Down In The Paw Paw Patch's Photo Gallery

The first taste of a pawpaw renders people speechless. It’s not that the little-known fruit that pioneers called a custard apple makes one pucker. On the contrary, its flavor is apparently indescribable.

“It’s not a banana or a peach,” said one taster at last fall’s Ohio Pawpaw Festival as he bit into the succulent fruit.

“Tastes like a banana combined with mango, pineapple, and melon,” said another.

There’s equally little consensus on the fruit’s texture: “It’s the softest stuff on the face of the earth, the consistency of pudding,” says Sharon Phillips, whose meringue-topped Pawpaw Cream Cake took first-place honors in the festival’s bake-off.

Casey Buchanan, however, finds it “squishy.” He shouldknow. In the festival’s pawpaw eating contest, the 10-year-oldslurped 12 ounces of the sweet stuff into his mouth nohandedand spit out 12 clean seeds in just five minutes.

The greenish-yellow fruit that nourished Native Americans, Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, and rural Midwesterners during the Great Depression is staging a comeback. And while it’s unlikely that Asimina triloba: The Sequel will be showing at local supermarkets in the immediate future, pawpaw fans believe the fruit is ripe for rediscovery. Researchers and growers are showing that the vitamin-packed orb with a splotchy complexion has the potential to become a viable food staple and the foodstuff of regional economic development. Will the finicky American palette agree?

Ohio University nutritionist Melani Duffrin thinks so. The assistant professor of human and consumer sciences has tested a puree of the pawpaw as a nutritious, flavorful fat substitute in muffins and made-from-scratch cake, with her results published in HortTechnology and other journals. She’s also helped develop standard descriptions of the fruit’s characteristics and plans to study consumer preferences next.

In Duffrin’s food studies, the muffin munchers enjoyed the pawpaw varieties as much as the higher-fat versions, but the cake testers weren’t fooled. That doesn’t faze Duffrin, who is right at home baking hundreds of muffins in the university’s sparkling-clean test kitchen in Grover Center or using a sophisticated texture analyzer to test their tenderness. “The pawpaw puree just didn’t work well in that particular food formulation,” she says. Since then, she’s informally tested the puree as a fat replacement in cake mixes, to rave reviews.

Why Pick Pawpaws?

The pawpaw packs a nutritious punch that Duffrin and other dietitians can’t ignore — three times as much vitamin C as apple, twice as much as banana, and one-third as much as an orange. It tops all three in niacin, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, iron, zinc, copper, and manganese. It equals the banana’s potassium content and has more protein. And with the nation’s collective cholesterol on the rise, the pawpaw’s naturally occurring fat content offers a healthy alternative to baking with saturated fats, according to Duffrin.

The “poor man’s banana,” as it’s sometimes called, is oblong shaped and 2 to 7 inches long. A gentle squeeze reveals when it’s ripe, and peeling back the skin uncovers an aromatic, yellow-orange flesh and oval seeds the color of pecans. The only temperate member of the tropical Annonaceae family, the pawpaw tree grows wild in 26 states, from Georgia to Michigan and west to Oklahoma. Today, the pawpaw is gaining new nicknames, from “Hoosier banana” to “Ozark banana,” as states jump on the fruit wagon. If a group of Buckeyes get their way, the pawpaw could become Ohio’s state fruit.

“It’s a wonderful industry — not only for the food products but for landscaping and, at festival time, for the arts and crafts market,” Duffrin says. In addition, a former Purdue University researcher has shown that compounds in the pawpaw tree’s bark and twigs, which Native Americans crafted into fishnets and medicines, have potential as natural pesticides, anti-cancer drugs, and herbal products such as head lice shampoo.

However, the fruit’s marketplace revival faces some hurdles. The pawpaw fruit bruises easily and has a shelf life of only two to three days, or up to three weeks if refrigerated. Buying them is tricky, too. In a good growing season, pawpaws selling for $5 to $10 a pound might be found at farmer’s markets between late August and October; a few gourmet food stores like Wegmans or Dean & DeLuca carry fresh pawpaws, and Albany, Ohio’s Integration Acres sells the frozen puree online.

To help develop pawpaw as a cash crop, researchers and farmers are seeking answers to a number of questions: What varieties produce a fruit loaded with pulp, not seeds? What do consumers like? And what’s the most efficient way to process the fruit from raw to shipped product?

“We want to see if the variety that produces the best is the one with fruit that the consumers want,” Duffrin explains.“If it’s not, then we need to find a balance.”

But first there’s the language problem again: One person’s sweet is another’s sour. So Duffrin and horticulturist Kirk Pomper from Kentucky State University’s Atwood Research Center set about to create a common language for researchers, growers, and others in the pawpaw industry. They used a consumer panel — 15 students trained insensory analysis and food evaluation — to taste and describethree puree samples of pawpaws collected from a Marylandorchard and wild patches in southeastern Ohio.

“There are 40 named varieties of pawpaws and they range in tenderness — some are thick, some watery — in appearance from yellow to orange, and in flavor from very tart to very sweet,” Duffrin says. “We need to know what we’re talking about when discussing different attributes of the fruit.”

In fact, testers generated 13 visual, 17 flavor, and 12 texture descriptors, words ranging from pulpy and creamy to explain its texture and citrus or banana-like for its taste. To illustrate the results, researchers developed a visual “sensory wheel” of descriptive language, Duffrin notes.

The study, which Duffrin will present at the International Congress of Dietetics in May, paves the way for the colleagues’ next project, which will identify specific characteristics of several pawpaw varieties and what consumers prefer. The results will help growers select superior varieties for propagation, Duffrin says. Although specialty food purchasers accept variation in products, consumers who shop at large grocery stores expect consistency, she adds. And if their first encounter is a bitter one, they might never try the fruit again, she says.

A Sweet Industry

Pawpaws interest small farmers seeking high-value alternative or second crops, according to Pomper, who heads the 350-member PawPaw Foundation and watches over the world’s largest collection of pawpaw trees. Some 1,700 trees from 17 different states fill the orchards at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, a U.S. Department of Agriculture-specified site for pawpaw research. Field days attract more than 100 farmers and researchers who tromp past pyramidalshaped trees with names like Prolific and Sweet Alice, eager to learn how the plant grows best.

Organic farmers like the pawpaw because the tree requires few or no pesticides, and tobacco farmers are taking note because both plants thrive in similar, slightly acidic soil conditions, Pomper says. They’ve caught apple growers’ attention, too.

“Pawpaws tend to produce smaller crops than, say, apple trees — about 20 to 40 pounds of fruit per tree,” Pomper says, “but they bring three times the price of apples.”

For homeowners adding the tropical-looking pawpaw to their landscapes — Better Homes and Gardens named it landscape tree of the year in 2000 — there’s another big plus: Deer don’t eat pawpaws. The Zebra Swallowtail Butterfly does, but it’s hardly a big pest.

Pomper also is studying ways to reduce bruising to the pawpaw crop during harvest and to hasten production. “Even with a grafted tree, the pawpaw doesn’t produce fruit for five years,” he says.

A pawpaw tree’s fruit ripens over a two-month period, allowing farmers to pick pawpaws in between other chores. On a sunny fall day, a line of pickup trucks was forming outside a former milk barn at Integration Acres. Farmers lugged 10-pound bushels loaded with ripe fruit inside, where Chris Chmiel, pawpaw entrepreneur and an Ohio Universityalumnus, was buying. Pawpaws sat in buckets, on countersand scales, and in stainless steel sinks.

A fruity perfume smell permeated the room as Chmiel sorted fruit into three grades — shipping, puree, or seed quality — and enthused about the fruit’s economic potential.

“They are growing in people’s woods and along fence rows. They’re already here,” he says. “That’s sort of how I got into this, as a way to provide economic opportunities for people living in the country. I saw this stuff — which is good for you — rotting on the ground. ‘This is crazy,’ I thought,” he says. He pays farmers anywhere from 50 cents a pound for seed grade fruit to “as much as $2 a pound for nice big ones.” Chmiel’s frozen puree, Pawpaw Pleasures, was his company’s first product seven years ago. Now he sells fresh fruit in season via the Web and through a specialty food distributor, as well as seed to nurseries. His pawpaw chutney is sold out.

Pawpaws are not Fortune 500 material, but Chmiel hopes to grow the industry. Besides buying local fruit, he collects pawpaws from approximately 3,000 trees that grow on his and his parents’ two farms in wild patches and youngorchards. He plans to propagate 5,000 new trees in a nurseryover the next several years and plant 1,000 annually. Throughgroups like the Ohio Pawpaw Growers Association, he andother new growers are sharing what they’ve learned so far.

Beyond the horticultural growing pains are entrepreneurial ones. The perishable fruit must travel from bushel to mush to frozen puree in short order. During harvest season, Chmiel makes a daily run to ACENET, a kitchen incubator in Athens where he and his staff separate pulp from seeds and store the frozen product.

“Processing is the biggest challenge,” he says. “There’s a trick to getting the pulp in good tasting form. Start mixing in the skin and it’ll get bitter. Plus, we need to learn to do it efficiently so we’re making money,” he adds. “All the other stuff is fun.”

Finding A Niche

Falling into the fun category is the weekend-long pawpaw festival Chmiel founded five years ago. Last fall, some 3,000 attendees sampled pawpaw-flavored fruitsmoothies, muffins, salsas, ice cream, and even beer. Thesound of a cork popping and glasses clinking signaledyet another new product — pawpaw champagne, just$50 a bottle. As one grower there noted, “We’re allpawpaw heads.” Will a costumed mascot be next?

As the pawpaw seeks its market niche, the little-fruitthat- could is appearing in unexpected places. At The Oakroom, a AAA five-diamond restaurant at Louisville, Kentucky’s Seelbach Hilton, executive chef Walter Leffler creates a pawpaw and green tomato relish to accompany French rib pork chops. For dessert, diners feast on Pawpaw Foster — flambéed pawpaw and banana with ginger liqueur and bourbon — and pawpaw ice cream. Too rich? Try the pawpaw soufflé with sassafras crème anglaise. Long-time pawpaw fans, however, know the best way to eat them. “I like eating pawpaws right out in the orchard,” Pomper says, “in the warm sun.”

For more information about Melani Duffrin, visit www.hhs.ohiou.edu/hcs/foodfaculty.asp.
For more information about pawpaws, visit www.pawpaw.kysu.edu.