If you aren't attending the Pawpaw Festival then you can choose your own topic for this week.
I spent my Saturday morning in search of the elusive, enigmatic pawpaw fruit. My first recollection of the pawpaw is a song sung in kindergarten: “pickin’ up pawpaws, puttin’ ‘em in the basket”. Repeat three times, followed by some final line that I’ve never been able to remember. Even then, I don’t think I knew what a pawpaw was. It was just a catchy s
ong. And I don’t believe I ever thought of a pawpaw in the subsequent 20ish years.
But the pawpaw resurfaced when I moved to Athens, Ohio and began seeing bumper stickers around town: “I’m pro pawpaw and I vote.” Oh, really? I had arrived in the midst of a campaign to dethrone the apple as Ohio’s State Fruit and replace it with the pawpaw. The pro-pawpaw lobby argued that the pawpaw was native to Ohio, unlike the apple. The power of the apple proved too great though, and the pawpaw was named Ohio’s Native Fruit instead. Somehow, I feel this must be par for the pawpaw’s course. It can’t quite catch a break.
Living in locavore-obsessed Athens, the pawpaw and I just kept bumping into each other—in locally made jams, paired with other foods on restaurant menus, and most especially in Zoe’s pawpaw creme brulee. Yet the more I tasted the pawpaw, the less I knew just what I was tasting. What does a pawpaw taste like? It is often described as tasting like banana or kiwi, but these are utterly different flavors in my humble opinion. I decided that this year, I would head over to the Ohio Pawpaw Festival at nearby Lake Snowden in the hopes of solving the mystery.
I set out to sample the varied pawpaw culinary offerings. My husband and I tasted widely (one of the great benefits of marriage being that you can taste twice as many things because, as we say in our family, “Married people have to share”). We started off by sharing some pawpaw puffs (fried funnel cake dough) with pawpaw cream cheese frosting. We moved on to the pawpaw and peanut chicken satays, then to the guacamole pawpaw burrito, followed by fried cheese curds with pawpaw pepper butter and then washed it all down with a pawpaw smoothie. Before we left we also sampled the pawzels (pawpaw pretzels), a pawpaw cheesecake brownie, and a strawberry-pawpaw popsicle.
Having tasted so many twists on the pawpaw, you would think that we would be able to clearly identify the thing itself, right? With my stomach full, I was no more able to answer the question “What does a pawpaw taste like” than I had been before. Before sampling the pawpaws I listened to a lecture titled “Pawpaw 101”. I learned that the pawpaw is native to many parts of eastern North America, that it can be somewhat difficult to grow, AND that the fruit’s taste can vary widely from tree to tree. Aha!
In the puffs and pawpaw frosting, the pawpaw added just a hint of a dark, fruity note. The pawpaw toned the cream cheese and sugar down a bit and made it more interesting. In the Burrito Buggy’s guacamole pawpaw burrito, it added a fruity tang to the guacamole, perhaps being used in place of the usual citrus. The pawzel had a perfectly sweet cinnamoniness to complement the dense, soft, chewy pretzel. (And, if I overheard correctly, the anti-oxidant-laden pawpaw had been used to cut the amount of fat without cutting moisture, much as applesauce sometimes does.) The smoothie tasted of fruity vanilla; the brownie had dark, fruity undertones.
The real standouts, though, were the pawpaw pepper butter and the pawpaw-peanut satays. The satays were made by the Indonesian Student Association and lest you scoff, their satays are the stuff of legend. Their booth has the longest line each year at the International Street Fair because the delicious scent of grilling satay wafts all up and down the street. Unlike all of the other pawpaw foods on offer, I knew what the “regular” satays tasted like. As I picked up the skewer to take a bite, I thought the sauce looked darker than usual. As soon as the sauce hit my tongue my eyes opened wide. They had somehow managed to make the satays even better. Under all the other layers of flavor was a darkly sweet, smoky hint of fruit.
The pawpaw pepper butter was a sauce accompanying Laurel Valley Creamery’s fried cheese curds. The curds themselves were the stuff of a cheese-lover’s dreams—soft, gooey, oozing pillows of cheesiness—none of that waxy rubberiness sometimes characteristic of cheese curds. The light batter they’d been fried in could not contain them and they had oozed together into delicious pale-golden globs on my waxed-paper-lined tray. The butter was a vibrant yellow and tasted like banana peppers with some added heat and a bright, fruity tang. The vinegary, almost mustardy heat cut through the luscious curds perfectly, leaving your tongue ready to get maximum enjoyment from the next bite.
Ultimately, I decided that it doesn’t matter what a pawpaw tastes like. The pawpaw is the chameleon, the tofu, the secret agent man of fruits. It’ll blend in to just about anything and add a little note of complexity. It can be light or dark, sweet or savory—it’s oh-so-accomodating. I now suspect you’d never eat something and say, “Hey, there’s some pawpaw in this sauce and it’s delicious!” but you might very well say, “This sauce is delicious and I have no idea why. I must have your secret ingredient!”
In sum, the pawpaw plays well with others. Much like the Ohioans for whom it is the native fruit. The pawpaw is quiet, unassuming. It won’t shout to get your attention. It won’t, like Texas, brag about how big and bold it is, or like New York, dazzle you with bright lights and loud noises. The pawpaw will just sit there quietly and politely on your palate like a good Midwesterner as it makes everything you taste a little more interesting.
image credit: ars-grin.gov
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