First, you need to know that “lilikoi” is our Hawai`ian word for passionfruit, the fruit of the Passion Flower vine. Read the Wikipedia religious explanation of the word “passion.” But I’m passionate about the passionfruit (groan), which I know mostly as lilikoi.
In January, I wrote about trying to grown my own, but I haven’t had much luck so far. In that post, I also included a recipe for lilikoi butter, but I’ve refined it a bit. Also, this is for the benefit of those readers who are new to “Lava to Lilikoi.”
A friend in Na`alehu gave me a huge box of lilikoi fresh from the vine. I love to simply scoop out the insides with a spoon and eat, seeds and all. But this time, there were way too many to simply sit and eat myself sick. So I asked around for some recipes. My masseuse (Velvet) gave me this recipe.
The process I use for juicing is to cut them in half, scoop out the insides, and let that drain in a colander for about 24 hours to get rid of the seeds. My house smelled like lilikoi for days after I finished juicing them.
Lilikoi Butter
4 eggs
4 cups sugar (I used a little less and mixed it with Splenda)
1 pound unsalted butter
1 ¾ cup lilikoi juice
Mix juice, sugar, butter in a large pan. Heat until butter is melted. Beat the eggs together in a separate bowl and temper by drizzling a little of the hot liquid into the beaten eggs so they don’t scramble on you. Keep stirring and when the egg mixture is about the same temperature as the hot liquid, pour it into the pan with the juice, butter and sugar.
Bring to a rolling boil, then down to a slow rolling simmer for about half an hour. This will thicken as it cooks.
I don’t know how to improve on this simple recipe other than to use it whenever you can, over whatever you can find. I like it over ice cream, on toasted English muffins or scones, over plain cheesecake, or just right out of the jar with a spoon!
I made a double batch with all the lilikoi I had, and ended up with twelve jars. They look like jewels on my shelf!
I first published this in September 2009 and have had many requests for it since. If you are interested in seeing later posts I did on Lilikoi Butter, look for them under “Categories” on the left-hand side of this post.
Anything to do with lilikoi has been one of the mostly highly popular topics of this blog. One reader (Kaleo) just sent this recipe for me to try. I’m not able to eat anything like it right now, so I’m passing it on for someone else to try it and let us know how it is. It sounds perfect for those of you who froze your lilikoi juice.
LILIKOI CRÈME BRULÉ
Ingredients
2 cups heavy cream
3 ounces egg yolk, about 4 large egg yolks
¼ cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Some baker’s or bar sugar, the superfine stuff.
3 ice cubes of lilikoi juice
Directions
Preheat Oven to 300º F. Use a thermometer to be accurate.
Whisk cream, sugar, egg yolks, lilikoi juice, and vanilla until smooth. Strain through tea strainer to remove egg crud.
Heat mixture to 165° F in saucepan. Transfer to baking bowls. Bake at 300° for exactly 20 minutes. Cool. (Kaleo says the secret is preheating the custard in a sauce pan to exactly 160-165 degrees.)
Sprinkle an even layer of baker’s sugar on top of chilled crème brulé after cooling and caramelize by using a chef’s blowtorch (or a pencil blowtorch available at Radio Shack for about 1/4 the price). Act quickly to ensure that the crème remains chilled and the top is crisp and brown.
Eat at once as this does not keep because the sugar crust will dissolve over time. It is okay to not put the crust on and keep a day or so, then put the crust on when you’re ready to serve.
All I can say is that this sounds absolutely heavenly!
The official theme of this blog is ” homesteading, food, travel, and philosophy from the side of a volcano in rural Hawai`i.” So far, I’ve done mostly the first three, but very little of the fourth – philosophy. I could elaborate philosophically on many topics, and over the next few months, bear with me as do more of that.
The official title of this blog is “Lava to Lilikoi,” and that is a great deal like saying “how to make lemonade out of lemons.” In other words, when given an acre of lava, how do you produce lilikoi (our name for passion fruit) in abundance?
The drought has discouraged me from doing a lot of gardening, although I did plant 45 garlic cloves this week! They don’t like a lot of water, so this area should be perfect for them. I bought a pound of California softneck garlic from an heirloom seed company, since most stores sell garlic that is treated to prevent it from sprouting. (I understand that health food stores might have organic non-treated garlic, however.)
The opening photo shows some of these garlic bulbs, plus a few miniature pumpkins from the grocery store, and a couple of even tinier acorn squash that never did grow big enough to eat!
One of the many lessons of gardening I have learned has been not to plant anything that requires plenty of water, plenty of rich soil, or a different climate.
For example, my geraniums have taken over various spots of my acre, and they add a great deal of color to an otherwise gray landscape. Herbs in pots are growing nicely. I have been able to get some delicious beets and arugula occasionally. My donkey tails seem to do well. Palms that don’t require a lot of water are doing okay. Various flowering shrubs have done fine (when the Mouflon sheep don’t eat them). Other veggies did quite well when we had regular rains, or when the birds didn’t eat them.
Please don’t mistake this for complaining! I’m just stating facts about my own particular situation. Everyone in my garden club seems to be suffering from the drought, too.
So on this weekend after Thanksgiving, I want to give thanks for the beautiful ancient ohia trees scattered around my acre, for the hens that give me delicious fresh eggs, for the splashes of magenta, purple, orange, blue, red, pink , white and yellow that adorn my lava “lawn,” for a year-round temperature that allows me to be free from snow and ice. Living and gardening on lava makes me thankful for every single sprout!
I’m also grateful for my friends, whether here or on the mainland, who keep in touch; for my students who challenge me, and who keep my mind active and alert; for good health that permits me to continue gardening and teaching; and for my family members who make me proud to be their mama, grandma, and great-grandma, sister, cousin and aunt!
Finally, I’m grateful for my little Katrina, a sweet and photogenic joy in my life! Doesn’t she look pretty in blue?
I’ve complained about the lack of lilikoi on my pathetic vines. They are starting to take off a little more and someday I’ll have my own lilikoi. In the meantime, Alexis, one of my readers, felt sorry for me and offered lilikoi from her yard. It turned out to be a great way to show how they grow to readers who don’t know about lilikoi
I’ve written about lilikoi in several posts. Check out the categories on the side under “FRUIT” and you’ll find both “lilikoi” and “passion fruit” (they are one and the same). The opening photo and the one below are shots of just a few of the lilikoi I brought back.
Chris took me on a hike down a trail on the back of their property where we gathered more lilikoi. He let me take pictures of the few left on the vines.
Vines grow so high up into the trees that we usually have to wait for the top ones to drop to the ground. Even when they dry up and become a wrinkled brown, the insides are still delicious.
Just before I left, Chris ran across the street to gather more lilikoi. The vines grow up into whatever tree they are near.
When a lilikoi is cut open, all you need to do is scoop out the insides with a spoon and eat (seeds and all). It is a sweet/tart flavor and the seeds have a gelatinous quality that makes them easy to eat. It’s making my mouth water to write this.
I dumped lilikoi into my sink twice, scooping out the insides and putting them into a colander to let the juice flow through overnight.
Another reader said she always put her lilikoi insides into a blender to separate seeds from pulp. I’d never tried that, but the next morning, I took the pulp that had remained in the colander, put it in the blender and zipped it up for a few seconds. Sure enough, it got out even more juice. So the combination of draining and blending might work.
BONUS: I’ve said so many times that writing a blog is so educational. I had known about lilikoi, but on this excursion, I learned about something else that I intend to learn more about. Chris has started a project of aquaponics.
He starts with a tank of tilapia, a fish that’s widely used in aquaculture or aquaponics.
This water containing nutrients (i.e., fish poop) from the tank is routed to another tank for lettuce. He took sheets of Styrofoam, cut a hole and inserted the pots.
He said, “Get your camera ready,” and he lifted up one of the sheets so I could take a picture of the root system.
The water from the lettuce is circulated back into the fish tank. When he gets ready to harvest, he simply lifts out the Styrofoam sheets to work on them in the house. Voila! You have locally grown organic veggies.
Thank you both, Chris and Alexis, for your lilikoi and a peek at your new project! This is definitely something I’d like to learn more about and investigate how it would work on my acre.
I’ve thought of the succulents and snapdragons that are all over this acre as really nothing more than weeds. Why? Because I didn’t plant them, they sprout up unbidden, then grow without anyone’s help, and they aren’t something I can eat. But I realized just how much they add to my landscape when I caught this shot of them. I think you’ll agree they are beautiful.
As we move into the last month of the year, I thought I would catch you up on what’s happening in my lava garden. It’s been about two months since my last update.
One of the most exciting changes lately has been my coffee berries – they are turning red! I may only get enough out of this first crop to make a small pot of coffee, of course. But I’m sure it will be the tastiest cup of coffee I’ve ever had.
I picked the ones that were ripe enough. Now I need to get the pulp off the beans, dry them, roast them, grind them, and drink!
The red mustards I planted several weeks ago are beginning to look like something edible.
I’ve had trouble keeping my cat (Kaimana) out of my raised beds, so there are large patches where nothing is coming up. He likes to scratch around and make himself comfortable.
At the same time that I planted the red mustard seeds, I also put in another batch of beets. They will give me several good meals this winter.
With the help of one of my students, I planted some ginger cuttings she had brought. It took them a long time to root, but now they are showing good growth and soon I will transplant them to a permanent location.
It’s been almost a year since I planted this red scarlet chard, and it’s still going strong. I eat off of it occasionally, stir-frying it in olive oil with lots of garlic. When the leaves are still young and small, I sometimes cut it up and put it into a salad without cooking it.
Like the chard, my arugula plants just keep producing. I love fresh arugula salads. A friend said, “A little arugula goes a long way,” but I like the spicy bitterness more than most folks do.
I’m not sure if these papaya plants are going to do much at this elevation, but I keep nursing them along. They were also a gift during this past summer.
My garden club has a plant gift exchange at Christmas. The gift I received last year was this pikake plant, now full of buds and blooms.
I had a lovely gardenia bush that suffered during the worst of the sulfur dioxide fumes from the volcano. Today, it is growing back and producing a few buds.
I put out a bunch of cuttings of a purple-flowered bush (don’t know the name of it), and every one of them is showing great signs of growth. When it finally blooms, I’ll find out what it is and post more pictures. At this point, it’s great fun to see something grow from a bare stem stuck in the soil.
I have what I call a smoky bush (don’t know the real name of that, either) that is showing leaves from another piece of twig put in the ground. These two plants (red and purple) seem to take off right away with a little soil and water.
Still another plant that seems to root and grow profusely without much care is this magenta geranium. I’d put in just a couple of small cuttings from a friend, and now they are filling in the blank spots, giving color to an otherwise gray landscape.
The lilikoi plants that grow against my shed were eaten back by fuzzy black caterpillars. Now they are showing new growth. Unless someone gives me a bunch of lilikoi, I won’t be making more lilikoi butter this year!
The brugmansia were in need of some drastic cutting back. Once I did that, they started sprouting all sorts of new leaves and they are looking twice as healthy.
The poinsettias take over the island at this time of year. Soon I’ll have a chance to get more pictures of those. When they are mingled in with other colors, and especially the white flowering shrubs, they are a breathtaking sight. Some of the “Snow on the Mountain” are blooming on my property.
This plant is sometimes called Snow-on-the-Mountain, and is closely related to poinsettia, crotons, and the other members of the Euphorbia plant family. It is a native to the Pacific Islands. See the full article here.
We’ve had little bits of rain here and there, not enough to overflow the tank, but to keep it at a decent level. That’s a critical element in the grand scheme of life here on my little homestead. If it keeps up like that over the winter months, I’ll be in good shape. At least we are not worried about snow storms here!
A hui hou!
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