tree, juice made into jelly and wine
Pindo Wine
Pindo Wine is very tropical, takes a long time, and can have clarity issues because of the natural pectin.
About 1.2 kg of ripe pindo fruit
1 Campden tablet
1.2 kg sugar dissolved in 1 liter boiling water and cooled
½ tsp tannic acid (optional – slightly alters the taste and lightens the color of the wine)
½ tsp yeast nutrient
general purpose winemaking yeast
For
wine: Cover the fruit with water then use clean hands and rub out the
seeds. Mash up the fibrous fruit pulp. Add crushed Campden tablet and
leave, covered for 24 hours. Make up the wine starter. Add the
pectinase dissolved in a little water and leave for several hours. Add
the sugar syrup, tannic acid and yeast nutrient and make up to 5
liters. Add the yeast. Stir 3 times per day for 6 days before sieving
into a demijohn. Rack and add sugar as necessary. A final specific
gravity of about 1.020.
Pindo Jelly
One
would think it would be easy to make jelly out of the fruit of a plant
called the “jelly palm.” The answer is yes and no. It is
called the jelly palm because the fruits, in a good year, have enough
natural pectin to make jelly, barely. So, one should add pectin. The
other issue is the seeds. You can cook the fruit with the seeds still
in them but I think that can impart a woody flavor to the jelly and
reduce its ability to jell (I think cooking the seeds release some of
the edible oil and that affects the process.) On the other hand,
cutting the fruit off the seed is a chore. Friends make the job go
quicker. You can cut the pulp off or try to rub the seed out,
your choice.
Since three cups is the standard for Sure Jell,
start with six cups of ripe fruit. Cut and scrape as much fruit as you
can off the seeds. One would like to say cut the fruit out but it hangs
on so tenaciously to the pulp you really have to cut the fruit off the
seed. Starting with six or more cups should yield you three cups of
cleaned fruit. When you have three cups, cover with three cups of
water. Bring to boil and cook until you have about 3.5 cups of infused
juice. Yes, measure it. When you have those 3.5 cups, filter the juice
and make jelly per the recipe on the box for three cups, adding two or
three cups of sugar, depending upon taste. Of course, you also
don’t have to filter it, and can use three cups as is, the
texture and clarity will be slightly affected, but it is just as
wholesome.
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