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Behold the pawpaw
You might be surprised to learn that the tropical-tasting pawpaw fruit grows right here in Canada. And if you can get your hands on one, chef Tawnya Brant says you’re in for a treat.
“What do you think tropical tastes like? If that was a flavour, if that was the smell on its own, that's probably exactly what a pawpaw would be,” said Brant, owner of Yawékon Foods and host of the APTN’s One Dish One Spoon.
Brant, a Mohawk chef from Six Nations of the Grand River, says the fruit tastes like a banana, mango and pineapple all rolled into one, with a custardy texture that gets almost caramel-like as it ripens.
“It's like a little alien banana … a little shorter and chubbier, I guess, more like an oval type of shape — and they have these huge seeds inside,” she told The Current’s Matt Galloway.
Pawpaws have grown in North America for millennia, and were once abundant from Florida to Missouri to southern Ontario. They were widely cultivated by Indigenous people before colonization, but were pushed back as forests were cleared for farmland. Some trees still grow in the wild and in some orchards in pockets of southern Ontario, B.C. and Quebec, yielding fruit in the fall.
Part of the reason pawpaws aren’t widely known is that they have a very short shelf life, browning quickly after they’re picked. They also bruise very easily, making it difficult to harvest and sell in large numbers commercially.
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Brant first tried the fruit about a decade ago when a friend brought some to her late mother’s garden. Before that, she’d heard of the fruit, and that the Haudenosaunee had helped to bring the trees up the eastern seaboard over the centuries, “just because we liked them so much.”
“I was told kids would go on like little rafts and go down creeks and … collect them that way,” she said.
“It was definitely a once-in-a-year [treat], something to enjoy, and really something to appreciate because we didn't really have a way of preserving them.”