Passion for pawpaws

Tim Forsberg
Posted 10/8/15

There’s a mysterious Native American fruit known as the pawpaw that’s now in season, and the only place to find them in Rhode Island is at Rocky Point. And after missing one of the state’s …

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Passion for pawpaws

Posted

There’s a mysterious Native American fruit known as the pawpaw that’s now in season, and the only place to find them in Rhode Island is at Rocky Point. And after missing one of the state’s best-kept secrets for the last few years, we were on a mission to find them. 

The first sign that the elusive fruits were ready came from a Facebook post from the Rocky Point Blueberry Farm on Sept. 20 exclaiming, “The pawpaws are coming! The pawpaws are coming!” The post said they’d be available for sale beginning on the 26th at the farm on Rocky Point Ave. from 9 until 11 a.m.

That Saturday morning, my wife Christine reminded me about the pawpaws at 8:45. I’d promised our 3-year-old daughter Lexi a shared pawpaw adventure with dad, so we readied quickly and headed to Warwick Neck. She was so excited, and I was too, for I’d never tried the fruit.

Arriving shortly after 9:30, we entered the farm through the familiar entrance we’d used to pick untold pounds of blueberries during the summer. It was already a gorgeous fall day, and Lexi immediately recognized where we were. There were two customers in front of us, but farm owners Rhonda Shumaker and Joe Gouveia were not at the stand, and while there were pears and apples on display, I didn’t see any pawpaws. 

Joe eventually emerged from under a pawpaw tree at the front of the farm carrying two pawpaws the size of pears. In the 30 minutes they had been open, the farm had sold out of the 60 pounds of the fruit they had readied for the day. Nervous that we weren’t going to get one, I quickly began thinking about what I would tell Lexi.

The first customer purchased one pawpaw. The second gentleman, whose name remains a mystery to me, graciously passed the last pawpaw to us with a smile stating he had already purchased some. Lexi beamed and thanked him, and I did, too.

The pawpaw cost $1.58, and as we left, Joe closed the farm gate behind us and put out a neon green “Sorry, no more pawpaws” sign with sad faces on it. I promised him I’d be back the following week, and we then headed to Rocky Point Park to enjoy more adventures.

Returning home, our intrigued family gathered around the curious fruit. I had read about the history of the plant, but in my haste I hadn’t learned how to eat it. I cut the greenish-yellow fruit lengthwise, revealing huge, dark brown seeds the size of almonds in the center and a mushy, yellow colored interior that resembled an overripe banana. The kitchen was immediately filled with a sweet floral smell of summer, and we all dug in with spoons.

I immediately wondered how something that tasted like it grew in the Caribbean thrived here in the city. As if a cross between a mango, cantaloupe, banana and pear, the flavors seemed destined to be made into a frozen drink topped with a candied cherry and a paper umbrella rather than being harvested alongside New England apples and pumpkins.

Within minutes, the entire fruit was gone – I even downed the skin, which I later found shouldn’t be eaten. Just like that we were all hooked, and for the next week I daydreamed about them.

Hoping not to be left out again, Lexi and I arrived back at the farm at 8:55 a.m. the following Saturday. Where the weekend prior met us with an idyllic fall day, the morning was cold, wet, and raw. Still, we found a dozen people in front of us quietly waiting with the same idea.

The farm’s latest Facebook post said there would be 80 pounds of fruit available, and I wondered if we’d be able to get more until I saw the sign saying, “Limit 5 pounds per person.” We were safe, but the line continued to grow behind us.

I ordered several pounds of pawpaws, and asked Rhonda and Joe if I could follow up with them during the week for more information about the plant and their efforts. We then went home and spent several hours baking four-dozen pawpaw cookies with a recipe we found online. The house smelled like a fruit-filled fall day, and rivaled the scents of apple and pumpkin pie. The cookies tasted wonderful.

Beacon reporter Kelcy Dolan was going to the farm this week to work on a story about the farm’s upcoming annual pumpkin walk, so I tagged along with her to inquire about the mysterious history of the pawpaws.

“The first time I tasted it, I didn’t really like them that much,” said Rhonda, who gave us an entire tour of the farm. “It was really kind of strange. But the next year I liked them more, and the third year I really liked them, so it’s like your taste buds have to adjust to it. I found I really liked the ones that are just picked and are really green, but it’s all based on personal preference.”

For thousands of years, Native American tribes ate pawpaws as a staple. European settlers followed suit and collected them from the wild. Thomas Jefferson grew them on his plantation, and Lewis and Clark sustained themselves on the fruit when their supplies ran low during their expedition.

The tree is a temperate member of a tropical family of fruits that grow wild, and is the largest native tree fruit in North America. When settlers eventually cut wild forests down and relied more on farming for food rather than gathering, knowledge of the pawpaw waned.

In the spring, the pawpaw tree sprouts purple flowers that give off a rotting meat smell that are eventually pollinated by carrion flies, not bees. To attract the flies, Joe and Rhonda hung chicken wings and legs by strings from the trees, and left them to rot and attract more flies.

“It’s a very weird plant,” said Rhonda. “If you break the twigs or the leaves, they also smell like rotting meat; it’s just a weird plant all around.”

The fruit grows all summer, eventually ripening in September and October. After picking, pawpaws generally spoil after several days, but its shelf life can be extended for a week or longer with refrigeration. Its skin is also easily bruised, and can turn dark brown and unattractive quickly. Because of this, the fruit hasn’t been successful commercially and typically isn’t available in supermarkets.

“We counted the fruit this year that we could see, and we had more than 1,500 pawpaws on the trees this year,” said Rhonda. “This year we have more, but some of them seem smaller than last year. We think we had better results because we baited the trees to attract more pollinators.”

Rhonda and Joe bought the farm in 2011 from Mark Garrison, who had planted about 35 pawpaw trees on the property a decade prior as a pet project. It’s the only orchard they know of in the state, with mature trees now more than 25 feet tall.

While they’ve collected fruits larger than eight inches in length and weighing over a pound, most fruits are usually only several inches long and weigh less than half a pound. Restaurants, hotels and distilleries have all purchased the fruit for their businesses, and the possible uses for the fruit are vast. Since the farm started selling them, the pawpaw has developed a cult-like following locally.

“It’s like a mad dash to the stand each week when we open,” said Rhonda. “There’s still plenty of fruit out there that are not ripe yet, not even close. So we’ll sell them up until October 24th.”

In addition to selling fresh fruits on Saturdays at the stand for $4.50 a pound, frozen packages of peeled and separated pawpaw pulp are also available. The farm will also ship the fresh fruit across the country by mail through flat rate boxes in quantities of three and five pounds.

“I like to eat it chilled, right out of the skin, but it’s supposed to make excellent ice cream,” said Rhonda, who provided a bag of pawpaw samples for the Beacon office before we left. They were all eaten by staff the very next day.

As far as my family’s newly discovered affinity for papaws goes, we’ve saved all the seeds we could to try and plant them next year, and we’ll see you in the pawpaw line soon.  

For more information on pawpaws, visit the farm’s website at www.rockypointblueberries.com/styled-6/page6.html.

 

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  • RPFarm

    Great article!

    Friday, October 9, 2015 Report this