Pawpaw Varieties

Hahaha nice!
@Beetree you should enter a pawpaw eating contest. I’ve always wondered who could stomach that :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

2 Likes

Pawpaw’s aren’t the only fruit I will eat too much of. If there’s fresh ripe peaches on the counter I’ll crush way too many of those too. Those golden kiwis are dangerous as well.

3 Likes

I wholeheartedly agree on the golden kiwis. Those things were an eye opener when I tried a container, although the higher price vs green kiwis stopped me from a binge haha. I could honestly eat them until my body goes into sugar coma sleep mode.

2 Likes

Additionally to @JustPeachy questions, do you mean the actual fruit or trees? I assume you mean the trees but there are a lot of good options depending on the cultivar you are looking for and whether you want to learn to graft.

I’ll see what I can do to get the various KSU papers - after tomato season is over here and we get a few thousand cloves of garlic planted. The papers would be good winter reading.

I still would rather have more peaches. Time to offload them to vict-… I mean friends. @TrilobaTracker @scottfsmith

13 Likes

Don’t you have restaurants or specialty food stores you can sell pawpaws to?

A few people here posted that pawpaws are sold at $10 a lb and they will sell out, I was like what? That’s incredible!!!

4 Likes

These are unthinned. They aren’t premium grade or anything. Many are small like date size as a result. They won’t last more than a couple of days, and it’s the weekend.

By the time I locate and setup sales, these won’t be in the greatest of shapes. $10 is what they sold for at the pawpaw festival years ago. Frankly. I’m surprised it’s still $10 a pound (according to @FarmGirl-Z6A) I would have thought there would be inflation adjustment.

You don’t want to even look at the trash bin here… The amount of discarded pawpaw is amazing.

3 Likes

Plan for next year. You can even sell them to many members here.

I’ve noticed that, lately, there has been a lot more interest in pawpaws on the forum than ever before.

2 Likes

WOW! :astonished:
I could go for some pawpaws- over a month since my season ended and the cravings are starting. Will try to make some smoothies or ice cream with the frozen pulp I have, but out of hand is the best.

5 Likes

Hey, if anyone is reading, I’ll take standing orders for the future. :stuck_out_tongue: Let’s make it dunno… $7.50 a pound. Don’t forget, I’ll need to use probably next day air for proper delivery if you want these green ripe. Shipping isn’t exactly cheap for sending something so fragile and time sensitive.

If you don’t mind half brown, 2nd day will probably work. Neal’s friend picks tree ripe or once they hit the ground.

5 Likes

No kidding. There are people here who look to try pawpaws before planting a tree.

I did that myself. I asked a member here to ship me one of his pawpaws so I could try. Once I knew I could eat the fruit, I planted my trees.

1 Like

Paging @IL847 taste report requested.

Still getting some wild ones just north of you. These heavily shaded spots are real season extenders.

2 Likes

Justpeach gave me some paw paws, different cultivars. I must say pawpaw are different. Pawpaw tastes more tropical fruits , strong aroma, sweeter than stone/pom fruits . I had sugar apple before. Since it is a relative of the sugar apple , paw paw and sugar apple share something in common like the sweetness, like a little gritty taste sometime mixed in the creamy texture. But I like pawpaw’s texture and aroma is better than sugar apple’s.
I haven’t finished all the pawpaws that justpeach gave to me yet. I had Mango, Shannondoah, West, and Central. Mango has the largest size but less strong tropical flavor/aroma. I am not impressed by West. Shannondoah are on the small side. One I tasted was a little blend . But the second I ate was sweet so I think the flavor has a lot to do with the location of the fruit on a tree, or size of the fruit. Maybe bigger size will taste better. Central is similar to Shannondoah in sweetness and texture. I like to eat at really ripe at point that the skin starts to brown. If you buy a Cherimoye at supermarket, you want to buy the one that has brown skin. Same way go with the pawpaw. When the skin turned brown, the sweetness, the aroma, the creamy texture are all at the peak. So all the pawpaw I ate so far are all sweet, it is only the matter of degree of the sweetness. I can eat several peach/pear/plum a day through out the season but I don’t think I can eat pawpaw every day. If there are both pawpaw and peach/pear:plum in front of me I more likely will select peach:pear/plum. I like pawpaw but I think stone fruits are better.

The biggest drawback of pawpaw I think is the fruit size and a lot of large seeds inside. The pawpaw that justpeach gave me mostly are small to very small. I am not sure normally how large a pawpaw gets. If the pawpaw tree grows the paw paw size all this small, I don’t think I want to grow pawpaw myself. It just too much work for me.

3 Likes

You’re right on that. It’s crazy how long some of those will hang on.
Too bad I’ve yet to find any good wild pawpaws down here!
Got some from a spot on the Little Harpeth river and they were terrible. :nauseated_face:

1 Like

Lol, I really envy people who live in areas where they say the wild pawpaws all taste good. I’ve found some patches where all the fruit I tried there were just awful. Some can have no sweetness, little good flavor, and high amounts of bitterness. Those cause me to spit them out almost immediately.

I have found that green ones, or unripe ones are lack of sweetness, or flavor. But all the ripe ones I have tasted were sweet in certain degree, some were sweet like a good mango, maybe even sweeter than a good mango. For those who are not familiar with tropical fruits’ flavor may not like pawpaw. But if you like mango and can stand theun smel of ripe banana you might want try pawpaw. It a lot likes a fruit that has mango texture , sweetness, and banana smell

@TJ_westPA @TrilobaTracker I dunno where these magic patches of pawpaw are. Or maybe we have more discerning taste buds. :stuck_out_tongue: I think the ratio of good “wild pawpaws” is probably like 5% in comparison to current cultivars (not necessarily other wild). Even among the second and third generation of crosses of current cultivars, there are a lot of let downs. KSU has hundreds of plantings, which are progeny of Peterson pawpaw and other older cultivars like Overleese. Yet, still they only choose to release 3 cultivars (Atwood, Benson, Chapelle) to the public. The rest didn’t make the cut.

Or maybe it’s a lack of options. If you only have wild pawpaw, it maybe one of those “I can put up with x quality.” Once you reach the point of “all-you-can-eat” of newer cultivars, it’s hard to say you’ll reach for wild instead.

For those reading and following along, I wanted @IL847 to post her taste thoughts to demonstrate how wildly taste can skew preferences. I prefer pawpaws still green, avocado firm texture. She prefers than more ripe, more brown, when there is that caramel developed flavor. @tonyOmahaz5 for example likes a cultivar temporarily known as “West” (seedlings are named for their location in the plot), describing it as mild Cherimoya like, and will tolerate some brown but not much. @IL847 didn’t care for “West.” @Barkslip doesn’t like them when they go brown at all. Our definition of ripe varies widely, even though I everything I gave @IL847 either pulled free easily or fell off the pawpaw tree.

Size here is small because Neal’s friend doesn’t thin. Small fruit in pawpaw doesn’t mean small seed though. Seed size doesn’t change regardless of fruit size. Thinning is the difference between a lot of fruit with large seed and less flesh vs fewer fruit with larger seed and more flesh. Neal mentions that distal fruit from the main trunk often is smaller in size even with thinning. I do thin, so there are substantial size differences on my own tree. My Allegheny fruit is more than 5x larger in some cases. Terroir also seems to play a slight role. Even though I am only an hour away, my Allegheny was said to be the best Allegheny Neal’s friend had tasted in 10 years, noticeably less phenolic, but I have black loam soil for at least 2 feet, while orchard where I collected the fruit to give to @IL847 has hard deadpan yellow clay soil about 2-4 inches below the top soil

8 Likes

I have had good if not great wild pawpaws. One tree I’ve propagated in my orchard in fact (not doing great, so hasn’t fruited yet).
@Vid has shared some very good wild ones too, from only 60 miles or so away.
And of course as you know, many of the old school tried and true varieties are wild selections - Sunflower, Mango, and I think Overleese to name a few off the top of my head.
The wild ones here are bad mostly due to the strong phenolic taste and watery texture.
The good ones are nearly as good or as good as a named selection.

5 Likes