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Download today. Sirius XM Podcasts All right, Sarah.
We are at the entrance to a park. Yes. At an undisclosed location somewhere in the New York metro area.
Yes. I would like to ask you to please read the email that you sent me that has brought us here today.
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, papas 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.
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. So Sarah, you're in from Ohio.
Here we are. Here we are. I think there's only one thing left to do.
What's that? Look for pawpaws. Let's go.
Okay. Oh, there are two more things I have to do.
Okay. Apply insect repellent. Okay. And then look for pawpaws.
Okay, all right, let's do it. 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.
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 Sané 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 gonna be at the Salem Lit Fest in Salem, Mass on a panel called Cooking the Books, cookbook authors from concept to cookbook.
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. 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 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. 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.
Exactly, exactly. This is the most fun kind of place to go foraging because it's full of surprises.
And it's completely unexceptional from where we're standing.
Yeah, there is no path. You should have brought a machete.
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? I think it's possible.
I think it's possible. I believe there are pawpaw trees here, but maybe I'm a nincompoop 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. Oh, so there's two hurdles we've got to get over.
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.
Yes, yes. Everyone listening, place your wagers now.
What is the probability of success here?
This is going to be successful no matter what, because any time, to me, it's been out of the woods is like totally, Totally worth it.
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.
Pawpaws are understory trees, so that means in a hardwood forest like this, The understory trees are going to be the shorter ones growing under what I suppose would be the canopy, right?
Right. Most pawpaw trees get to be like, maybe 20 to 30 feet tall, but 10 feet tall is also not an uncommon.
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. When was the first time you heard about pawpaws?
When I was in my 20s, 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.
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.
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. I was like, what the heck?
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, 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 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?
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.
I'm lucky that a bonafide 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 take place across the eastern half of the U.S., mostly in September.
We'll link to a list of them in the show description.
This year's Ohio Paw Paw 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 deseed, 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.
A couple years back, we sent reporter Liz Reed to the festival to chat up the Pawpaw Faithful.
What brought you here today? I'm just trying to find some pawpaw fruit and eat some pawpaw food, drink some pawpaw drinks.
We are foragers. We have Pretty hilly acreage and forested acreage that has pawpaws on it. so we get ideas on how to improve production on our own property.
I just found it fascinating that you could take a wild pawpaw and graft a different cultivar on it. and change the variety, but also... The festival also attracted some newbies.
I've had pawpaws once in my life. I grew up in West Virginia and, you know, you sang the song, you know, way down yonder in the pawpaw patch and all that kind of stuff.
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.
You cut it open, and the one I ate was really soft, so I kinda 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. They're very good. They're rich.
They're sometimes almost cloyingly sweet.
Well, it's a little slimy, but it's like somewhere between banana and mango.
There's a little bit of pineapple. This is genuine reaction.
All right, here you go. You try some. It's very much a combination between a banana and a mango.
Yeah, I would agree. That's good though.
That's really good. I like that. 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 cherimoya and soursop.
So most of the pawpaw's 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.
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.
It tastes very much like a tropical fruit called a sweet sap, which I was... familiar with from growing up in Jamaica.
Sweet sops 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 substitute that'll grow in the cold air.
Vic and his wife, Vicky, were so inspired they drove up to the festival on a whim.
So now we're standing in line to taste test because we don't know what a pawpaw really is supposed to taste like. and he can compare it to the one he knows, and I can learn something new.
The Ohio Pawpaw Festival is all about sharing pawpaws, eating them, swapping recipes, trading tips about how to grow them. some information isn't shared.
We live in Columbus and there's a lot of sort of competition because 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 between the animals and the other foragers.
It's real hard to get any. Do you know, what are some spots that you go to?
Do you have a favorite spot? Oh, we wouldn't give that away.
Why not? I just told you about the competition.
There's a park nearby and they have a hike every year.
And they tell you to bring a bag, so I figured they know where the pawpaws are.
I didn't go on the hike. I saw where they were meeting, and I went the week before. and found where the pawpaws were.
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?
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 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.
So we found our first pawpaw tree here. We did.
But this is a baby, so there's no hope of there being fruit at this point.
Sarah is now petting the pawpaw. I do this with lots of plants that I love that won't give me rashes, right?
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 the world.
So I feel good that we've already found signs of pawpaw life here.
Yeah. Yeah. in these woods, but this is a baby and we're hoping to find some fruit, so let's keep going.
You lead the way, Sarah, which way? 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.
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Thank you. 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 Heap's co-founder, Sarah Sané.
One ingredient that I've always thought should be in an ice cream and I've never seen it is fried plantains.
Hang on, I have to think. Because I love cold fried plantains out of the fridge.
This is a wild place to start. That's incredible.
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.
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 is in opera.
You should write an opera about the pawpaw.
We love the pawpaw. Yes. This is DeLessland George Warren, but most people call him by his nickname.
Roo. Roo is a citizen of Catawba 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 Catawba Reservation, then left to go to college and work in D.C.
He moved back in 2017 to work with the tribe.
Originally, he was focused on the Catawba language.
Coming back and working on the language, in diving into our language resources and the historical texts is that I couldn't know the language until I knew the land.
That's when that started expanding into understanding what are our native plants, what can we forage for, what are our agricultural traditions.
From there, it just kind of grew into larger community work on food.
Why couldn't you know the language until you knew the land?
So every language right is full of the values and understandings of the people who came before, right?
And so Catawba is... unique from European languages because it was developed on these lands.
Everything about the language is structured around our relationships and understandings with the land.
So for example, the word nature doesn't really exist in Catawba. the word you would use is basically just outside because there's not this philosophical underpinning in Catawba 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.
As Roo 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.
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 and adapt to places where it's actually freezing, where most of their relatives are in South America, where it's not freezing.
So this plant is explained to you. What are you thinking?
I'm thinking I want to grow this. Like, it sounds like such an amazing plant.
A year after Roo 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.
Ru starts asking community elders, what trees do you remember from your childhood that you don't see around anymore?
They mentioned 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 Catawba lands, Rue figures Catawbas must have interacted with them at some point.
And regardless of the history, Roo has a certain way of looking at his mission.
We're not just trying to recapture, record, and freeze our culture.
Because Catawba culture, was different from 1491 to 1770 to 1850 to now.
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 Catawbas, And so part of that is turning back to the land and remembering that the land was our first teacher, right?
Catawbas learned how to live on the land from the land itself.
And so that means even though we don't have records of how Catawbas used pawpaws or had a word for pawpaws, for example, it doesn't mean that that's not something that we can't start integrating back into our culture.
Roo and other Catawba citizens planted those trees three and a half years ago.
Since then, roos learn firsthand how fickle they can be.
So we kind of took an approach called STUN, Supreme, Total and Utter Neglect.
Is that a technical term? Turns out, yes.
This is a term in permaculture. You're not trying to cultivate... the plants that need the most care.
You're trying to cultivate the most resilient plants.
This is like the cry it out approach to parenting.
Exactly. Exactly. Like give them, give them some good soil, give them some water when you first plant them.
We got you. We fed you, kid. Your crib is very comfortable.
You're going to have to figure out how to sleep.
Which is kind of nerve wracking because it is a high loss kind of strategy.
Right. But the ones that survive, are not really requiring a lot of watering.
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.
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.
Not just the birds and the bees? 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 that are 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.
Well, you know, depends on what floats your pollinator's boat.
Exactly. Whatever the pollinators are into.
Have you thought about that first season when your pawpaw trees start to flower and you start to get fruit?
Yeah, every year we have what's called Yapien Iswa Festival, which is the day of the river people.
In our language, we call ourselves the river people 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.
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.
What do you see, Sarah? I see kind of a clearing.
It looks like it's a little clearer. Is that one over there?
That should be a pawpaw, yes. Yes. 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. 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? You haven't seen something big enough for it to be like a thing people talk about.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's just my guess is that there's a mother load. that we haven't come across.
It'll be a modest motherlode, 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 going to happen.
A couple 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 papas a couple weeks a year, and it gives me a big appreciation for just how much work it takes to eat.
Period. I mean, if in fact we don't find actual pawpaw fruits, I will be a little disappointed.
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.
Yeah. Yeah, sometimes you win and sometimes you don't.
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 Paw Paw 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.
Yeah. Why? How? There is a compound in there and in the seeds as well that induces vomiting.
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 got to 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.
You should not have that issue. No. Sarah and I keep searching.
And a few minutes later... Yeah, I feel very va... What?
Go. Go. Let's go. Roll out. She sees something.
Sarah sees something. We're going deeper into the woods.
Sawgrass, which is invasive. But here we go.
Here is a bigger one. Yeah, like... This is a big... This is...
Yes, this is a tree. This is an actual tree.
How many feet tall would you say that is, Dan?
I'm terrible at that kind of estimation.
I think it's more than double my height.
So I would say it's like 14 feet tall. Yeah, 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. but I still don't see any fruit, right?
No fruit here. 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... There's no other Sarah Burr.
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've been 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.
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. 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.
At this point, Sarah stops and looks at me with a twinkle in her eye.
Would you like to eat a pawpaw right now?
Did you bring a pawpaw? I did. Awesome. Sure, let's do it.
Yeah, this is like not- This is plan B. This is plan B forest bathing.
She's pulled out a pawpaw, it's wrapped in a paper towel.
Yes, this is not how you find them in the wild, is wrapped in a paper towel, so I am looking for one.
So wait, these are pawpaws that you foraged?
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 going to be lovely, but these aren't the ones that would be like entered in the best pawpaw contest.
They're just very average pawpaws. 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. Okay, okay.
Do I need a knife? You should be able to just tear into it with your hands.
Just rip it open. Yeah. Like, dig my thumbs into it and pull it apart.
Yeah, there's kind of not a wrong way. All right, all right.
I'm digging my thumbs in. At least in this context.
It pulls right apart. The skin is not too thick.
It is very juicy. Kind of mushy, like you say, custardy.
See the black seeds? There are the black seeds.
The flesh is yellow, bright yellow. So I would say to slurp out some of the flesh and then spit out the seed.
Okay. Can I just bite into the flesh? Yeah, yeah.
Just go for it. 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...
You're thinking. Yeah, there's something like a little bit sort of funky to it.
Like 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.
A taste of many things and also of none of them.
That's what's really hard about this to articulate, I think.
I'm getting the hang of eating it. 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. Yes.
Yes. Melty for sure. If you can sink your teeth into it, it's going to taste disgusting because it's not ripe.
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 such a weird sensation to eat it is that it feels totally out of place.
It's like I feel like I'm on vacation. Like I'm not here.
How could I be here and be eating this? I must be somewhere else.
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'd 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... Licking my fingers.
Licking your fingers and step three, if you like, is wipe them on your pants.
Sarah eats the other pawpaw she brought.
And then... What should I do with the rest of this?
This is fun. Okay. What you can do is... increase the genetic diversity of the pawpaws here.
Yes, I can drop these seeds around. We can expand the patch.
Yeah, totally. See, I call this a pawpaw bomb.
I'm just throwing them all around. I'm throwing the seeds all around.
Well, thanks, Sarah. This was super fun.
This has been super fun. I feel like we covered a lot of ground, both physically and existentially.
Yeah. On my three-hour voyage home, I reflect on what just happened.
Part of me feels like I crossed through the Paw Paw 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 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 Phan, who you'll remember from my early pasta testing.
He just got his hands on some pawpaws and he's cooking with them.
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 feet of wood chips.
He just has all these random trees growing out there, and Pawpaw's one of them.
And how did you get hooked up with this guy?
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 Pawpaw.
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. Because it's local. Yeah.
So you decided to make what with it, with the pawpaw?
Creme brulee. Are you going to brulee this creme right in front of me?
Absolutely. Here comes the brulee, the blowtorch.
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 the Sporkful, but I'm starting to think we may have stumbled onto the biggest thing since arugula got put in a bag.
Did you burn it? After Ron's done bruleeing, he pours a splash of rum over the top, then sets it on fire.
Let's 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.
Oh my god. That is so good. Now the real question is, do I save any of this for Janie or not?
Yeah. It won't. You know what? Yeah. Sorry, Janie.
I'm really, really sorry. If you want to see a photo of the pawpaw 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 Pawpaw 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 U.S., you may just have a Pawpaw Festival coming soon to an area near you.
Check out projectpawpaw.com slash festivals.
See where you can find one. It's pawpaw season, so don't delay.
Also, special thanks to Sherry Crabtree at Kentucky State University, Liz Reed and all the people who spoke with Liz at the Pawpaw Festival.
Allison Brady, Blake and John Estep, Emily and Kate Fleitz, Maggie Flynn, Kristen Harnish, Mark Hildebrand, Griffin Kennedy, M. Onion, and Vic and Vicki Rose.
Next week on the show, we're taking your calls with Dan Pelosi, a.k.a.
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.
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. And I'm Holly Rosby in Cleveland, Ohio, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
