What happened to Ted’s Notes on Pawpaws that used to be here?
It’s still here, just an extra click away.
What’s a pawpaw?
The pawpaw, Asimina triloba, is the largest edible fruit native to the United States.
[Yes, yes, squashes are botanically fruit, but from a culinary standpoint, they’re vegetables.]
Related to tropical fruits like cherimoya, guanábana, sugar apple, custard apple/corazón. Not to be confused with papaya, Carica papaya, a tropical fruit sometimes also called pawpaw.
When is it ripe?
When it falls from the tree! More precisely, when it changes from rock-hard to yielding and gets fragrant. Here in Massachusetts, that’s around mid-September through late October.
The fruit progresses from just-ripe to over-ripe in a matter of days, which is why you won’t find them in grocery stores.
What’s it like on the inside?
Inside the thin skin is a custard-like flesh and a number of large seeds.
What parts can I eat?
Eat only the flesh. Don’t chew the seeds. The defensive toxins in the skin and inside the seeds can make you sick.
How does it taste?
There are subtle differences in taste between pawpaw varieties, but dramatic differences in taste between different stages of ripeness.
When it’s just ripe (firm to the touch with uniform grey-green skin), it tastes
[…to me! Some people perceive the taste quite differently!]
vaguely like a just-ripe banana, with a texture like a barely-ripe avocado.
After a while (a day or so), the skin develops dark blotches, the flesh turns more yellow and more custard-like, and it tastes much sweeter, more “mango-pineapple.” A local journalist recently compared it to a mango lassi, which is the best description I’ve heard so far.
Finally, the skin gets mostly dark, the flesh is a bit more liquid, and it tastes more like a caramel custard, even with a touch of burnt-sugar bitterness. Don’t wait too long, though: unlike bananas, over-ripe pawpaws are nasty.
They’re not very pretty, and they get even less so as they ripen—how come?
Pawpaws evolved to be eaten and propagated by giant mammals like mammoths and mastodons. Most mammals—unlike us primates—rely on scent rather than color to judge ripeness, and the sweet smell of ripe pawpaw fruit is unmistakable. Also, staying green prolongs photosynthesis.
What are the annotations written on the skin?
They indicate the variety, or at least which of my trees the fruit came from. M is Mango, N is NC-1, P is Pennsylvania Golden, Sh is Shenandoah, Sf is Sunflower, Sq is Susquehanna. The ones prefixed with “r” are unknown rootstocks; scions of named cultivars were originally grafted onto them but failed. Happily, the rootstocks have been bearing excellent fruit! The suffix after the “r” is a reminder to me to differentiate the rootstocks; in the future I’ll probably just identify them as “r1”, “r2”, etc.
Don’t obsess about the variety—they’re all good. How ripe the fruit is makes much more difference in the taste.
How do I eat it?
Nick the tender skin in the middle and pull it apart into two halves. If you have a spoon, scoop the tasty custard. In a pinch, just squeeze the contents of each half into your mouth.
How can I make them last longer?
Keeping them in the refrigerator will slow down ripening a bit, but even so, it’s a matter of days.
Can I save the seeds and plant them?
Yes. Please do! Don’t let them dry out. Remember they need a period of cold before they’ll sprout. More details in my full pawpaw page.
Are there pawpaw recipes?
I recommend Sara Bir’s The Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook (http://beltpublishing.com). There’s an annual Pawpaw Festival in Ohio that has contests for pawpaw recipes but, sadly, nobody so far has collected them and published a cookbook. Our local group of enthusiasts hopes to do better!