Boiling Point: Go ahead, I dare you to try some pawpaw
By Jim Hillibish/GHNS
The pawpaw, naturally occurring here, is a well-storied apple cousin that a handful of people crave.
GateHouse News Service
Wed Oct 01, 2008, 09:46 PM CDT
We were touring a farm in Ohio last week when we found a pawpaw tree. For some, this is a pasture of plenty. It’s an acquired taste. I’m still acquiring it.
Pawpaw is a fruit tree related to the apple only in name. It produces a weird thing looking like apples run amok. The genetics are totally skewered.
So is the flavor.
Let’s see. My pawpaw-loving friend (she also loves rhubarb) says it tastes like an “overripe banana with hints of mango, pineapple, melon and berries of some sort.” If still green, I’d add rancid sneakers.
Part of this is because you must know when a pawpaw is ripe. Unripe ones taste like, I don’t know, week-old socks? You must pick the yellow ones that are soft. The green ones are stomach nukes.
Harvest them and experience what is known as the “pawpaw afternoon.” It takes all afternoon to peel them and separate the big seeds that languish randomly through the fruit. Sometimes you get a pile of seeds and almost no fruit. Apples, with their cores, are very well-behaved compared to this mess.
OK, after hours of finger-bleeding knife work, you have a pile of pawpaw flesh mixed in with some of your own. Now what? Well, the door has just opened to pawpaw heaven, although some may call it hell.
There’s pawpaw custard, pawpaw pie, pawpaw cookies, pawpaw bread and the Pawpaw Foundation, a group of diehards in West Virginia with an expired Internet address. You’ll find more pawpaw trees down there than anyplace else.
Your average pawpaw aficionado (I’ve identified only one) will tell you that the apple of their eye can be used any place a common apple will do. Not in my lunch sack.
Pawpaws, like rhubarb and Scotch whiskey, require patience. That’s being polite.
This stuff thrives in rich bottomland and on hilly uplands in northern climes. Nearly all are wild. You would never cultivate something like this.
The pawpaw name is a bastardization of papaya, which they look like. True believers say they even taste like papaya. It’s hard to call them on that lie because nobody around here eats papaya, either.
How it got here is anybody’s guess, since all of its cousins, including the memorable ylang-ylang tree, are tropical.
The tree adapted here so well that it needs about 1,000 hours of cold weather to produce fruit. A paucity of pawpaw may be the only benefit of global warming.
Certainly, I’m not prejudiced against pawpaws. I just hate them, but that doesn’t mean you should not decide for yourself. You’re probably not going to find pawpaws at grocery stores, so you must hike a lot or have odd relatives. Of course, anything this strange has its own cult.
Pawpaws, according to the “Medical Directory of Minnesota,” “pull the plug on cancer.” They also fight shingles, toenail fungus, intestinal worms and are an ingredient in pet flea shampoos. Yummers.
The book reports, “Side effects are very slight, BUT should be noted. Pawpaw has the power to make people throw up.”
Don’t blame me.
Send cooking questions but not pawpaw to jim.hillibish@cantonrep.com.
Some people actually eat pawpaws: www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/pawpaw/recipes.htm
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