Checking out the various pawpaw threads here I’ve yet to run on anybody suggesting storing the fruit frozen whole and unprocessed, which is what we do now.
I have three pawpaw trees in my backyard, a prolific, a sunflower and a native Missouri. The native Missouri produces a scant handful of fruit yearly but the other two almost drown us in fruit.
In the past I’ve tediously passed pawpaws through a colander to separate the seeds, then frozen the pulp in silicone ice cube trays and kept baggies of orange pawpaw squares for use over the year. It’s a lot of work and the results aren’t always satisfactory as frost likes to gather on the fruit.
Last year a local couple that makes pawpaw butter for a local farmers market bought about 30 pounds of fruit off of me. They like my pawpaws because I never pick them off the trees, I wait until they hit the ground nice an ripe then gather them up. He told me to just freeze them whole and when I had enough to call him and he’d pick them up.
Once I had close to 30 lbs I decided to try a frozen one to see how it compared to a fresh pawpaw.
When it thawed completely I was shocked to discover I couldn’t tell the difference between it and a fresh one. My wife agreed.
So last year we didn’t process any of the fruit, just put them in large plastic bags and froze them whole.
Now we’re enjoying pawpaw pretty much whenever we like. The fruit will blacken a lot faster even then fresh pawpaw but who cares? It still tastes great and usually it doesn’t sit around long enough to blacken anyway before we eat it.
And, frost doesn’t seem to matter to whole frozen fruits.
Thought this post isn’t necessarily timely, if you have pawpaw trees and are looking for an easier way to store them for long term consumption, try freezing the whole fruit.
