Pick A Pawpaw: America’s Forgotten Fruit

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just a quick note before we start the show we know that some some of you listen to Gastropod with kids, which we love.

So, FYI, the first couple minutes of the show include a little bit of jokey innuendo.

It's pretty PG, but if you want, you can just keep the sound down super low for the next minute and a half.

You won't miss too much.

It's just us acting a little silly.

We are Pawpaw Virgins.

It's time to lose it.

This is a big moment for us.

Okay.

This is the sound of something very special.

A moment that I shared with Cynthia.

A moment I'll never forget.

Nikki and I did, in fact, lose our pawpaw virginity together.

But before you start cheering, thank you, it was emotional.

You might be wondering, what are pawpaws anyway?

That's what we were wondering, too, and just what you're going to hear about this episode.

You are listening to Gastrobod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And you know, Cynthia, I don't think it's fair to leave everyone hanging like this.

We need to get to the climax.

Okay, pawpaws, here we come.

Uh-huh.

We're about to lose our pawpaw virginity.

I'm very excited.

Chris burst our bubble before the grand deflowering.

That's it.

Well, no, you're not.

This is frozen pulp, which is not the same as because of the delicate sugars in the pawpaw.

You know,

there's really no substitute for the fresh pawpaw.

But this is all we got right now.

Okay, so just to back up for a second here, Chris is Chris Schmeel, and we were on his farm, which is called Integration Acres.

It's near Athens in southeastern Ohio.

We're in the Integration Acres

farm kitchen, I guess we call it.

I'm Chris Schmeal.

They call me the pawpaw man around here.

We're the world's largest pawpaw processors.

Our motto is pawpaws to the people.

Chris had taken us into his freezer to retrieve a brick of deep orange frozen pawpaw pulp.

Go ahead.

Okay, here we go.

Are you ready?

I'm ready.

I love that we're going through this milestone together.

This is a big deal.

Yeah.

Okay, here it goes.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Finally, I see what the fuss is about.

This is good.

It is, it's

like a more floral, better banana.

So, again, you're all probably wondering, as we were, what in the world is a pawpaw?

Well, it's not a papaya, although they're often confused.

It's not a prickly pear.

When you pick a pawpaw, or a prickly pear,

and you prick a raw paw, well next time, beware, don't pick the pawpaw.

So to get to the bottom of this, we asked Sherry Crabtree at the country's only full-time pawpaw research program at Kentucky State University.

So it's a small, fairly small tree, and it has fruit that tastes like a banana-mango combination.

So it's this really unique tropical flavor, which is one especially cool thing about pawpaw.

You know, it grows up here where it's cold.

You know, we were down to single digits this past week.

And we have this tropical banana-like fruit that we can grow here.

And that fruit is also really freaking big.

As far as edible fruit native to temperate North America, there's nothing as large as a pawpaw.

Andy Moore wrote an entire book on the pawpaw.

It's called Pawpaw in Search of America's Forgotten Fruit.

Which again adds to the mystique that drew me into the plan is how is this large fruit fruit that's native to the eastern United States so you know overlooked?

It's big.

Once you notice it, once you start seeing it, you don't miss it.

If you wander in the woods where pawpaws might grow and you know what you're looking for.

I mean, I grew up in the eastern U.S., in Maryland specifically, and I'd certainly never seen one.

And, you know, you're not alone.

Most Americans up until a couple years ago hadn't really heard of this fruit.

And so, you know, don't feel bad about not having tasted one.

Thanks.

I was feeling a little bad, actually, but I feel better now that we've tried one.

We were turned on to the topic of pawpaws by a listener, Sarah Burr.

She lives in Ohio, like Chris, and she's written a pawpaw cookbook.

Yes, I could not find any recipes that I was really delighted with once I became completely obsessed with pawpaws, so I decided to make my own.

Sarah told us to make an episode on pawpaws, and so we did.

And what we discovered is there is a whole pawpaw community out there.

People like Sarah and like Chris, a pawpaw party, really, of people who are more or less obsessed with the fruit.

Nearly all of them stumbled upon pawpaws as adults.

They had a moment of discovery when they first tasted this amazing, large, native North American tropical fruit.

That's what happened to Sherry.

Honestly, I think my first pawpaw was probably after I started working here.

So I grew up in Kentucky, but we did not have pawpaws growing up.

I knew what they were.

I had heard of them, but I did not really eat them until I started working here.

But, you know, I liked them immediately.

Chris actually fell for one of the pawpaws' close cousins, first of all, the soursop or guanabana?

Yeah, so I was in Mexico studying Spanish and was at one of these like juice bars basically.

And I don't know, I just forget exactly because it was many, many years ago now, but had a probably a cocos elados, you know, like where they blend up the fruit and the ice.

And, you know, had never had a soursop, so it was a great new experience.

Chris said that the guanabana had large seeds, and those seeds reminded him of the pawpaw.

So he got back to the U.S.

and he started doing some research, and he figured out that the two were cousins, and this gave him an idea.

Basically, there was like just tons of pawpaws around the hills here, just rotting on the ground.

And to me, it was a shame that we weren't appreciating them or doing anything with them.

So that's sort of when I sort of like started to dedicate my part of my life to preserving pawpaws or, you know, promoting pawpaws.

This is a classic example of the pawpaw vibe.

All the pawpaw lovers we met this episode are incredibly chill and low-key on the surface and deeply, deeply passionate about the pawpaw beneath that.

Chris made the connection to soursop or guanabana, one of the pawpaws relatives.

Another one is one of my favorites from traveling in Peru.

It's called the cheramoya.

Pawpaw, cherimoya, guanabana, they all belong to a family of trees called the custard apples.

And this family of trees includes over 2,000 species.

And the overwhelming majority of these species are found exclusively in the tropics or subtropics.

And the pawpaw is the only member of that family that exists in the temperate world.

So from a biological and evolutionary standpoint, the pawpaw really stands out in North America.

So how in the world did this one member of the tropical custard apple family end up on the eastern part of North America?

This is a question that Andy gets all the time.

You know, some people say, how did this tropical plant get to Ohio?

And I say, well, millions of years.

Andy says that this huge fruit with its large seeds was transported to North America by some very large animals.

Yeah, so before humans showed up in North America, the pawpaw was eaten by large megafauna, you know, things like giant ground sloths or the mastodons that would have eaten fruit whole and then carried it across, you know, large distances and then through its droppings deposited seeds.

But just like we always do, humans wiped out those megafauna.

But the pawpaw stuck around and figured out how to deal with the cold, and then we started to eat all those delicious pawpaws ourselves.

Native Americans have been eating pawpaws in North America, well, basically as long as they've been here.

We call Devin Mahisua.

I'm a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

And I'm the Coralie Beers Price Professor in the Humanities Program at the University of Kansas.

Devin grew up eating pawpaws just like her ancestors.

You know, my grandparents in Muscogee, Oklahoma, had pawpaws and so there was that window of time every fall when they were ready and I just couldn't wait and we just cut them open ate the flesh and the seeds are pretty big and so we would just suck on the seeds and then you know kind of like a watermelon you don't eat those you spit them out.

Devin told us not all tribes ate pawpaws.

Because they're really just in the eastern part of the United States.

So many tribes never even heard of it and it probably was not a trade item because they don't travel well.

But for tribes who did have access to it, they would just simply pick it and eat it.

Pawpaws grew and still grow across a lot of the eastern part of the U.S.

It covers from, you know, essentially the Atlantic Ocean west into eastern Nebraska, eastern Oklahoma, and from the Florida panhandle north into southern Michigan and even parts of upstate New York.

So this huge swath of the country.

And pawpaws are just out there in the woods, growing, you know, by the thousands, the millions.

many of what look like wild pawpaw patches today may well have been intentionally cultivated by native americans as forest orchards it could very well be that more tribes used it than we know but the euro-american observers left behind descriptions of what tribes farmed and what they gathered what they hunted but often they would just write fruit

Or if they recognized a fruit like a strawberry, they would say that.

But if they didn't know what the pawpaw was, they may not have even mentioned it.

Pawpaw season, that brief window of time from September through early October, was clearly an important time for many Eastern tribes.

When you look at the various names for the moons that the Shawnee tribe had in the Ohio Valley, the time of year of September corresponded with the pawpaw moon.

So we know that the fruit would have had great significance if a time of the year was marked for this fruit.

Chris says there are traces of pawpaw all across the landscape.

We have in this area the the woodland tribes, so like the Adena and around here we have these old

mounds.

So there's this place called the Serpent Mound.

There's this other place called Flint Ridge where they would dig Flint out.

There's another place called Shawnee Lookout.

Every one of these ancient sites, there's pawpaws.

And in fact, in this neck of the woods, there's a spot where these rivers kind of come together.

And there was an idea that this was an old campsite for natives because they could see a good range.

Great pawpaws everywhere.

Like we said, these pawpaws were probably deliberately planted, and they were probably also deliberately cultivated and selected.

Native Americans would have chosen the best ones to grow, and they were so important that the pawpaw name is also written across the landscape.

There's a place in North Georgia, Alcovey.

There's an Alcovey Mountain and a stream, and these places are derived from a word that meant pawpaw thicket river.

So when you start to look at some of these Native American place names, you start to really read the landscape and read the history there by learning what various Native American groups called the places where they live.

Another example, in western Louisiana, there's a place that translates to the Pawpaw Eaters.

So that's significant because it implies that people ate pawpaws, A, but that the people there were known as Pawpaw Eaters.

This was a part of their identity.

And the pawpaws were important for more than just a quick, tasty, seasonal snack for the tribes that love them.

They could make ropes and string from the bark.

Because the inner bark of the pawpaw tree is super fibrous and stringy.

Folks were known to, even into historical times and more recent times, even into the 1800s, people were making cordage to string fish when they were out fishing.

So it's possible that for those people in that area, the plant would have been more prized for its cordage, for its bark, for its material, than perhaps as a food item.

Pawpaws were also used as medicine.

You could grind up the seeds and perhaps make, you know, know, to deter head lice because it is a natural insecticide.

There are still pawpaw head lice shampoos on the market today.

Chris had some in a little shrine to all things pawpaw he set up in a barn on his farm.

And in 2002, a scientific study was done on the effectiveness of pawpaw seed shampoo for killing lice and it totally worked.

So pawpaws were evidently a big deal in pre-colonial times, but you start getting the first written records of the pawpaw when the colonists showed up.

The earliest European explorers, Hernando de Soto's expedition, recorded seeing Native Americans growing pawpaw, intentionally cultivating the fruit in southern Appalachia.

Not all Europeans fell in love with the pawpaw right away.

You know, I can only imagine that the earliest colonists were just confronted with all kinds of new things.

And so there was so much to discover and to learn, and everything was new.

So the pawpaw in those earliest colonial records, so they're mentioned in, you know, some of the accounts from Jamestown, you know, descriptions of the fruit, but they quickly move on to other things.

It's not like me in 2009 when I first had my pawpaw wondering about this fruit,

this great revelation.

But the pawpaw persisted, and eventually Europeans, at least some of them, woke up to its charms.

So yeah, you can kind of run down great important events in American history.

And the pawpaw is kind of there in many of those occasions as a little footnote in the background of history.

It doesn't play this great big role in much of American history, but it's there.

It's right there there with the founding fathers.

Thomas Jefferson was known to

have been impressed with the fruit.

He had them grown at Monticello and he even sent seeds to Europe.

Pawpaws grow around George Washington's home in Mount Vernon.

So he most certainly would have been aware of them.

However, there's this larger-than-life myth around George Washington that his favorite dessert was chilled pawpaw.

And I have looked and looked to find reference to this in the historical record and I can't really find any record where he says definitively, you know, my favorite dessert is chilled pawpaw.

It's certainly plausible, but more likely, you know, not to rain on the pawpaw person's parade.

But more than likely, this is another folk tale that came up with this first president.

As the cherry tree goes, so goes the pawpaw.

Even when it comes to fruit tree presidential myths, the pawpaw is lesser known.

But the founding fathers weren't the only pawpaw lovers.

Lewis and Clark, the explorers who, you know, explored out west, out to Oregon and back,

they recorded in their journal they ran out of food when they were in Missouri, when they were on their way back from Oregon, and they found wild pawpaw trees.

And they said that the pawpaws saved them from starvation.

They ate only pawpaws for several days.

Daniel Boone was also a pawpaw fan.

So there's just a ton of American history with the pawpaw fruit.

Pawpaws were also treasured by enslaved Africans on the East Coast.

The tropical flavors reminded them of similar fruits back home.

And when the fruits were in season, they'd have been a welcome foraged addition to their often monotonous and meagre diet.

Pawpaw kept people fed in times of need, but the fruit was more than just a food of last resort for early Americans.

Over time, as the frontier pushed westward and settlements became more and more removed from some of the bigger eastern cities and markets, you know, wild foods became even more important than perhaps they were on the eastern seaboard.

And so, as you move westward, you start to see towns and villages and little little settlements all named pawpaw, all named for the fruit that Americans were naming places for this fruit and eventually learning to love it.

And at some point, we get the American folk song Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch.

As is common with traditional folk songs, nobody knows just how old that song is, but Chris Smeal knows how the song goes.

Where, oh, where is pretty little Susie?

Where, oh, where is pretty little Susie?

Where, oh, where is pretty little Susie?

Way down yonder in the Pawpaw Patch.

Picking up pawpaws, put em in her basket, picking up pawpaws, putting them in her basket, picking up pawpaws, put em in her basket, way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.

Come on, boys, let's go find her.

Come on, boys, let's go find her.

Come on, boys, let's go find her.

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.

And now I'm clapping along with him.

Chris has a lovely singing voice, although the song has a slightly dubious message to my ears.

But the point is, if it has a whole traditional folk song about it, and all these places are called after it, clearly at one point the pawpaw was popular but now on a list of fruits americans eat the pawpaw is precisely nowhere why like i said i grew up in the pawpaw belt and i hadn't tasted one until we made this episode i bet almost none of you have tried them either why did they disappear thumbtack presents uncertainty strikes I was surrounded.

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You know, people say the pawpaw has been forgotten.

I'm not sure that it's been...

forgotten.

I think it's been ignored, disliked, and unavailable.

We said the pawpaw had disappeared, and in a way that's right, but like Devin said, it's not the whole truth.

Pawpaws never fell off the table altogether.

Another common name for pawpaw is Kentucky banana or poor man's banana, Hoosier banana, just depending on what state you're in.

I'm from Indiana, where they call it the pawpaw, the Indiana banana.

Poor man's banana?

That tells you who was eating pawpaws in the 20th century.

It was people in mostly poor communities who mostly foraged for them.

That's part of the reason behind the pawpaws decline right there.

As wealthier Americans moved away from gathering their own food, they stopped eating pawpaws.

But also, there were fewer pawpaw patches to gather from.

It is,

I won't say disappearing in the wild, but you know, you find fewer trees in the wild than you used to just because of development, you know, woods being cleared out for housing and other commercial development.

But that's not the pawpaw's biggest hurdle to overcome.

Sherry says they've got more significant problems.

Well, the main challenge is it has a very short shelf life.

So when the fruit are ripe they are soft and they bruise really easily.

And that makes them ugly.

You know there's an ick factor I think you know people want bright shiny apples or a perfectly smooth tomato.

But this short shelf life and tendency to bruise it's not just an aesthetic problem.

These days fruit and veg have to be capable of being trucked around the country and refrigerated in warehouses to make it into our everyday diet.

It's not just that the pawpaw bruises, it actually starts to rot.

There are only a few days when the pawpaw is tasty after you pick it, and then it starts to taste, well, slightly fermented, or honestly, rotten.

The perishability and the fragility of it are probably the two biggest impediments to making it this large, important agricultural commodity.

It's not going to be thrown, you know, in a box with like 40 pawpaws stacked on top of it in the back of a truck and then driven across the country and then thrown on a supermarket shelf and sit there for a week or more and be presentable.

That's not going to be the case with the pawpaw.

So they bruise easily.

You can't chip and store them easily, but we have to go a step further back.

The problems start on the tree.

So the skin is green even when they're ripe, so you can't tell by looking at the fruit that they're ripe.

So you just gently give it a squeeze with your hand.

Also, you kind of wiggle the fruit, give the fruit a little...

a little wiggle and gentle squeeze and it'll come off in your hand when it's ripe.

What that means is every single piece of fruit has to be fondled multiple times, very, very gently, so it doesn't bruise before you know it's ripe.

Also, the the fruit ripen over a long period of time.

That's great if you have a few pawpaw trees on your property and you're enjoying them over a few weeks or if you want to sell them at the farmer's market over a month or so.

That's bad news if you want to go bigger scale.

For you know like a commercial mechanized harvest you can't completely harvest the entire tree at one time.

You'll have fruit ripening over a two or three week period from the same tree.

So for a serious pawpaw processor like Chris, the harvest season is pretty full on.

You've got to be out wiggling your fruit every day, carefully hand-harvesting the ones that are ripe before they fall to the ground.

It's a lot.

Yeah, pawpaw season is an endurance sport for me, and it's very much dependent on the weather.

And some seasons are harder than others.

When Chris started out, he quickly realized how big the challenges were to grow, harvest, and store the fresh pawpaw.

So I just thought that, well, gosh, we have to figure out a way to preserve them and make them available year-round so that people can basically have an opportunity to include them in their diet.

Not so fast, Chris.

Turns out there are huge challenges to preserving pawpaws too.

So for processing the fruit you have two main issues, the skin and the seeds.

So the skin is bitter, has a bitter flavor and if you leave even a little bit of the skin on the fruit it can make um the whole batch of pulp or ice cream or jam or whatever you're making uh with the pulp taste bitter.

So you have to remove the entire skin, which is a little bit difficult.

It doesn't peel easily like a banana or an orange that has a thick peel that comes off easily.

Plus the huge seeds are also tough to separate from the pulp.

But these problems did not deter Chris Schmiel when he started down his pawpaw path two decades ago.

It helped that he had Ohio State University nearby.

I went up to OSU and worked with their food safety folks and

We figured out ways to get the seeds out with a machine, but we still take the skins off by hand.

So come pawpaw season.

Chris hires a bunch of people and they process pawpaws all day.

And then we basically will sort them out and wash them over here.

Then we put them on trays on this table and then we have people lying on each side and basically

we're breaking them open like that and squishing.

And by doing that, that's the most efficient way to get them out of the skin.

Chris showed us what he does.

He pretended to hold half a pawpaw in each hand and just squeezed his hands shut.

It's like he's squeezing a stress relief ball.

The technical term is squishing.

I've squished many as a pawpaw.

But yeah, you just have to like, you know, and if you have a really big one, it's a little harder.

But like most of them are around here about that size.

So like you can just like break them in half and then

just like that, like squish it out.

And when you do that, the skin pretty much stays in your hand.

Just in case this sounds therapeutic to you, squishing squishy pawpaws into a bucket all day.

Chris is here to burst that bubble too.

His crews are under the gun.

Yeah, and it's just messy.

You know, it's just like pawpaw slop all over the place.

And yeah, I mean, that's part of the, you know, like, especially if things are, we're, we're swamped with pawpaws and, you know, we're trying to process them as fast as they can.

You know, I get the whip out and kind of like get everybody.

Squoosh!

Squoosh!

As you've now figured out, this is why most of us aren't eating pawpaws.

They're bruised and kind of ugly, and it's tough to get them to our grocery stores.

And if you want to process them, freeze them like Chris does, you have to do it by hand.

Chris is the largest pawpaw processor in the country.

yeah um so we have the capacity here to do about six tons

uh yeah i mean you know compared to any other fruit out there on the market like right we're just you know we're just uh a drop in the bucket okay so all these challenges they seem insurmountable but there was a moment where it seemed like popo was going to be the next big thing

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It was 1916 the American Genetic Association held a pawpaw contest.

This is an era when plant explorers like David Fairchild are going around the world finding plants and crops to bring back to the United States to grow.

Our good friend David Fairchild, we have an entire episode on him, just by the way.

You should check that out if you haven't already heard it.

And people are moving things all over the world, but they're also kind of looking in their own backyard, in their woods, and they're saying, what do we have here that could contribute to agriculture, American agriculture, and agriculture around the world, really?

Almost unanimously, these agricultural societies at that time said the fruit with the most potential that is out of the gate already has high potential and quality in its wild state.

That with a little bit of breeding work, the most potential was found to be the pawpaw.

Better than blueberries or cranberries or conquered grapes or persimmons.

The pawpaw was America's most likely fruit to succeed.

And they put out a call for people to send in the best pawpaws from around the country.

And people did this, which is in itself an incredible feat, mailing this highly perishable, soft fruit from, in some cases, central Texas to Washington, D.C.

I have no idea how they did that and how the fruit arrived in good, presentable condition, but it happened.

Fruit came in from all of the 26 states where pawpaws are native.

Five top five best pawpaws were from southern Ohio.

Chris is obviously very excited about the pawpaw genetics of southern Ohio because that's where he's based.

And actually, and I had no idea before we went there, but this region is kind of a hotspot for native plant genetics.

Appalachia is like a biological preserve.

When the glaciers came through, this place was not glaciated, so a lot of the genetic diversity survived in the hills of Appalachia.

Like 75% of North America's medicinal plants are here in Appalachia.

And, you know, I just look at the pawpaws like the king of the native plants personally, but you know, I'm biased.

Ohio won that contest, but here's the thing.

The point of the contest was to take all of the best samples and then breed them to try to create a pawpaw that could be successful on a commercial scale.

That was the goal: to have this new fruit that farmers could grow.

As you can guess, because of the fact that we're having this conversation today, their plans didn't pan out.

Meanwhile, a very different story played out with another native fruit, one that was still more or less wild back in the early 1900s, and one that was not voted most likely to succeed.

That exact same year, 1916, the blueberry was essentially domesticated.

Two researchers in the New Jersey Pine Barrens determined that blueberry was not self-fertile and that it needed acidic soil.

And with those two basic facts of blueberry cultivation pinned down,

the blueberry went from a wild crop to a crop that's grown throughout the world.

Andy says the blueberry won basically because it had a champion.

There was one guy, his name was Frederick Vernon Coville.

He's one of the ones who wrote that the blueberry needed acidic soil.

He also worked on domesticating it.

He just loved the blueberry.

The pawpaw also had a champion, a man named George Zimmerman.

He used the pawpaws that had been sent in in 1916 as well as other specimens he'd gathered himself and he set about breeding commercial pawpaw varieties and then he died and no one picked up where he left off.

So the blueberry won.

It was a wild food and it's just been completely transformed in the past 100 years, at least in terms of how we think about it as a commodity.

And the pawpaw could have been the same way.

That could have happened.

Cue the violin.

Don't get too sad for the pawpaw, Nikki, because Sherry Crabtree says it's starting to do okay today.

There's growing interest in pawpaw as a new crop for farmers to grow them in orchards, just like there's apple orchards and peach orchards.

There are pawpaw orchards out there now.

I do say this is a pawpaw revival.

I think, you know,

we're embracing this.

Many folks, for many different reasons, are embracing this fruit.

Back in the 1970s, pawpaw found a new new champion in the form of an eager botany student called Neil Peterson.

He tasted his first pawpaw in the woods near his university.

He fell in love, as people do, and then he went to the library and did a literature review.

And he found an article about the 1916 Pawpaw Genetics Contest.

Neil actually went and tracked down the places where the fruit was sent.

So they had, you know, records of where all this fruit came from.

So Neil went down to the county courthouses and found the deeds of where these these people had lived who sent in the outstanding fruit.

And he went around the country looking for

traces of this best fruit.

Neil wandered through forests and picked his way along streams, and he did manage to find fruit and seeds from a lot of those early winners.

He used that to start his own experimental pawpaw breeding program.

It just took 60 years from when the contest took place for it to get going again.

And it's an incredible story, but to summarize it to some extent, he grew out thousands of pawpaw trees and selected for the best and then propagated those to determine which held up under propagation.

And, you know, after 20 years of work, released cultivars to the public to be grown, Peterson pawpaws, that are among the best that can be grown today.

Today, Neil is no longer America's only pawpaw breeder.

As we said, there's an official academic breeding program at Kentucky State University.

Sherry Crabtree told us about it.

Well, it started in the early 90s, and in the last few years, we've released three pawpaw cultivars from Kentucky State University.

It's still in the early days, of course.

As we've said repeatedly on Gastropod, plant breeding takes a long time.

Pawpaw trees take years to grow in fruit.

Pawpaw is pretty early on in commercial development compared to fruits like apples that have been bred for hundreds,

you know, many hundreds of years.

It's slow work, but Sherry and her colleagues are trying to make the pawpaw a commercially viable fruit.

They're trying to breed good-tasting pawpaws, sweeter ones with no bitterness.

They're trying to grow bigger fruit with a better seed to custody goodness ratio.

And of course, they're trying to breed a prolific, high-yielding plant.

As Sherry said, they've released three new cultivars so far, and the third and most recent one is our favorite.

It has a really creamy, yellow flesh, almost some floral notes to it, kind of a more banana-like flavor, but with some floral notes.

And really large, the tree's very vigorous and high producing but they are a long way from done with their pawpaw wish list yet one thing sherry wants to find is a pawpaw that changes color when it's ripe so that growers don't have to gently fondle each fruit multiple times a week to see if they can harvest it and something that we would like to have we haven't done a lot of breeding for this but is for the fruit to be able to be stored better we mentioned how delicate it is and it doesn't store for a long period of time or ship very well.

So we would like to have, you know, a little bit firmer fruit or thicker skin or something that made it store and keep a little bit longer.

But as Andy pointed out to us, there are already easily bruised fruits with delicate skins that people have figured out how to ship.

The pawpaw's cousin, the cherimoya, also turns black really easily, and some people do ship it.

Figs are super fragile, and I can buy fresh California figs in Boston.

Think about how delicate a raspberry is.

I can't think of a more delicate fruit.

And sure, it includes, you know, plastic packaging.

You know, we can ship fresh raspberries around the world.

So, I think if people want a thing, they will figure out a way to overcome that.

So, I'm not too worried about that.

In fact, some people have already figured out how to ship fresh pawpaws.

One year, Andy went and helped with the harvest on a Maryland pawpaw farm that ships to distributors as far away as Michigan and New York City.

The fruit is pricey, of course, because of all the TLC it requires, but it can be done.

Chris ships fresh pawpaws too, when they're briefly in season, of course, so you're going to have to catch those in September if you want any.

He gets around this issue by freezing them.

Chris does have a small pawpaw orchard of his own but mostly he's still processing wild gathered fruit from his land and from the surrounding community.

We primarily, I would say there's about

20 so families that we really work with.

He encourages the families and these are not necessarily super well-off families.

He shows them how to take care of their pawpaws, how to prune the trees, how to help them get more sun, and how to get rid of a particularly thorny invasive plant called multiflora rose that will make picking pawpaws painful.

Getting people to basically tend to their pawpaws a little bit.

And,

you know, some people, they make pretty good money because this is not, they have not made a big investment in this.

And

right now we pay a dollar a pound.

So there's folks that have, you know, bought a new truck and, you know, put a roof on their house.

That's partly why Sherry is so excited about the pawpaw, too, for economic reasons.

Well, Kentucky was a major tobacco-producing state, and as you know, the last

20, probably even 30 years, tobacco has been on the decline.

Tobacco was a really high-value crop per acre.

It could earn a lot more money in a small space than, say, soy or corn.

And so, people with only a few acres made a good living.

Those farmers are now looking for a new high-value replacement.

So, things like vegetable production and fruit production, especially things that are a unique niche crop like pawpaw, are a good thing for people to get into because it's not not as common as apple.

You can really differentiate yourself with pawpaw because there are not a lot of commercial growers.

Sherry says it can be a struggle at first to convince farmers to try pawpaws, particularly if they haven't heard of it.

But those that have, yeah, I think it's a really promising market.

The growers in the state sell all the fruit that they have each year.

Sherry says that Kentucky growers mostly sell to wineries and breweries, and that's true for Chris too.

He sells most of his pawpaw pawpaw pulp to local folks who make craft beer with it.

Since there is that little bit of bitterness in the pawpaw, that it goes really good with beer, because, you know, beer has hops which are bitter.

And I do have some pawpaw beer if you want to try some.

Heck yeah, we wanted to try some, and it was delicious.

It was.

I wanted to keep drinking it, but it was 2 p.m.

and we had to do a live show that night.

I'm still dreaming of that beer.

But this brings us to another funny thing about pawpaw.

For me, it's been hard to actually describe how it tastes to someone who hasn't had it.

It has a flavor that folks often describe as a cross between a banana or a mango.

And really, what people are saying when they say those words is they're hinting at this tropical flavor that's, again, unique for fruits grown in this region and certainly native to this region.

And they don't all taste alike.

Just like we were able to taste in our recent mango episode, there are a lot of different flavors of mangoes.

Same with pawpaws.

Andy says some pawpaws taste more like mild bananas.

Some taste a little like cantaloupe.

Some have a brighter flavor.

In some ways, though, the pawpaw's most distinctive flavor note comes from its texture.

It's so creamy and rich.

You know, folks say it tastes just like egg custard, or I say it tastes like a chilled vanilla pudding.

One thing I definitely noticed, as Chris had described, there was a slightly bitter aftertaste.

Listener Sarah Burr says, Not everybody loves that.

I live with two non-pawpaw lovers.

My husband and daughter, I think, are fatigued of my obsession.

Pawpaws have a very very strong, beguiling aroma, but when they're in your refrigerator for a couple days, they really do take over.

Sometimes there's this really funky back note or finish, and I think that's interesting, but some people think that's completely disgusting.

One way to lure pawpaw haters in and extend pawpaw season all year round is to put them in prepared foods.

Chris gave us a jar of his pawpaw preserve.

Sarah gave us some homemade pawpaw curd.

If you want to be cooking with them, I would say heat them as little as possible.

They pair very well with dairy.

So yogurt, cream, any kind of frozen dairy dessert.

I make a pawpaw pudding, which is a custard that's almost like the filling for a pumpkin pie, but with no crust.

That's like an old-timey classic pawpaw recipe, and it's really wonderful.

So those are some, oh, you can use them in cocktails as as well.

Cocktails, I am definitely into that idea.

But most everyone says the absolute best way to enjoy them is to eat a ripe pawpaw fresh, which means that really, with its short growing season and all its challenges, the pawpaw is never going to be a hugely successful commercial fruit.

But Andy doesn't think that's such a bad thing.

One of the things that I like about, again, the pawpaw story, not just the fruit, but you know, more like what it represents, is that it's probably a good thing to have fruit that is a little tricky and doesn't fit neatly into distribution centers.

It's okay to have a fruit that takes a little bit more work and

has to be treated with a little bit more care.

We already have plenty of commodity fruits in the supermarket.

The pawpaw might always be something that you have to forage or grow or find at your local farmer's market in season to really appreciate it.

And I think that even if the pawpaw doesn't become a banana or orange or apple-like commodity, it has

a place it can fill in our culture and our diets, and that may perhaps be, you know, even more important to have things like that that we grow and think about and eat and enjoy.

And I think the

period of forgetting it won't be the norm.

Okay, if you're anything like me, you will now be dying to try a pawpaw if you haven't before.

We have the scoop on how you too can lose your pawpaw virginity.

But first, a couple of thanks.

Thanks this episode to listener Sarah Burr, who suggested we make an episode about the pawpaw.

We have links to her pawpaw cookbook at gastropod.com.

Thanks also to Chris Schmeal at Integration Acres, who also joined us on stage for our live show in Athens, Ohio, and to the folks at Ohio University who brought us to town.

And a big thanks also to Sherry Crabtree at Kentucky State University, to Devin Mahisua at the University of Kansas, and to Andy Moore, whose book is called Pawpaw, In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit.

Links at gastropod.com.

If you want to try pawpaws yourself, you could go out into the woods and go foraging in the fall.

Everyone told us that once you learn to spot the trees, they're hard to miss.

Or you could plant two of Sherry Crabtree's cultivars.

You need two to cross-pollinate.

But maybe you're too lazy for a hike or for horticulture, so you can try to find them at farmers' markets in the eastern states in the fall.

I won't say it's easy.

I had to ask Sherry, and she told me about two farms in New England.

But perhaps the best place to try pawpaws is a pawpaw festival.

Chris founded the country's biggest, the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, now in his 21st year.

But there are small festivals during pawpaw season all around the country.

Have a pawpaw beer for me.

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