Leo in N E Illinois
The Professor
- Messages
- 11,337
- Reaction score
- 23,254
- USDA Zone
- 5b
On the blueberry farm, SW Michigan. First frost was last night. Knowing the freeze was coming I made sure I could get out and pick a few pawpaws. Asimia triloba, the pawpaw, it is a winter hardy member of the Anonacea, cousins are cherimoya, soursop, sweetsop and other custard apples. In Dutch and Afrikaans pawpaw refers to the papaya which is not at all related to the north American native fruit I'm talking about. Found throughout eastern half of North America, from Ontario to Florida. Most people never heard of it. University of Kentucky has a breeding program where they are trying to develop commercially acceptable cultivars. So far it is not showing up on the farmers market circuit in any quantity. The farm has several hundred trees scattered around in the wood lot understory. Deer, racoons and other critters love the fruit before it is fully ripe, so no fruit will be found low enough for a person to pick. So to harvest you take a walk in the woods, and shake every pawpaw tree you see. Fully ripe fruit drops easily. Green fruit stays hanging. For various reasons only one in 10 or more trees will have fruit, so the box of fruit pictured below took 2 hours to pick. But it was a beautiful day and I was also scouting hornbeams to collect for bonsai.
A good pawpaw is probably the best tasting fruit you can imagine, better than a tree ripened peach. Imagine the flesh has the texture of smooth flan, or custard. Vanilla, pineapple, caramel, peach, and banana fragrances all mixed together. Each tree will have it's own flavor profile. Pretty often the banana flavor dominates. Some the vanilla or the caramel flavor dominates. Others the pineapple flavor is more forward. Rare but most exquisite is when the peach flavor is forward. Totally delicious. Each fruit can weigh up to half a pound, though smaller is more common.
Unfortunately, there is a downside, wild strains are very variable, and a bad pawpaw is very off putting. Green pawpaws have a chemical taste that reminds me of vinyl or styrene or terpentine. The seed coat and the skin can retain this flavor, and in inferior cultivars it can be pretty bad. But the good ones make it worth sorting through the lot to find them I save seed from the very best.
Pawpaw is a warm summer fruit. In southern Illinois they are ripe by the end of August. In Michigan they barely ripen before first frost. Some years they don't quite make it and there won't be any harvest that year. Late frosts can kill the flowers too. So this is a treat that doesn't happen every year.
So if you live in Michigan, Northern Illinois, or Wisconsin, right now is the time to take a walk in the woods and find your own pawpaws.