It’s still here, just an extra click away.

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 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.

Inside the thin skin is a custard-like flesh and a number of large seeds.

Eat only the flesh. Don’t chew the seeds. The defensive toxins in the skin and inside the seeds can make you sick.

When it’s just ripe, the skin is mostly just grey-green, the flesh is pale yellow, and it tastes vaguely banana-like. After a while (a day or so), the skin develops dark blotches, the flesh turns bright yellow, and it tastes more mango-pineapple like. Finally, the skin gets mostly dark, the flesh is deep orange-yellow, and it tastes more like a caramel custard. Don’t wait too long, though: unlike bananas, over-ripe pawpaws are nasty.

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.

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.

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.

Keeping them in the refrigerator will slow down ripening a bit, but even so, it’s a matter of days.

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.

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!