Pawpaw Varieties

I bought a cherimoya yesterday after reading this lol. Does Cherimowest taste similar to any pawpaws you’ve had? It sounds great! @JustPeachy

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I haven’t eaten that many Cherimoya, so it’s hard for me to make that comparison. I am more familiar with soursop and sweetsop. I’m not sure about similarities between “Cherimowest” and other pawpaws. Cherimowest (to me) has some taste similarities with Wabash and maybe another seedling here called “East.” They each have their own subtleties. Sometimes it’s hard to pick them apart after you sit down and eat through 10-15 cultivars at the same time. After a while, the lines start to blur, especially after you pile through stronger flavored pawpaws like Susquehanna in the same sitting.

Several people on this forum have tasted “West”/“Cherimowest.” Each will have their own opinions, though.

All the pawpaws have a singular common thread where they all taste like pawpaws (no surprise). I think it’s more of us picking up hints of flavor. Just like when people describe some russeted apples tasting a lot like pears. It’s still a apple. It just has hints of pear flavor. It’s not an apple that tastes like a pear. It’s an apple with pear flavors. That’s my take on it anyways.

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My feelings exactly.

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I agree. They do start to run together. The more I have the less I think they taste like other fruit and just have flavors in common with tropical fruit. Others have no tropical taste and just have that pawpaw flavor. Very hard to describe. I really enjoyed the Wabash and Susquehanna I picked up at England’s orchard. I’m glad I’m growing them!

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So my UPS big tab is higher than I expected. >_<

I finally sat down yesterday to start looking at the number of packages I sent. 15 packages varying 3-10 pounds. 10% of that weight is packing material. I guess I have sent out about 75 pounds of pawpaws over the course of 3 weeks mostly to friends. I think about 2-3 more packages should go in the mail next week to a few more friends. I didn’t even realize I send out so many pawpaws this year. The last of the harvest will probably fall by the end of the month.

Yet, so many pawpaws go to waste even still. I dumped 15 pounds of rotten pawpaw in the backfield hoping they will germinate in the spring and processed another 20 pounds of overipe fruit for seed.

Thoughts on packing for anyone who wants to mail. Bubblewrap isn’t a good idea. It’s not permeable and just accelerates ripening more. Crumpled newspaper seems to works better. Lasagna layering is a good idea. It’s almost like trying to figure out how to pack raw eggs and shipping them cross country without having the shell crack. Overnight shipping way way better than 2nd day (@SMC_zone6 @bradybb thanks for being my first guinea pigs on GF).

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Perfect segue to the post I’ve been meaning to do.
JustPeachy sent me several pawpaws too, and I wanted to close the loop by giving my thoughts.
Shenandoah- very mild, not particularly sweet. Good texture. Similar to JBG perhaps - banana, vanilla but not strongly either one. Honestly these came off as somewhat bland to me. Jury is still out.
Mango - on softer side, sweet. Definitely has a unique taste in there. I can see how folks would say it’s mango-like. Could also be described as creamsicle or orange push-up. This variety had the most prominent special flavor and frankly made me wish I had it in my orchard. Very cool.
Wabash - very tutti-frutti flavored, maybe a little vanilla. Has a note that is hard to describe, somewhat plum or berry-like. excellent pawpaw. Not the “creme brûlée” that I’ve heard about.
NC -1 - very small so hard to judge but nothing bad here. Just an average pawpaw.
Allegheny - very similar to Shenandoah but sweeter. Also very small fruits so hard to fully judge.
Garage West - 2 fruits, one had a rotten area but still tried to work around it. Sweet with a floral flavor that I believe approximates violet.
Second fruit I hung on to for a couple days. It was one of the best pawpaws I’ve eaten, but very hard to say exactly why. It just hit all the buttons. I still got the violet but not as much. Kind of like the marshmallows in Lucky Charms. Great smooth firmish texture.
Based on this, I would want to propagate it.

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Can anyone tell me what you think about the productivity and flavor, the ripening time (early, mid or late) of these varieties? All the fruits on my trees dropped due to the heatwave we had in June in WA state. Another year of waiting. Thank you!

Sunflower

Wells

NC-1

Mango

We have those four here. I would consider them mid to mid-late.

Wells is slightly before Susquehanna, but overlaps a bit here from what I have seen. I would say it would be Mango, NC-1, Sunflower, then Wells. They are all in the second half of harvest here for us.

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Loved the pawpaws you sent, thanks. I think this is most of them. In addition to the more common Shenandoah and Susquehanna, Neal and Carmelo were two top quality standouts.

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Lorner = Corner @SMC_zone6 That was my bad, I should have used marker better.

@IL847 refers to this pawpaw in an earlier post as more wild tasting. It’s just more phenolic and stronger in my mind like NC-1, bear in mind she likes eating pawpaws when they darken and soften up.

Rebecca’s Gold started to fall today (not pictured). @TrilobaTracker

Box#20 Probably three or four more boxes left, then we are done for the year.

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Thanks for sending them.It opens up the chance to taste different flavors,with the view towards later grafting and planting.

I’m glad you were able to enjoy them! I too am trying new pawpaws in the hopes I may find something else that peaks my interest. New for me this year was Maria’s Joy, Taytoo, Rebecca’s Gold, and a handful of new crosses/seedlings.

Now that I’ve thought about it, I’m still not quite convinced that pawpaw flavor alone itself as diverse as apples. However, I think there’s enough diversity when you factor in texture and perhaps firmness that some people will find that they prefer cultivars that fit a certain “profile” over others.

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Anyone familiar with this seller:

Are the reputable? Is it likely that these seeds will be decent?

He lives ‘down the road’ from me, but I’ve yet to visit him.
My first impression is that he’s “OK”.

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Bear in mind, as you very well know, that we are only on 3rd to 4th generation cultivars versus wild stock based on what we are aware of using modern methods. Who knows how much selective breeding Native Americans were doing prior to European interference. They may have done a little bit of “this tree tasted good, I’ll plant the seeds”, or maybe they had methods to selectively cross as we have discovered improves chances of higher fruit quality. No way to know unfortunately.

That being said, we have literally thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of apple cultivars and hundreds of years working on cultivars. I’m confident that pawpaws will find their way to greatness, just as “club apples” now build on the success of the huge resources poured into modern apple breeding programs.

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I highly doubt we will ever reach “club pawpaw” type situation… I was listening to stories that a few PGA members were sharing about years past dealing and negotiating with large corporations. (I believe one was Ocean Spray… )

Pawpaws will always have limited interest for multitude of reasons, but the mainly is that it’s nearly impossible to ever produce enough for commercial interest and even if you did the requirements would be impractical.

This is how one PGA member explained it to me, and it makes sense now that I’ve had time to think about it. Say some company needs 10,000 pounds of pawpaw. You need to pulp it immediate after harvest and do it in phases because you can’t accumulate enough all at once (the harvest from the week before would be spoiled already). This would require a large scale farm with the willingness to invest in a planting that wouldn’t generate its first return for at least 6 years (compared to apples in 2-3). You’d need processing and storage on site, which you don’t necessarily require for other fruit.

Until you get commercial interest, it’s never going to be in stores. If it’s not in stores, there’s never going to be properly exposed to people and generate enough demand. Thus, it’s always going to be relegated to a backyard interest or niche local farm type situation.

(Putting aside the fact that pawpaws are a far far more polarizing fruit relative to apples, pears, stone fruit, etc… imo)

That’s just my take anyways. Who knows though… In 100 years, they might figure out a way to GMO a pawpaw that’s perfectly shelf stable for 2 weeks.

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I would say the challenges associated with pawpaws from a spoilage perspective are very real. However, that said, frozen fruit pulp/ice cream type dessert is already the closest thing we have to a commercial enterprise for pawpaw.

There are folks looking into pawpaws from a commercial lense. Tom Wahl at Red Fern Farm mentioned that he had one tree that appears to ripen all of its fruit in an extremely short time frame, a day or two. If that trait could be found for various ripening periods, those cultivars could make for a much more effective commercial harvesting system instead of a labor intensive “is it ripe” checkup on each fruit on a tree.

The parallels I am thinking about in my mind are very different industries, cranberries and dairy farms. With cranberries, you harvest the field all at once and send it off to make Ocean Spray juice for the year.

With dairy farms, you have a product that will spoil quickly if not processed with lots of infrastructure and a well tuned assembly line style program (for larger operations, of course).

If both of these strategies could be combined with the right investment, you could have a winning strategy in my opinion. Heck, even if someone built the right machine to remove skin economically and the lowest seed ratio, or Freestone cultivars were created, that might be a game changer too. I am almost envisioning a giant fine cheese grater type machine that you could put whole frozen fruits into, flash heat so the skin gets soft for easy removal, shred and remove the skin, wash, then send to seed removal, then some sort of process for that. It would be a huge undertaking but I’m sure it could be done. For example, imagine chocolate covered pawpaw freeze pops on the grocery store shelf. My wife buys Diana’s bananas, and those silly things aren’t even ripe bananas. Pawpaw would make a superior product both with better taste and lower carbon emissions being locally sourced.

Similarly to how a brewery grows, no one starts at Annheiser Busch size, they work up to it from a carboy fermenting in their downstairs shower, which by the way is a very easy way to clean up after an overly enthusiastic strain of yeast.

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Yeah but didn’t you also say that she doesn’t like ANY pawpaw. >_< When you have people dislike something, the lower emissions and locally sourced argument doesn’t work.

On a side note, pawpaws I notice also have a short freezer life than one might think. The taste changes too… (at least to me).

Several of the seedlings/crosses do that drop nearly everything type thing. Who knows if it is genetics or environment or both. Not sure if that is necessarily better from a cultivation standpoint though. Maybe for commercial, but this would run counter to what you’d want for a local crop, where you want harvest to be spread out since it spoils so fast.

You might be right though. I just don’t see it in the next 50 years. The money and interest still isn’t there. It’s a chicken and egg scenario. Without the fruit for people to taste, you can’t generate interest for enough finance. Without enough finance, you can’t generate enough fruit for people to taste. We probably need the equivalent of a Johnny Appleseed (Johnny Pawpaw?) seed to sow it in ever park and public space and gift saplings to every population center.

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Lots of good debate here but funny you mentioned pulp in the freezer.
I froze several cups back in August in ziplocs.
My wife made some pudding with some (stirred in after cooling), and it tasted strange. Then from a separate bag yesterday I made a smoothie. It also tasted a little funky, plus I got a bit sick (could’ve been old milk but probably not).
I tasted all the fruits as I processed them back in August and all tasted great and didn’t make me sick. But a couple months later I’m not impressed. Probably will throw the rest out.
After this I’m inclined to relegate Pawpaws to fresh eating only.
Or at minimum let them get overripe before processing, to get the caramel/maple goodness. The fruitiness of the less ripe Pawpaws seems to be the issue for me when freezing.

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I tried them both ways. Results weren’t good either way when freezing. I even go as far as to separate pawpaw pulp by cultivars (which helps some).

Even vacpacked, the frozen pulp doesn’t really seem to store long. I’m pretty sure it’s still aging in the freezing or whatever enzymatic activity continues that advances them to not so great flavor, just at a slower rate. Frozen Cherimoya puree last “up to 4 months” according to one book. Though, I don’t ever recall frozen Cherimoya pulp tasting this different from fresh.

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