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Comment by moultano | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the paw paw (not to be confused with the papaya which Australians call pawpaw) https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/15/550985844/th... It's a fruit that seems tropical, a close relative of the custard apple or sitaphal that tastes like a pina colada. Yet it grows natively all over the eastern US. It's so common that in many places it's every third tree in the forest.

I grew up in peak pawpaw country (Cincinnati), got a thorough outdoors education via boy scouts, and never learned about the existence of this incredible plant. Nobody knows about it! The day after I learned about it, I could walk a few feet into the woods in a park in the middle of the city, shake a tree and come out with tropical tasting fruit, and yet people walk by this tree every day oblivious. Mind-boggling.

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Pawpaws have very inconsistent harvests, don't ship well at all, and have a very short ready to eat -> overripe time.

They are also, like you note, absolutely delicious. I have two trees in my backyard. (You need two for them to pollinate and bear fruit.) But there are practical reasons why you don't see them for sale very often.

I get why they aren't in supermarkets but it's so sad that they've dropped out of food culture almost entirely. They're so abundant in the woods around Cincinnati that they are hard to miss. I remember seeing one on the ground while camping as a kid, but had no idea what it was and neither did anyone around me.

Make sure to do your part, and introduce as many people as you can! They're still very uncommon here in California, but they grow well in much of the state. I managed to get one of my neighbors to plant a pair a few years back. This year may be the first we both get fruit. :)

Are you in a wetter area? I mentally associate them with river valleys so naively I wouldn't think they'd be drought tolerant at all.

I'm in the bay area of California, so while we do get rain, it's highly seasonal. My pawpaws do need watering in the summer, but it isn't as bad as you might think. They have a pretty deep taproot once established, so a slow drip system just to keep the soil column from drying out can be all you need, which is pretty water-efficient. I'd say they use about as much water as an equivalent-sized stonefruit tree, like a peach or plum, maybe even a little less.

This should make them even more attractive as DIY foraging or backyard arboriculture.

A fruit that is delicious and exotic, but doesn't lend to industrial/agricultural production & marketing. That's kind of what truffles and morels are.

It definitely does: here in the DC area you’ll hear and see pawpaws from people’s foraging spots which are in public locations and are carefully never discussed in detail.

Couldn't they be canned to overcome these instabilities? It would reduce flavour, I'm sure, but still

It would be like canning a pudding. They're quite mushy when ready to eat.

Which may work out just fine! I've never tried, simply because there are never any leftover pawpaws in my house. :D

There are a number of active PawPaw breeding programs working to improve the fruit's production, size, and suitability for shipping. Some of the named varieties are even more incredible tasting than the standard wild ones.

Kentucky State:

http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/

http://kysu.edu/academics/cafsss/pawpaw/

http://ppserver.pawpaw.kysu.edu/KSUstory.htm

Purdue:

https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/nexus/Asimina_triloba_ne...

(I grew up around the trees and my father now grows and sells Pawpaw trees commercially.)

That makes me very happy to hear, and I wish your father the best of luck in making our native fruit better known.

Does he sell to individuals? Or if not, do you know of a nursery where I could buy one of the improved cultivars? I wouldn't mind planting one or two more. :)

Thanks!

He does. Here's his site: http://blossomnursery.com/ I'm not sure if it's the right time of year for transplanting, but he should be able to tell you if you contact him.

Thanks for the link! It looks like web ordering isn't working, but I see contact info, so I'm going to give it a shot. Some great pics, too. Cheers!

Sadly, that whole genus contains neurotoxins. I'm not sure the medical evidence is in on pawpaw's, but soursop is responsible for high rates of atypical Parkinson's in areas where it's a staple.

Looks like you're right:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22130466/

I'm guessing moderate pawpaw consumption is still relatively safe. This study isolated annnonacin from pawpaws and applied it to neural cells directly in large dosages. The soursop case involved prolonged and daily intake, as well.

The toxins are mostly in the leaves, bark, and skins, so eating them is quite safe.

Some people can have an allergic reaction when consuming them so just be aware of that when trying them for the first few times.

According to the linked article, the toxin is in the fruit pulp. I wonder if it could be bred out?

There's only a small amount in the pulp. Not an issue unless you totally gorge on them. (Similar to the Cyanide in Almonds.)

The active components have been studied for treatment of a variety of things - anti-tumor and pesticide uses being big ones:

http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/Pawpaw%20Acetogenins.htm

Unfortunately, it's hard to get funding to work on directly plant-derived compounds since companies can't get a monopoly on the resulting treatments.

Clover Food Lab here in Boston got a small batch of pawpaws recently and used them to make soda. It was heavenly.

Hopefully recent trends of farmers' markets and such will increase the availability!

South Africans also call papaya pawpaw. Wikipedia says the name is colour related:in Australia, these are called "red papaya" and "yellow papaw". In SA I only saw yellow.

Come to southeast Ohio and you will see that pawpaws are far from forgotten. Bumper stickers on cars are common and there's even a Pawpaw Festival each September.

https://www.ohiopawpawfest.com/

Lots of people I know in Kentucky eat them as well.

So much so that Kentucky State has a large program devoted to them:

http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/

I LOVE paw paws. I used to eat them all the time as a kid when I’d visit Kentucky. You can buy saplings online, but I’ve never had any success growing them in my area.

They're pollinated by blow flies, not by the insects that pollinate most other plants. Which is why it's sometimes recommended to hang small animal carcasses (rabbits, rats) between paw paw plants. For those of us who aren't too keen on nailing up dead animals, there's manual pollination.

I ate a paw paw once, and since then I've been trying to find a definitely identified paw paw tree so I can recognize them in the wild. The fruit was so delicious and the seeds were really interesting and unique. If any of you are willing to show me a paw paw tree in person, please shoot me an email.

It's 1am where I live right now, but tomorrow I'll take a picture of the two in my backyard and post it. They're only just starting to leaf out after winter, but you can get a decent idea of what they look like.

Thanks for the offer, but there's more to identifying plants for me than what they look like. There's also texture, and smell. I've looked at pictures online, and it's tricky, because apparently their morphology changes depending on where they are grown.

Here are a variety of pictures to give you an idea of the range of morphology:

http://blossomnursery.com/

http://blossomnursery.com/pawpaw_PIX.html

http://blossomnursery.com/pawpaw_more_pix.htm

Just go to your local botanical garden or arboretum. They’re super easy to recognize because the leaves look like giant exclamation marks. Sometimes you’ll see them planted near magnolia trees or Buckeyes, both of which also have big leaves, to ‘hide’ them so that people don’t eat the fruit.

I'd love to see (and taste) one too!

Hey we've got some pawpaws too! Ours are flowering and already setting some fruit!

Pawpaw is available in every supermarket in Australia, maybe not all year round.

I’ve seen quite a few pawpaw trees in backyards, but it’s defi an under appreciated fruit here too.

Dried sugar dusted pawpaw is flipping amazing.

I loved dried pawpaw as a kid (growing up in Aus) but never had it fresh. Is it good?

Hard to beat sugar dusted sweetness, but yeah the fresh fruit is delicious too.

That's a totally different pawpaw! The fruit that Australians call pawpaw, Americans call papaya. Edited original post to avoid confusion

Nah mate, same thing.

The Google image search you linked to is the pawpaw or papaya, it goes under both name.

See here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaya

I should know better since I work for Google, but you're getting results localized for Australia which are all "papaya." I get results localized for the US which are all this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba

The funny thing is that I've actually used this example at work as a rare case of an Australia/US localization issue, but totally forgot about HNs global audience when I made this post.

Ooooh, right, I see, thanks for clearing that up.

Yep, I see now how the flesh and seeds are similar to a Custard Apple. I’ve eaten those fresh from the farm in Norther New South Whales and liked them. Had limited success with store bought ones elsewhere in Australia.

Funny how we both forgot about internet search localisation!

This right here is why I've dumped Google. Long tail searches essentially no longer work, if I type a part number into Google it'll often be rewritten needlessly and I'll get irrelevant results.

Even Yahoo can get long tail search right, which is a pretty low bar. Though, Qwant seems to be the most well rounded search engine, both Yahoo and DuckDuckGo have unpolished edge cases that have turned me off over the years.

If you can remember the example queries I can pass them along to debug. (You can check your search history if you have it turned on. https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity )

Already passed them along a few weeks back when I was over in Fremont (a neighborhood in Seattle) at the Google Campus. Not expecting much, most of my friends who worked at Google have moved on to greener pastures.

Papaya does make for good ointment cream for massaging post op scarring. :)

From the Wikipedia article you linked to:

"The name Pawpaw or Papaw, first recorded in print in English in 1598,[8] originally meant the giant herb Carica papaya or its fruit (as it still commonly does in many English-speaking communities, including Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa). According to Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary, it began to be used [presumably in North America] "from 1760 to designate the papaw tree" [meaning not Carica papaya but Asimina triloba]."

So the original pawpaw is papaya, and the American pawpaw is the imposter.

I just learned about these last year from a coworker. I still have a way too old one in a ziploc bag in the fridge, because I was suppose to try and grow a seedling.

Are these like sapotes? My grandma has a Sapote tree in San Diego and it is incredible!

In that they have a tender, thin green skin and creamy white flesh. The flavor profile is pretty different though.

Pawpaw has been described as tasting like banana custard.

They area related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherimoya

(And yes, Sapotes are amazing too - one of my favorite fruit.)

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