Cooking & Baking

appalachiablue

(41,132 posts) Sun Oct 9, 2022, 02:31 PM Oct 2022

The Pawpaw, Native No America Tree Fruit Comeback: GW Fav, TJ, Lewis & Clark, Ohio Festival

Last edited Sun Oct 9, 2022, 08:48 PM - Edit history (2)

- 'How America’s most enigmatic fruit is making a comeback.' The Guardian, Oct. 8, 22. -Ed. 🌱 The pawpaw ‘tastes best when it looks worst’ & occupies a niche the food industry cannot fill. (It's gaining popularity in the eastern US, & as big ag is left out in the cold. Photo).

When Chris Chmiel first organized a “pawpaw night” at an Ohio restaurant focused on local foods in 1999, he was happy to have a 100 people show up. The goal of the event was to spotlight the largest edible tree fruit native to North America: the pawpaw, which grows from northern Florida & western New York to eastern Kansas, & boasts a soft, custardy flesh with a mild flavor somewhere between a mango & a banana. Chmiel became a pawpaw evangelist after a trip to the Yucatán peninsula proved to him how popular the guanabana, a Central American cousin of pawpaw, was in Mexican food & drink.

Convinced that the pawpaw deserved similar treatment in the US, he championed it in Ohio, where the tropical-tasting fruit grows plentifully in forests & backyards. He didn’t foresee that decades later, he’d still be hosting a version of the same event, the Ohio Pawpaw Festival. This Sept. marked its 24th year, with more than 10,000 people coming to taste pawpaw waffles, pawpaw curry & pawpaw beer, enjoy pawpaw crafts, hear live music & eat the ripe fruit itself. “It was the biggest festival ever,” said Chmel, who has a pawpaw tattoo on his arm.🍐

“People come from all over the world to this event, from Los Angeles, France, Chile – it’s crazy.” So how has this enigmatic fruit managed to draw crowds from across the globe when so many Americans have still never even heard of it, much less tasted it?

Sheri Crabtree, a plant breeder at KY State Univ. with the only U.S. pawpaw research program, says it's kept a low profile recently because it's almost big ag- proof: ripe for only a few days before spoiling, hard to ship & sell & why you’ve probably never seen it in food stores. Much of US fruit & vegetable production is based on storing fruit for a long time & shipping it long distances. Pawpaws may also have suffered from a stigma around wild foods, the ‘poor man’s banana’. In the early 20th c., processed foods were seen as more appealing because of links to refrigeration. Wild forest foods fell out of favor for a while. People thought, ‘That’s what poor rural people eat.’” But pawpaws haven’t always had that reputation.

Legend has it that chilled pawpaw was George Washington’s favorite dessert, & the 19th-cent. explorers Lewis & Clark survived on them after running out of other food on one expedition. Devon Mihesuah, a Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma citizen & Univ. of Kansas prof. says that Indigenous people have cultivated pawpaw trees for many other uses, incl. making rope or twine from the bark & using seeds to make a shampoo for treating lice. They were an integral part of tribes’ diets..Pawpaws remain so promising that Crabtree dreams they might someday serve as a viable alternative to fruits that are currently trucked & flown to the US from around the world...https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/08/pawpaw-fruit-indigenous-north-american
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🍐 🫒 - (Wiki). Asimina triloba, the American papaw- a small deciduous tree native to the eastern U.S. & Canada, producing a large, yellowish-green to brown fruit..* Pawaw has had many local common names including: wild banana, prairie banana, Indiana banana, Hoosier banana, West Virginia banana, Kansas banana, Kentucky banana, Michigan banana, Missouri banana, Appalachian banana, Ozark banana, Indian banana, banango, & the poor man's banana, as well as American custard apple, asimoya, Quaker delight, & hillbilly mango.
🍌 *HIPSTER BANANA. Due to increased interest in the foraging & locavore food movement during the late 2010s & the COVID-19 pandemic, the pawpaw has been referred to tongue-in-cheek as the "hipster banana"...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba
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- 🌳 Natl. Park Service ('NPS), 'Pawpaw: Small Tree, Big Impact', *Antietam Natl. Battlefield, Balto-Wash Pkwy, Catoctin Mountain Park, Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Natl. Historical Park, Civil War Defenses of Washington, more » Ed.

With leaves & branches that deer avoid, & fruit that is loved by all, the pawpaw is a fascinating native tree. It’s the only local member of a large, mainly-tropical plant family (Annonaceae), & produces the largest edible fruit native to No. America. Despite being a small, understory tree, unlikely to ever grow into the forest canopy, pawpaw is the most frequently observed sapling in forest monitoring plots tracked by the Natl. Capital Region Network Inventory & Monitoring program. * What do we know about the ecology of pawpaw in our region, & what could its dominance mean for our future forests? One of the most tasty late-season rewards for hikers & wildlife alike is the pawpaw fruit, which begins to ripen in late summer & peaks in Sept. & Oct.

The fruit's flavor is often compared to bananas, but with hints of mango, vanilla, & citrus. It has the appearance of a small green potato & may occur in clusters on the tree. In spite of pawpaw’s prevalence in NCR forests, successfully foraging for its fruits can be a challenge. It is self-incompatible- pollen produced on a plant cannot pollinate flowers on the same plant. To produce fruit, a pawpaw flower must receive pollen from flowers on another tree, & sometimes this “other tree” is farther away than it may appear at 1st glance. Pawpaws frequently grow in clusters (patches), & the trees in a patch are often genetically identical & connected underground by roots (& thus, in biological terms, are a single plant).

Pawpaw’s pollinators, including flies & beetles inevitably pollinate some flowers, & fruit-hunters may eventually find a tree with fruit. Opossums, foxes, squirrels, raccoons, & birds are all known to enjoy pawpaw & are likely to observe for ripe fruits. Still, pawpaw fruit can often be found by closely surveying the ground underneath a fruiting tree. > DC Area: Natl. Capital Region Parks with Pawpaw trees: the most common sapling in the region, some parks have many more pawpaw saplings than others. It is the most common sapling species in *C&O Canal, GW Memorial Parkway, Harpers Ferry , & National Capital Parks - East, & ranks as the 2nd most common sapling species at *Antietam, & Monocacy...https://www.nps.gov/articles/pawpaw.htm