It's paw paw season! For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, the paw paw (or Indiana banana as we call them here) is the Single Greatest Fruit Of All Time. I'm sure I wouldn't say that if we could have them year-round or find them in the grocery store, but they're only available at the farmer's market for about a month and they don't keep well enough to carry in grocery stores, so I spend most of the summer kind of itching for them, peering around for the one guy at the market who sells them. I was in Chapel Hill last weekend for a conference, and Suz heroically volunteered to go early and stand in line to buy me some. Thanks Suz!
More paw paw facts: These are native fruits and are apparently only recently gaining in popularity because they can be grown organically pretty easily, they're pest resistant and all that good stuff. Unfortunately, they flowers smell like rotting meat, they're pollinated by blowflies and carrion beetles, and they can't self pollinate, so you need at least two of these trees that smell like death. Apparently farmers either pollinate by hand or hang chicken necks to attract the beetles and flies. Yum.
What do they taste like? Sort of like a banana mashed together with a mango and turned into a custard. I think you can use them in recipes, but I like eating the flesh with a spoon. It's luxurious.
2 comments:
They are native to the Americas? Really? Where are they grown? I always thought that they were tropical!
Em, that's the highly amazing thing about paw-paws, they're the only member of the mango family that grows out of the tropics. Outside the US, paw-paws is another name for papaya, and that might be how they got the name, because they reminded people of papayas. Here's a distribution map. They're grown as far west as Texas and as far north as New York, but I think they're supposed to be most common in IN, OH, and on down to GA.
http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=ASIMI
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