Pod Insights The Sporkful On The Hunt For The Elusive Pawpaw About this episode An email from Sara Bir set us off on an adventure. She’s an author and recipe developer who’s obsessed with pawpaws, the largest fruit native to North America. “Pawpaws are tricky in the kitchen,” Sara wrote to us.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dan Pashman? There's nothing quite like Aruba. The white sand beaches are truly unlike anything you've seen. But what really stands out is the food. Because Aruba's not like other Caribbean islands. French pastries, Spanish paella, Peruvian barbecue, papardelle that has no business being that good that far from Florence. Not to mention the local fair. Aruba's food scene pulls you in with its astonishing variety of cuisines and beyond satisfies you with its unexpected flavors. So plan your escape to culinary delight at aruba.com. Your taste buds will thank you. As we turn to fall and the weather starts to cool down, I think of things like crunching leaves. I think of cheering from the sidelines of a soccer game, walking the dog in the woods. And when I think of doing all those things,
0:43 Dan Pashman? I'm usually wearing something from LL Bean. Whether it's my puffer vest, my puffer coat, my scarf, whatever you're doing outside this year, you probably need something from LL Bean. Whether it's their boots, their Scotch plaid flannel, their rugged field coat, or more. Grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider.
1:10 Speaker 01 Sirius XM Podcasts.
1:20 Dan Pashman? All right, Sarah. We are at the entrance to a park.
1:25 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:27 Dan Pashman? At an undisclosed location somewhere in the New York metro area.
1:30 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:32 Dan Pashman? I would like to ask you to please read the email that you sent me that has brought us here today.
1:40 Speaker 02 Sure. Do you think sporkful listeners are pumped for pawpaw season? Maybe a few, but a lot of the people have no idea what pawpaws are. Pawpaw lovers are just about the biggest nerds out there, and I'm one of them. So much so that I wrote an entire cookbook about pawpaws, The Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook. It explores the ins and outs of gathering and preparing North America's largest native fruit, which is not as straightforward as it seems. Pawpaws are tricky in the kitchen. You can't buy them in stores. Occasionally, they cause people to vomit. But besides the rare instances of vomiting, pawpaws are truly beguiling. They're aromatic, custardy, and reminiscent of tropical fruit like mangoes and bananas. I make a mean pawpaw lassie. Pawpaws grow all over the place in Ohio where I live.
2:25 Speaker 02 To my knowledge, there's only one pawpaw patch in the New York City area. It's a quasi-secret, but through careful Google searches and tips from the grapevine, I sussed out where it is. What if I came to New York and took you there to go pawpaw hunting? I wouldn't want the actual location revealed on the show in order to keep yahoos from raiding it. Also, mysteries are more fun.
2:48 Dan Pashman? So Sarah, you're in from Ohio. Here we are.
2:53 Speaker 02 Here we are. I think there's only one thing left to do.
2:55 Dan Pashman? What's that?
2:56 Speaker 02 Look for pawpaws.
2:58 Dan Pashman? Let's go.
2:58 Speaker 02 OK. Oh, there are two more things left to do.
3:02 Dan Pashman? OK.
3:02 Speaker 02 Apply insect repellent.
3:04 Dan Pashman? OK.
3:05 Speaker 02 And then look for pawpaws.
3:07 Dan Pashman? OK, all right, let's do it.
3:13 Dan Pashman? This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Now, before we get into the show, I have two quick, important things I want to mention to you. First off, thank you so much to everyone who came out to Heaps Ice Cream in Park Slope, Brooklyn, last week for the launch of my ice cream sandwich collab with Chef Sarah Sane that you heard so much about in last Monday's show. Everyone really seemed to love the sandwich. I don't think they were just saying it to be nice. Good news is, they still have some. They'll have it for a bit, so head on over to Heaps for a taste. Second, heads up Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. I'm going to be at the Salem Lit Fest in Salem, Mass. on a panel called Cooking the Books: Cookbook Authors from Concept to Cookbook.
3:57 Dan Pashman? It'll be hosted by Adam Cowett of America's Test Kitchen. This event is Saturday, September 6th, at 11:30 a.m. And even more exciting, this and all the other events at the festival are totally free. Go to SalemLitFest.org for info.
4:12 Dan Pashman? All right, let's get into it. Today, we're searching for pawpaws, guided by Sarah Burr, who you heard at the top of the show. She's an author, chef, and recipe developer. And she loves pawpaws so much that she offered to make the nine-hour drive from her home in Ohio to New York to introduce me to them. So what is this mysterious fruit? Why have I, and I suspect many of you, never heard of it? And what about it inspires an almost cultish following? As Sarah said in her email, pawpaws are the largest fruit native to North America. They've been around for as long as we have records in this part of the world. The Shawnee tribe has a month named after the pawpaw. Thomas Jefferson had them grown at Monticello. Lewis and Clark ate them on their famous expedition. And formerly enslaved people foraged and ate pawpaws
4:57 Dan Pashman? on their way to freedom. When European colonists first encountered these fruits, they may have thought they were papayas. In fact, in some parts of the world, pawpaw is another name for papaya. But the North American pawpaw we're talking about today is a completely different fruit in a different family from the papaya. Ohio, West Virginia, and other parts of Appalachia are the heart of pawpaw country. But they grow as far west as Nebraska, up into Canada, down to Florida, and east to New York, where Sarah and I are today. It's almost impossible to find pawpaws at a grocery store for reasons we'll get into later. That means to get your paws on some pawpaws, you have to forage for them. As we said, I can't tell you where Sarah and I are looking. That's a big no-no among foragers.
5:42 Dan Pashman? But I will say that it took me nearly three hours to get from my house on Long Island to this spot, which doesn't really tell you anything because with traffic, that could be 200 miles or 20. The spot is called a park, but it's really just woods that run along a busy road. You don't just like, end up where we are right now by accident.
6:01 Speaker 02 Exactly, exactly. This is, this is the most fun kind of place to go foraging because it's full of surprises. And it's completely unexceptional from, from where we're standing.
6:13 Dan Pashman? Yeah, there is no path. You should have brought a machete.
6:17 Dan Pashman? That would have been really fun. Sarah's never been here before, but I'm hoping she's got enough sleuthing skills and enough contacts in the pawpaw dark web to figure out where this pawpaw patch should be. What are the chances that we're gonna search and search and search and never find it? Is that possible?
6:34 Speaker 02 I think it's possible. I think it's possible. I believe there are pawpaw trees here. But maybe I'm an incomp poop and not able to see them. And also, if we find the trees, there may be no pawpaws on them, right? That's more likely.
6:47 Dan Pashman? So there's two hurdles we gotta get over.
6:49 Speaker 02 Two hurdles.
6:50 Dan Pashman? First, we gotta find the trees, and then we gotta hope they still have some fruit on them, or that they ever had some fruit on them.
6:54 Speaker 02 Yes, yes. Everyone listening, place your wagers now.
7:01 Speaker 02 What is the probability of success here? This is gonna be successful no matter what, because any time, to me, spent out in the woods is like totally, totally worth it.
7:12 Dan Pashman? We make our way through this untamed thicket of trees, fallen branches, and brambles. We pass an old exercise bike that someone trashed, which is deep enough into the woods that it's not like a person just chucked it in here. They carried it in quite a ways. I suspect it's a marker for buried treasure, or a body. We leave it undisturbed. Sarah starts giving me some tips on what we're looking for.
7:35 Speaker 02 Pawpaws are understory trees, so that means in a hardwood forest like this, the understory trees are gonna be the shorter ones growing under what I suppose would be the canopy, right?
7:45 Dan Pashman? Right.
7:45 Speaker 02 Most pawpaw trees get to be like, maybe 20 to 30 feet tall, but 10 feet tall is also not an uncommon height. They don't get super duper big, so if I see, if we see a patch of greenery that's notably not as tall as everything else out here, that is a sign.
8:07 Dan Pashman? When was the first time you heard about pawpaws?
8:11 Speaker 02 When I was in my twenties, I had a boyfriend from West Virginia. He told me about them and it sounded like some something that somebody made up. It didn't sound like it could exist. It just stuck in my head that that existed.
8:26 Dan Pashman? Several years passed and Sarah moved all around the country. Eventually, she settled back in Ohio, where she's from. She was working as a chef and recipe developer, but she was also searching for a new direction, some kind of spark.
8:38 Speaker 02 And when we moved to Ohio, I was out in the woods around this time of year and I saw this thing splayed open into the middle of the trail, just like smashed open. And it had these bright yellow guts and these glistening black seeds. It looked like a spaceship had dropped it there. It looked like nothing I had ever seen in all of my years. So I picked it up and I smelled it and I thought, I bet this thing's a pawpaw. So when I revisited the spot and after having verified that it was indeed a pawpaw, I went back. I found another one that was not smashed open with ants on it. And I just stood there and ate it. And I was like, what the heck?
9:22 Speaker 02 It was like nothing I'd ever tasted before. And so you can spend your whole life in a place where pawpaws grow and you're just not aware of them at all, which is kind of fun because once you are, it's like this whole other portal opens up and you realize there are so many discoveries to be made in our everyday world.
9:44 Dan Pashman? I gather there's like a whole community of pawpaw nerds, as you put it in your letter. Tell me about that community. Who are the people? What are these people like?
9:57 Speaker 02 Slightly esoteric, into plants. People who love eating pawpaws tend to have more, I don't want to say adventurous. They can just tolerate a wider range of flavors and they're drawn to that.
10:17 Dan Pashman? I'm lucky that a bona fide pawpaw nerd was willing to drive from Ohio to New York to hang out with me. I understand that not everyone has that kind of opportunity. For most folks, you have to seek out the pawpaw community. And the best way to do that is to head to a pawpaw festival, which takes place across the eastern half of the US, mostly in September. We'll link to a list of them in the show description. This year's Ohio Pawpaw Festival is happening in just a few weeks. More than 7,000 people will descend on Albany, Ohio for it. Of course, Sarah has been. She once did a demonstration on how to de-seed, puree, and freeze pawpaw pulp. There's been a best pawpaw competition, judged by TikTok famous forager Alexis Nicole Nelson and other experts. Sarah described the attendees as people who like to hula hoop and dance to jam bands.
11:01 Dan Pashman? Couple years back, we sent reporter Liz Reed to the festival to chat up the pawpaw faithful.
11:06 Speaker 03 What brought you here today?
11:07 Speaker 04 I'm just trying to find some pawpaw fruit and eat some pawpaw food, drink some pawpaw drinks.
11:12 Speaker 05 We are foragers. We have a pretty hilly acreage and forested acreage that has pawpaws on it. So we get ideas on how to improve production on our own property.
11:23 Speaker 06 I was just found it fascinating that you could take a wild pawpaw and graft a different cultivar on it and change the variety, but also...
11:31 Dan Pashman? The festival also attracted some newbies.
11:33 Speaker 02 I have had pawpaws once in my life.
11:36 Dan Pashman? I grew up in West Virginia and, you know, you sang the song, you know, way down here under the pawpaw patch and all that kind of stuff. But I have yet to eat one yet, but the beer's good. This festival takes place every September, which is prime time for pawpaw foraging, although the season extends into October in some areas. Pawpaws may be hard to find in the woods of New York, but at the festival, they're everywhere. And most people can't get enough of their distinctive taste and texture.
12:01 Speaker 02 You cut it open and when the one I ate was really soft, so I kind of ate it with a spoon and it had the consistency of a custard. And it was like a mild banana mango taste. It was delicious.
12:13 Speaker 06 They're very good. They're rich. They're almost too, they're sometimes almost cloyingly sweet. Well, it's a little slimy, but it's like, it's like some...
12:22 Speaker 07 Somewhere between banana and mango, there's a little bit of pineapple. This is genuine reaction. All right, here you go. You try some.
12:30 Speaker 03 Mmm.
12:32 Speaker 03 It's like, it's very much a combination between a banana and a mango.
12:36 Speaker 07 Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, that's good, though. That's, that's really good. I like that.
12:42 Dan Pashman? That taste has inspired many nicknames for the pawpaw. Prairie banana, Indiana banana, poor man's banana, American custard apple, Quaker delight, and hillbilly mango. When Sarah told me that pawpaws are like nothing she ever tasted before, that's because they've got an unusual lineage. They're native to North America, but they're in a family with fruits that grow in tropical climates like Chirimoya and Sour Sop. So, most of the pawpaws' relatives are native to the Caribbean, Central America, or South America, much closer to the equator. The pawpaw is like a sibling that wandered away from the group at some point and never turned back. But it still tastes tropical. Its flavors might transport you to the Caribbean, even if the closest beach is on Lake Erie.
13:25 Dan Pashman? Vic Rose tried a pawpaw for the first time just a few days before the festival, when he found some growing on his property in West Virginia.
13:31 Speaker 01 It tastes very much like a tropical fruit called a sweet sop, which I was familiar with from growing up in Jamaica. Sweet sop's can't grow here, it's too cold. I sent to text all my Jamaican relatives to tell them that I may have identified a sweet sop substitute that'll grow in the colder.
13:48 Dan Pashman? Vic and his wife Vicky were so inspired, they drove up to the festival on a whim.
13:52 Speaker 05 So now, we're standing in line to test, to taste test, because we don't know what a pawpaw really is supposed to taste like. And we can compare, he can compare it to the one he knows, and I can learn something new.
14:04 Dan Pashman? The Ohio Pawpaw Festival is all about sharing pawpaws. Eating them, swapping recipes, trading tips about how to grow them. But some information isn't shared.
14:14 Speaker 03 Um, we live in Columbus, and there's a lot of sort of competition. Cause there's a lot of pawpaw growing in the city and parks, but um, you have to be very vigilant to actually be able to get them. Um, between the animals and the other foragers, it's, it's real hard to, to get any. Do you know, like, what are some spots that you go to? Do you have, like, a favorite spot? Oh, we wouldn't give that away.
14:38 Speaker 02 Why not? I just told you about the competition.
14:44 Speaker 02 There's a park nearby and they have a hike every year. And they tell you to bring a bag, so I figured, you know, they know where the pawpaws are. I didn't go on the hike. I went, I saw where they were meeting and I went the week before and found where the pawpaws were.
15:09 Dan Pashman? Back in the woods with Sarah, we've been hacking our way through brambles and branches for about a half hour. And then? What? What? Did you find one?
15:19 Speaker 02 This is a baby one. Oh, hello, hello. Here's this little tiny young one. Look at its beautiful leaves. So, I think it's notable that this is, this is a pawpaw. Okay, so we have achieved phase one. I would say this is like maybe a year or two old. It's not that big. But the leaves are really big. They have these long tapered leaves. And to my mind, they have a bit of a jungly look to them.
15:49 Dan Pashman? So we found our first pawpaw tree here.
15:51 Speaker 02 We did.
15:51 Dan Pashman? But this is a baby, so there's no hope of there being fruit at this point. Sarah is now petting the pawpaws.
15:58 Speaker 02 I do this with lots of plants that I love that won't give me rashes, right? Like I just, I just want to thank them for existing because they've brought so much joy to my life. Plants are great listeners because they don't care about your feelings. It just makes me feel like I'm existing as part of the larger fabric of, of the world.
16:17 Dan Pashman? So I think, I feel good that we've already found signs of pawpaw life here.
16:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:22 Dan Pashman? In these woods. But this is a baby and we want, we want, we're hoping to find some fruit, so let's keep going.
16:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:28 Dan Pashman? You lead the way, Sarah. Which way?
16:34 Dan Pashman? Coming up, will my quest with Sarah bear fruit? Plus, we talk to someone who's trying to grow pawpaws despite the fact that they're famously fickle. Stick around.
16:53 Speaker 05 And now, a delicious word from our sponsors.
17:04 Dan Pashman? There's nothing quite like Aruba. The white sand beaches are truly unlike anything you've seen. But what really stands out is the food. Because Aruba's not like other Caribbean islands. French pastries, Spanish paella, Peruvian barbecue, papardelle that has no business being that good that far from Florence. Not to mention the local fair. Aruba's food scene pulls you in with its astonishing variety of cuisines and beyond satisfies you with its unexpected flavors. So plan your escape to culinary delight at aruba.com. Your taste buds will thank you. As we turn to fall and the weather starts to cool down, I think of things like crunching leaves. I think of sharing from the sidelines of a soccer game, walking the dog in the woods.
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19:10 Dan Pashman? Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. In last week's show, I take you inside the process of something I've been wanting to do for a very long time. I invented an ice cream sandwich. If you don't believe that this is like a decade old dream of mine, well, I have a Google Doc of ice cream sandwich ideas to prove it. So when the folks at Heaps Ice Cream in Park Slope, Brooklyn, asked me to collab with them on a limited edition ice cream sandwich, I called that Google Doc into action. The process started off with me pitching ideas to Heaps co-founder Sarah Sane. One ingredient that I've always thought should be in an ice cream and I've never seen it is fried plantains.
19:45 Speaker 02 What? Hang on, I have to think.
19:48 Dan Pashman? Because I love cold fried plantains out of the fridge.
19:52 Speaker 02 That, this is a wild place to start. That's incredible.
19:58 Dan Pashman? So did fried plantains make it into the final ice cream sandwich? Well, you're gonna have to listen to find out. After hearing this episode, one of my Instagram followers actually told me that I should ask my parents if Sarah is my long lost sister because our approach to food is so similar. It was eerie. We had a blast together. Anyway, this is a super fun episode. Check it out. And the ice cream sandwich did go on sale last week. It's only available for a limited time at Heaps in Park Slope, Brooklyn. So head over there and get it while you can. Okay, we'll get back to my pawpaw mission in the woods in a bit, but the woods aren't the only place you can find these fruits. People do grow them. Problem is, it's hard. The trees require specific conditions to fruit. Shade when they're small, sun when they're bigger. And then, once the fruit is harvested, it doesn't keep well.
20:42 Dan Pashman? So unlike, say, a red delicious apple that's been bred to last a long time after it's picked so it can be shipped to a store and sit on the shelf for a week, the pawpaw needs to be eaten within a few days. Kentucky State University has the only full-time pawpaw research program in the world, and they're trying to develop new varieties of pawpaws that might be easier to mass produce. You can buy seeds from them now. But I wanted to talk to one of the few people who's trying to grow pawpaw trees on a smaller scale. I have no background in agriculture. My degree
21:11 Speaker 05 Is an opera. Um, and I, you know, like.
21:14 Dan Pashman? You should write an opera about the pawpaw.
21:16 Speaker 05 We love the pawpaw.
21:18 Dan Pashman? Yes.
21:21 Dan Pashman? This is Deles Lynn George Warren, but most people call him by his nickname, Rue. Rue is a citizen of Kataba Nation, a federally recognized tribe with trust land in North and South Carolina. Rue started learning about pawpaws a few years ago. He grew up near the Kataba Reservation, then left to go to college and work in DC. He moved back in 2017 to work with the tribe. Originally, he was focused on the Kataba language.
21:45 Speaker 05 Coming back and working on the language, what I realized in diving into our language resources and the historical texts is that I couldn't know the language until I knew the land. And so that's when that started kind of expanding into understanding what are our native plants? What can we forage for? What are our agricultural traditions? And so from there, it just kind of grew into larger community work on food.
22:08 Dan Pashman? Why couldn't you know the language until you knew the land?
22:13 Speaker 05 So every language, right, is, is full of the values and understandings of the people who came before, right? And so Kataba is unique from European languages because it was developed on these lands, right? And so everything about the language is structured around our relationships and understandings with the land. So for example, the word nature, does it really exist in Kataba? Um, the word you would use is basically just outside because there's not this philosophical underpinning in Kataba that nature and humanity are separate. And so being able to even use the language properly requires kind of understanding the land and back and forth, back and forth.
22:56 Dan Pashman? As Rue continued his research, he also got involved in gardening and food projects on the reservation. He attended a permaculture training program in Asheville. That's where an instructor introduced him to the pawpaw and where he ate his first one. He was drawn to the taste and he loved the story.
23:12 Speaker 05 I mean, just thinking in terms of deep time, what sort of series of events had to happen for pawpaws to be able to come up? Adapt to places where it's actually freezing, where most of their relatives are in South America where it's not freezing.
23:26 Dan Pashman? So this plant is explained to you.
23:32 Dan Pashman? What are you thinking?
23:34 Speaker 05 I'm thinking I want to grow this. Like, it sounds like such an amazing plant.
23:40 Dan Pashman? A year after Rue attends this workshop, he has his chance. The tribe gets a grant to plant indigenous fruit and nut trees around the reservation's cultural center. But they have to decide which trees. Rue starts asking community elders, "What trees do you remember from your childhood that you don't see around anymore?" They mention persimmons, mulberries, and black cherries, not pawpaws. So they plant those fruits the elders remember. But they also plant pawpaws. Since pawpaws are native to Kataba lands, Rue figures Katabas must have interacted with them at some point. And regardless of the history, Rue has a certain way of looking at his mission.
24:17 Speaker 05 We're not just trying to recapture, record, and freeze our culture, right? Because Kataba culture was different from 1491 to 1770 to 1850 to now, right? It's constantly changing as all cultures do. And so part of it is protecting the things that are in our living memory, but it's also bringing in more things into our culture, expanding our understanding as Katabas. And so part of that is turning back to the land and remembering that the land was our first teacher, right? Katabas learned how to live on the land from the land itself. And so that means even though we don't have records of how Katabas used pawpaws or how to work for pawpaws, for example,
25:02 Speaker 05 it doesn't mean that that's not something that, you know, that we can't start integrating back into our culture.
25:08 Dan Pashman? Rue and other Kataba citizens planted those trees three and a half years ago. Since then, Rue's learned firsthand how fickle they can be.
25:16 Speaker 05 So we kind of took an approach called stun. Supreme, total and utter neglect.
25:22 Dan Pashman? Is that a technical term? Is that what the bot- Turns out, yes. This is a term in permaculture.
25:27 Speaker 05 You're not trying to cultivate the plants that need the most care. You're trying to cultivate the most resilient plants.
25:34 Dan Pashman? This is like the cry it out approach to parenting.
25:37 Speaker 05 Exactly, exactly. Like, give them, give them some good soil, give them some water when you first plant them.
25:43 Dan Pashman? We got you, we fed you, kid. Your crib is very comfortable. You're gonna have to figure out how to sleep.
25:48 Speaker 05 Now it's on you. Which is kind of nerve wracking because it is a high loss kind of strategy.
25:53 Dan Pashman? Right.
25:54 Speaker 05 But the ones that survive are not really requiring a lot of watering.
26:01 Dan Pashman? It'll be a few more years before the pawpaw trees flower. And then, in order for those flowers to become fruit, they need to be pollinated. That's another challenge, one that may require a more hands-on approach.
26:12 Speaker 05 So pollination of pawpaws is tricky because they rely on a different set of pollinators than what we're used to. When we're talking about pollinators, we're talking about a huge diversity of creatures.
26:21 Dan Pashman? Not just the birds and the bees?
26:22 Speaker 05 Right. And for pawpaws, it's actually flies and other detritivores that fertilize them. So if you are unlucky enough to be walking through a pawpaw patch when they are flowering, you will notice a light rotting stench. And that is actually their flowers, which are kind of these crimson red cup-shaped things. They're trying to attract flies to them. So you hear stories about pawpaw growers who will literally hang up rotting meat or rotting fish in their pawpaw patches to get more flies to be able to come to the patch and pollinate them.
27:00 Dan Pashman? Well, you know, depends on what floats your pollinators boat.
27:03 Speaker 05 Exactly, whatever, whatever the pollinators are into.
27:07 Dan Pashman? Have you thought about that first season when your pawpaw trees start to flower? And you start to get fruit?
27:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, every year we have what's called Yakian Yishuang Festival. Festival, which is the day of the River People. In our language, we call ourselves the River People because we've been living along the Catawba River, archaeologists tell us, for 6,000 to 10,000 years. And so every year, we have a fall festival. And so I would love to do some pawpaw ice cream or something as part of that festival, because most people haven't heard of it or tried it in my community. And so that, for me, feels like the next step in the pawpaw journey for my community is just getting people to taste it.
27:54 Dan Pashman? Back in the woods with Sarah, I'm still hoping to get my first taste of pawpaw. As we move deeper in, we seem to be getting a little closer to something.
28:03 Dan Pashman? What do you see, Sarah? I see kind of a clearing. It looks like it's a little clearer. Like, is that one over there?
28:10 Speaker 02 That should be a pawpaw, yes, yes.
28:13 Dan Pashman? So we are standing before the biggest pawpaw tree I've ever seen. I still don't see any fruit, but this one, the top leaf is taller than my head. So it's six and a half feet tall.
28:25 Speaker 02 And there are, okay, so there's a smaller one over there. And I feel like there have to be more because there's not a critical mass of them worthy enough to be noted through the grapevine. You know what I'm talking about?
28:39 Dan Pashman? You haven't seen something big enough for it to be like a thing people talk about?
28:43 Speaker 02 Exactly, yeah, yeah. That's just my guess is that there's a mother lode that we haven't come across. I'm gonna, it'll be a modest mother lode, but I think there's something more notable here. One of the reasons I love pawpaws so much is they're only here when they're here. And you're not even sure that's gonna happen. A couple of years ago, there was an early frost. I found one pawpaw. You just get what you get. But if I go to the store, I can get carrots and kale and mangoes in Marietta, Ohio, anytime I want, 24 hours a day. But you can only have pawpaws a couple of weeks a year. And it gives me a big appreciation for just how much work it takes to eat. Period.
29:27 Dan Pashman? I mean, if in fact we don't find actual pawpaw fruits, I will be a little disappointed. But, you know, maybe that's the lesson in all this, Sarah. That's what makes, like you said, that's what makes the pawpaw special. If we just wandered 10 minutes into the woods and found a bunch, then it wouldn't be pawpaws.
29:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, sometimes you win and sometimes you don't.
29:49 Dan Pashman? If you do find pawpaws, there are a few things you can do with them, which Sarah covers in her Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook. You can make custardy desserts like flan, cheesecake, key lime pie with pawpaws. Or you can use them to flavor savory sauces like Sarah's South Carolina mustard pawpaw barbecue sauce. Or her pawpaw chutney, sort of like a mango salsa. You can make blended drinks like a pawpaw lassi. Or baked sweets like chocolate chip pawpaw tea cake. But when you're cooking with pawpaws, there is a catch. You said in your email that pawpaws sometimes induced vomiting.
30:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:22 Dan Pashman? Why? How?
30:25 Speaker 02 There is a compound in there, and in the seeds as well, that induces vomiting.
30:33 Dan Pashman? In large quantities, these compounds can cause intestinal distress. They're also thought to be a neurotoxin. So, don't eat several pawpaws a day. And also, watch out if you're drying or dehydrating them. That'll concentrate the compound and make it more potent. Sarah says in general, you gotta be careful when you're cooking pawpaws. But if you eat the pawpaw when it's ripe without the seeds, you won't have that issue.
30:54 Speaker 02 You should not have that issue, no.
30:56 Dan Pashman? Sarah and I keep searching, and a few minutes later...
30:59 Speaker 02 Uh, yeah, I feel very vah.
31:01 Dan Pashman? Look, what, go, go, let's go. Roll out. She sees something, Sarah sees something. We're going deeper into the woods.
31:11 Speaker 02 I'm walking through some sawgrass, which is invasive, but here we go. Here is a bigger one, yeah, like...
31:18 Dan Pashman? This is a big, this, this is...
31:23 Dan Pashman? Yes, this is a tree. This is an actual tree.
31:25 Speaker 02 How many feet tall would you say that is, Dan? I'm terrible at that kind of estimation.
31:28 Dan Pashman? I mean, it's more, I think it's more than double my height. So I would say it's like 14 feet tall.
31:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, this is, I would say this is like an average size, mature pawpaw tree that you would run across in the woods. And then it has some baby pawpaws down here.
31:41 Dan Pashman? But I still don't see any fruit, right?
31:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:44 Dan Pashman? No fruit here.
31:44 Speaker 02 What I'm doing right now is looking down because it's possible that, like even a month ago, this fruited, and then bloop, bloop, bloop, all the fruit dropped. But it's also possible somebody came and cleared it out because they had been keeping tabs on it. Like, the Sarah Burr of where we are came and
32:04 Dan Pashman? There's no other Sarah Burr.
32:07 Dan Pashman? If Sarah finds seeds or scraps lying around, that would suggest the ripe pawpaws fell to the ground and animals ate them. But she finds nothing, which means more likely either this tree didn't fruit this year, or someone beat us to it. There are a couple other fully grown pawpaw trees near this one, but it's the same story with each one. No fruit. This seems like the end of our road. We went out here for almost two hours. We've scoured just about every inch of this little patch of wilderness. So Sarah, it looks like we might not find any pawpaw fruits.
32:42 Speaker 02 No, it looks like we might not. I'm not, I'm not getting the feeling. And not getting the smell either. The smell is another tell.
32:53 Speaker 02 But we saw some trees and have really enjoyed ourselves. And I think, I think I'd prefer that rather than like having a crummy time and finding some fruit.
33:05 Dan Pashman? At this point, Sarah stops and looks at me with a twinkle in her eye.
33:09 Speaker 02 Would you like to eat a pawpaw right now?
33:10 Dan Pashman? Did you bring a pawpaw?
33:12 Speaker 02 I did.
33:13 Dan Pashman? Awesome.
33:16 Dan Pashman? Sure, let's do it.
33:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, this is, this is like not-
33:19 Dan Pashman? This is Plan B.
33:20 Speaker 02 This is Plan B for us.
33:22 Dan Pashman? She's pulled out a pawpaw that's wrapped in a paper towel.
33:24 Speaker 02 Yes, this is not how you find them in the wild is wrapped in a paper towel. So I am looking for one.
33:30 Dan Pashman? So, wait, these are pawpaws that you foraged?
33:32 Speaker 02 These are from Ohio, yes. These do, I deliberately chose ones that seemed like they could have come from a woods like this. Like, these are not prime specimens. They're gonna be lovely, but these aren't the ones that would be like, entered in the best pawpaw contest. They're just very average pawpaws.
33:52 Dan Pashman? Sarah picked these two days earlier. They're oblong on the small side, one fits in the palm of my hand. They have the coloring of a speckled green pear. Okay, I'm ready, let's do it.
34:01 Speaker 02 Okay, okay.
34:01 Dan Pashman? Uh, do I need a knife?
34:03 Speaker 02 You should be able to just tear into it with your hands.
34:05 Dan Pashman? Just rip it open?
34:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:07 Dan Pashman? Like, dig my thumbs into it and pull it apart?
34:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's not, kinda not a wrong way.
34:10 Dan Pashman? All right, all right, I'm digging my thumbs in.
34:12 Speaker 02 At least in this context.
34:14 Dan Pashman? All right, pulls right apart, the skin is not too thick. It is very juicy, kinda mushy, like you say, custardy. I see the black seeds.
34:23 Speaker 02 There are the black seeds.
34:24 Dan Pashman? The flesh is, is yellow, bright yellow.
34:27 Speaker 02 So I would say to slurp out, slurp out some of the flesh, and then spit out the seed.
34:34 Dan Pashman? Okay. Can I just bite into the flesh?
34:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, just go for it.
34:39 Dan Pashman? The fruit is a challenge to eat, a lot of seeds in relation to flesh. But once you navigate all that and take a taste-
34:46 Speaker 02 You're thinking.
34:46 Dan Pashman? Yeah, there's something like a little bit sort of funky to it. Like, I keep, I keep trying to think of like, oh, it tastes like this other thing that people will know, but I can't think of what that is.
34:56 Speaker 02 It tastes of many things and also of none of them. That's what's really hard about this to articulate, I think.
35:03 Dan Pashman? Hmm, I'm getting the hang of eating it. I doubt, you know, the word that I kept reading was custardy of the texture inside, and I think that's a very good description. It's almost like flan. It's not the kind of thing you sink your teeth into, it's sort of like very kind of melty.
35:15 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, melty for sure. If you can sink your teeth into it, it's gonna taste disgusting because it's not ripe.
35:21 Dan Pashman? Most people said it tastes like a banana-mango combo. To me, this one's more like a papaya-passion fruit combo. Tart, almost citrusy. That could be my perception, or it could just be that wild pawpaws vary a lot from one tree to the next. Yeah, I think you're right, that part of the reason why it's so, such a weird sensation to eat it is that it feels totally out of place. It's like I feel like I should, like I'm on vacation. Like I'm not here. How could I be here and be eating this? I have to be, I must be somewhere else.
35:48 Speaker 02 There's a disconnect about it that is, for me, completely compelling. And I get excited about it every year and I forget what it's like to eat a pawpaw. And then I think, will they even come back? Do pawpaws even exist? And then they do come back and I'll be like, do I even like pawpaws? And then eventually I'll come across the first ripe one I come across. And I get to experience that all over again and it's so fun and reassuring. I'll be like, oh yeah, I do love pawpaws after all. There we go. Okay, Dan is flinging the juice off of his hands and now.
36:27 Dan Pashman? Licking my fingers.
36:28 Speaker 02 Licking your fingers and step three, if you like, is wipe them on your pants.
36:32 Dan Pashman? Hmm, yeah. Sarah eats the other pawpaw she brought and then? What should I do with the rest of this?
36:37 Speaker 02 Okay, this is fun.
36:39 Dan Pashman? Okay.
36:40 Speaker 02 What you can do is increase the genetic diversity.
36:44 Dan Pashman? Yes, I can, I can throw, drop these seeds around. We can start, we can expand the patch.
36:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, totally. See, I call this a pawpaw bomb.
36:51 Dan Pashman? I'm just throwing them all around. I'm throwing the seeds all around.
37:07 Dan Pashman? Well, thanks, Sarah. This was super fun.
37:09 Speaker 02 This has been super fun. I feel like we covered a lot of ground.
37:12 Dan Pashman? Yeah.
37:12 Speaker 02 Both physically and existentially.
37:21 Dan Pashman? On my three hour voyage home, I reflect on what just happened. Part of me feels like I crossed through the pawpaw portal that Sarah talked about. The world looks different. As I pass other woods, I think about what wonders might be in there. But then I also start asking the same question Sarah said she asked at the end of every pawpaw season. Did that really happen? Do pawpaws even exist? Then, a couple of days later, I'm scrolling through Instagram and I stop on a photo. I'm like, "That thing looks familiar." "Wait a second, that's a pawpaw." "What's a pawpaw doing in my Instagram feed?" "It's my friend and neighbor Chef Ron Fan, who you'll remember from my early pasta testing." "He just got his hands on some pawpaws and he's cooking with them."
38:05 Dan Pashman? I send him a text. He asks if I want to stop by to try some samples. So it turns out, I didn't have to travel three hours to find a pawpaw after all. Ron's pawpaws were grown by a local farmer on Long Island. He set up behind a convent. He laid out like, a couple of feet of wood chips. He just has all these random trees growing out there and pawpaws one of them. And how did you get hooked up with this guy? He's been, he's been advertising on Facebook a little bit, doing like weird little videos telling people, you know, "You should try this fruit." So this is your first time eating, first time cooking with pawpaws? Yes, absolutely. The first time I've seen a pawpaw was just two days ago. Would you rather have that than just like going to the supermarket and getting a banana and a lychee or a mango or a passion fruit? Yeah, absolutely. Cause it's local. Yeah.
38:51 Dan Pashman? So you decided to make what with it, with the pawpaw? Uh, creme brulee. Are you gonna brulee this creme right in front of me? Absolutely.
39:01 Dan Pashman? Here comes the brulee, the blowtorch.
39:04 Dan Pashman? As Ron torches the sugar, he tells me something else. "It's not just this farmer in the area. A local chocolatier is working on a new confection featuring pawpaws." "We don't usually cover food trends on this porridgeful, but I'm starting to think we may have stumbled onto the biggest thing since a rugala got put in a bag."
39:22 Dan Pashman? After Ron's done bruleeing, he pours a splash of rum over the top, then sets it on fire. Lets it cook off for a minute. Then he breaks up the hard sugar top so the rum can flow down into the custard. That's right, Rowan. Very good. Oh my god, that looks ridiculous.
39:39 Dan Pashman? Oh my god.
39:43 Dan Pashman? That is so good.
39:46 Dan Pashman? Now the real question is, do I save any of this for Janie or not?
39:53 Dan Pashman? Sorry, Janie. I'm really, really sorry.
40:02 Dan Pashman? If you want to see a photo of the Paw Paw Creme Brulee and more pics from my adventures in the woods with Sarah Burr, check out my Instagram. I am at thesporkful. My thanks to Sarah Burr, author of The Pocket Paw Paw Cookbook, which you can buy wherever books are sold. She's also got a new book coming out in March of next year called Pocket Nature: Fruit Harvesting. And if you want to learn more about Rue George Warren's work with Catawba Nation, go to Catawba.com. And hey, if you live in the eastern half of the US, you may just have a Paw Paw Festival coming soon to an area near you. Check out projectpawpaw.com/festivals to see where you can find one. It's Paw Paw season, so don't delay. Also, special thanks to Sherri Crabtree at Kentucky State University, Liz Reed, and
40:46 Dan Pashman? all the people who spoke with Liz at the Paw Paw Festival. Allison Brady, Blake and John E. Step, Emily and Kate Flights, Maggie Flynn, Kristen Harnish, Mark Hildebrand, Griffin Kennedy, M. Onion, and Vic and Vicky Rose. Next week on the show, we're taking your calls with Dan Pelosi, aka Grossy Pelosi on Instagram, and comedian Nagin Farsad, host of the podcast Fake the Nation. We'll get into your disputes about heating up leftovers, when to eat the first bite of a meal, and so much more. That's next week. While you wait for that one, check out last week's episode in which I attempt to invent an ice cream sandwich. That one's up now. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer- Emma Morgenstern. And senior producer- Andres O'Hara. Our engineer is- Jared O'Connell. This episode was edited by- Tracy Samuelson.
41:31 Dan Pashman? Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
41:38 Speaker 06 And I'm Holly Rosby in Cleveland, Ohio, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
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