Sunday, June 19, 2011

Moshkan Dates

Nearby my apartment, I often visit a small fruit and vegetable shop. Sometimes they have these dates, which the shopkeeper told me are from Iran. They are so soft, delicious, and bursting with flavor!   I go through the whole box pretty quickly. They taste great with nutella chocolate, cheese, or peanut butter.

moshkan dates
To have such a high quality, they have developed a new method for harvesting (detailed below).

 Moshkan Dates


Set up in 2000 by an agricultural engineer. Moshkan Date Company is from a family of Date Estate owners, the Moshkan Date Company continues to grow from a small business into one supplying dates to numerous and famous companies and multi-national supermarkets.


The growth and development of the dates


Traditionally:


In short, the traditional method is that a single tree yields an average of 30 clusters of dates per year. The farmer pollinates all the clusters and harvest the dates that is large in quantity but low in quality.


Moshkan's method:


Our method comes from two decades of expert studies by Seyed Mozafar Fatemi, a graduate of Texas A&M University. After several years of experimentation the result was confirmed by related experts. All the clusters are cut half way, therefore, clusters which would have had about 5000 dates are reduced to about 2500-3500 dates. Then one month later they cut the clusters from the center to make more space for the dates to grow larger, a smaller number of dates with better quality. At the end of this process, out of 30 clusters of dates, only 8 remain on the tree for harvesting.

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