Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  Bergefurd, Ron Powell, and many others believe pawpaw is one of those high-value crops. This is what Brett Callaway hoped the KSU pawpaw research program could accomplish, a notion that’s still rippling through Ohio and this association. And right now, if you are connected to the right markets, where pawpaw can sell for up to ten dollars a pound, there’s not enough fruit to go around. Ron, with his three-acre orchard, still can’t produce enough seed to satisfy his buyers. In Cincinnati, select grocers can’t keep the shelves stocked. The demand is there; the buyers exist. And many of these small-acre farmers already have pawpaws, albeit wild ones, in their surrounding woods. “Nobody really manages them,” Bergefurd says. “The things fall to the ground.”

  There is a boutique demand, yes, but the future for a robust pawpaw industry is unclear, as is the question of how many Americans will want to eat them. There are a few modern examples of new fruits entering American markets and succeeding. Kiwi, for example. Significant imports of kiwifruit to the United States began only in the 1950s, when it was essentially unknown. An early description draws more parallels to pawpaw. “[The fruit’s] external appearance is not particularly attractive, [but] the flesh is an attractive emerald green color and has numerous small, jet-black, edible seeds.”3 Americans quickly embraced kiwi. In the next few decades as demand exploded, the California kiwi industry grew 667 percent; nearly twenty-seven thousand tons of kiwis are grown domestically today (not to mention imports from Chile, New Zealand, and Italy).4

  Of course, pawpaw’s texture is more difficult than that of kiwifruit. It doesn’t slice cleanly, and won’t work well in a fruit salad (the primary way my mother prepared kiwi while I was growing up). Some are quick to point to the pawpaw’s other flaws: Its shelf life is too short, it doesn’t ship well, it’s too full of seeds. An inside joke among breeders, “We’re still working on the seedless pawpaw,” is likely to never come true. But as more consumers develop a taste for pawpaw, I’m not convinced that seediness will actually be a problem.

  Consider two of pawpaw’s cousins: Annona cherimola, or cherimoya; and Annona muricata, known as soursop in English, guanabana in Spanish. Soursop, a prickly-skinned tropical fruit that’s citrusy and gummy (it even tastes a bit like Juicy Fruit), can be incredibly seed-laden—large fruits contain from a few dozen seeds to as many as two hundred.5 To eat the fruit you scoop out chunks and separate the pulp from the seed with your mouth—far more work than eating an apple or banana, but it’s not considered a problem because of the simple fact that it tastes wonderful. It’s eaten widely across the tropics as fresh fruit; it’s found in sugary fruit drinks both in the regions where it grows and at ethnic markets throughout the United States. Frozen soursop pulp (often labeled only in Spanish, guanabana) is also widespread. Cherimoya’s seed-to-pulp ratio and consistency aren’t much different, and it too is cultivated widely in the tropics. I’ve even found fresh cherimoya, shipped from a great distance, at Asian food markets in Pittsburgh. And domestically there’s already a burgeoning cherimoya industry in California.

  Although we now have seedless watermelons, for centuries we never balked at black-specked slices of this delicious, red fruit. Rather than be intimidated, we held seed-spitting contests! Food doesn’t always have to be easy. We like eating our sunflower seeds in their hulls, wresting steamed crabs from their shells, and so on. Granted, apples and bananas are much easier to eat and transport, and no amount of breeding is likely to change that for the pawpaw. “I wouldn’t foresee it as a pawpaw-in-every-kid’s-lunchbox kind of an industry,” Brannan says. “It will have to be different than that.” And that’s okay. Ultimately, if Americans come to love the taste of pawpaw, perhaps its seediness—low compared to these other Annonaceae—won’t actually be the problem that many believe it to be.

  Processed pawpaws, for use in juice, ice cream, tea, soda, you name it, could hold even more potential. But in order for that to happen—and this has been said time and again—an efficient method for separating pulp from seed and skin will need to be developed.

  Ron’s modified Roma tomato processor sits prominently in the center of the auditorium. We spend time inspecting it, rotating the arm, and passing his tools around. At the suggestion of Kirk Pomper, Ron and Terry began using this particular food processor because an electric motor can be attached to it. Ron has also removed an inch and a half from the machine’s spiral auger to allow seeds to pass through, and uses a salsa screen. This method is good for home use, but wouldn’t be in a commercial setting, since Ron says the seeds must be passed through the processor twice to remove the majority of the pulp, and removing the skins is still done by hand. Because there’s no industry standard processor yet, the DIY methods are many.

  Marc Boone has traveled for today’s meeting from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He describes his processing method, which includes a repurposed deep-fryer basket, to a small group of backyard growers. “I crack them right into a deep-fry basket,” he says. “And I take my spatula and as fast as I can, I push that pulp through the grating, and then I’ve got a deep fryer full of seeds. I probably only get about 30 percent of the pulp when I do it that way. But it’s the quickest way for me to do it, and being efficient with my pulp is not as important as being efficient with my time.”

  In 2009, Iowa State University’s Patrick O’Malley began an experiment to determine how producers could commercially pulp and store pawpaws. Using the university’s existing pulper, they demonstrated that skin and seed could be successfully removed by a mechanized pulper. But that process yielded only 53 percent skin- and seed-free pulp—47 percent was wasted. And hand labor was still involved, as fruits needed to be halved lengthwise before entering the pulper. Further, O’Malley reported that the cost of the system, estimated at more than seven thousand dollars, may be well out of reach of the small grower. Integration Acres, the nation’s largest pawpaw processor, uses a machine that would also likely be cost prohibitive for smaller growers (however, its Athens County neighbor, ACEnet, offers a cooperative model that may find success elsewhere). Meanwhile, O’Malley suggests exploring a Roma food strainer as a cheaper alternative.6

  In terms of quality control of mechanized processing, Chris Chmiel is considering removing the seed sacks from his pulp, based on research showing that the same bitter flavor encountered near the fruit’s skin is also present around the seeds, though he and others actually enjoy the flavor and eating of the seed sacks. Still, personal preference aside, he would like to keep bitterness out of the packaged pulp.

  Although the processing problem hasn’t yet been solved, Robert Brannan is already looking to the next step—fresh, processed pawpaw pulp in your grocer’s refrigerator. Thanks to a recent breakthrough in high-pressure processing, fresh, ready-made guacamole is now available in grocery stores. It’s a relatively new tool in food science; without it, the guacamole would turn black before it got off the assembly line. It could be used for pawpaws too. “It’s like four thousand elephants standing on this thing,” Brannan says. “It inactivates enzymes, and it can kill, pasteurize, pathogenic organisms.” Although pawpaws freeze well, this would be another tool to expand their distribution and storage.

  OSU is also experimenting with hops, and when Bergefurd mentions this during his presentation, Greg Hoertt shifts in his seat and asks several questions about the quality of Ohio-grown hops. He’s a homebrewer. I speak to Greg after the grafting demonstration and learn he has pawpaw beer in his car. I’m eager to try it, but he decides not to crack it in the parking lot of the Quaker college, and instead invites me to his home.

  At Greg’s home orchard the ground is wet from the recent spring rains. We’re just outside Xenia, where the Shawnee leader Tecumseh lived at the time of the American Revolution, and a few yards from Caesar Creek, named for the escaped slave who, according to the legend, later joined with the local Shawnee. Greg grew up nearby; as a child, he and his father would hike these storied woods and occasionally snack on pawpaw
s.

  It’s spring, and though his pawpaws are just beginning to leaf out, the trees have dozens of small pawpaw clusters. A few weeks ago, wanting to give his trees a boost, “I gave it a big drink of this concoction that I make of blood meal, and dung meal, and feather meal, and kelp concentrate,” he explains. “The other thing that’s good about using that concoction, I let that ferment and then, man, the flies are here within a half an hour.” It’s the flies, of course, that do the work of pollination.

  Greg’s great-grandmother was Miami Indian. Although many in his family have not been particularly interested in that heritage, Greg is, and part of his joy in cultivating pawpaws is this connection to his Native American roots. Greg is also equally interested in his Alsatian German heritage. His Kölsch-style pawpaw ale fermenting in copper kettles, and featuring pawpaw pulp spiced with European hops, represents a culinary bridge from the Miami River to the Rhine. And while planting pawpaw trees can’t resuscitate the once great nations of the Ohio River Valley—it doesn’t return land to the Shawnee and the Miami, or undo broken treaties—it can be a way of honoring their traditions and legacies by returning a once beloved fruit to its home in a new American culture. “Xenia is where Tecumseh lived,” Greg says. “I’m on Native American land, growing a Native American fruit, I have Native American genes in me, and I just kind of like all that.”

  In developing a pawpaw industry, its history cannot be overlooked. Kiwi and pomegranate are wonderful, and they were once novel in the US, but pawpaw has always been here, and many an American’s grandparents ate it and cherished it. “It has a story,” Jim Gilbert has said. “I think people like the idea of something that’s native, and part of the appeal of any crop is its story.”

  Like the fruit itself, not all pawpaw beers are great. “The style of beer, the yeast, and then the pawpaw, all have an outcome on the final product,” Greg says. And though he admits that the malt, hops, and style of beer will affect taste, Greg is looking for specific cultivars that are best suited for brewing. “I think I’m going to want sweeter, and I’m going to want more flavorful,” he says. Greg doesn’t put fresh fruit in his boil because it would lose too much flavor (rather, he waits for the secondary fermentation). A number of breweries in Ohio make a variety of terrific pawpaw beers, and nationwide pawpaw beers continue to debut everywhere from Indiana and Michigan to North Carolina and Missouri. These beers are seasonal, and often play on regional nostalgia for the fruit, as well as the appeal of local breweries using local ingredients. Fruit beers can divide an audience, but Magic Hat #9, brewed with apricots, is very popular. Maybe pawpaw is next.

  Americans have experimented with fermenting pawpaws for centuries. In the early 1800s, François André Michaux wrote, “At Pittsburg, some persons have succeeded in making from it spirituous liquor;”7 and before long pawpaw brandy was a fixture from the Ohio River Valley to Missouri. During the Civil War, Sandusky, Ohio, native John Beatty wrote of receiving “a box of catawba wine and pawpaw brandy from Colonel James G. Jones, half of which I was requested to deliver to General Rosecrans, and the other half to keep to drink to the Colonel’s health.”8 And in 1921, the Sandusky Star-Journal reported “Pawpaw beer, properly made, is said to have the hardest kick of any of the home brew drinks. It has become quite popular in some parts of Ohio since the coming of prohibition.”9

  Finally, and carefully, we open a bottle of Greg’s pawpaw beer. Greg has made pawpaw porters, wheats, and sours, but this brew is the Kölsch mentioned above, with fruit pulp added during a secondary fermentation. It tastes great, one of the best pawpaw beers I’ve had. “Like I tell my niece,” Greg says, “I don’t make it because it sucks.” In fact, Fifty West Brewing Company, located just outside Cincinnati, adapted one of Greg’s pawpaw recipes for its Fox Paw, an English pale ale. Down the line, if enough growers can produce enough fruit, perhaps it could become a year-round ale. For now, it’s a seasonal treat.

  I camp near Yellow Springs at John Bryan State Park, and in the morning hike down to the Little Miami River. I’m on the Clifton Gorge trail. On all sides of the path, much of the woods are overrun with Japanese honeysuckle. Before this plant’s arrival, the area would have been prime pawpaw habitat. I’ve seen other forests like this, where pawpaws are abundant, extending for miles, but here the traditional understory has been supplanted. A cardinal passes by; crows caw. Finally, after a mile or so, I begin to see pawpaws with immature, early-spring leaves, their flowers dropping. The tallest stands at least thirty feet, skinny and straight.

  One of the seven outstanding fruits of the 1916 contest came from Springfield, Ohio, just fifteen minutes north of Yellow Springs. The fruit was submitted by S. C. Martin, and mailed on September 19. It weighed ten to eleven ounces, with flesh “yellow and of superior quality, seeds not large, skin tough,” according to the Journal of Heredity. “Fruit arrived in perfect condition and matured evenly.”10 The pawpaws in this country were exceptional then. And in nearby Adams County, where Ron Powell’s farm is located, a geological surveyor reported in 1838 that the density of the stands “did not permit us to range on an average more than 130 feet at a time.”11 Those wild thickets—in Adams County and in Springfield, as elsewhere—are fewer now, supplanted by subdivisions and highways, plowed under for larger corn plantings, and often in the remaining wild places edged out by invasives. It’s in this light that Ron Powell’s work of saving cultivars, the best fruit of an earlier generation, seems even more important.

  About a month later, at my home in Pittsburgh, my parafilm-wrapped graft has broken through its bandages—it’s putting out new growth. The graft will grow about 10 inches this year—a success! In a few years I’ll have a productive Overleese pawpaw tree, a cultivar selected from the wild in Indiana by W. B. Ward back in 1950. According to KSU, it ripens in early September in Kentucky, and the first week of October in Michigan. Its fruit size is large at KSU, with the average pawpaw weighing more than 170 grams, and the trees bearing around fifty-five fruits each. Hopefully all of the grafts that we did back in May will succeed, and in a few more years Ron will have useful data coming in. I hope to be able to report on my own Overleese in southwest Pennsylvania, and the others I’m growing. All the while Ron will be collecting data, assessing the culture of growing pawpaws in America.

  — CHAPTER TWELVE —

  INTO THE WOODS: A NEW ORCHARD

  I’ve forgotten to get rubber boots. Instead, I hold my ankle-high hiking boots in my arms, pants rolled above my knees, and prepare to ford Pierson Creek. Though it is now May, the temperature is still in the midfifties Fahrenheit and the water is quite cold. “I told you to bring your rubber boots,” Steve says, again. It appears I’ll be getting wet. We find the narrowest point, and cross.

  Steve Corso is an amateur pawpaw researcher; we are in South Stebbins Forest, a tract of the three-thousand-acre woods of the Holden Arboretum in northeast Ohio. We’re hunting wild pawpaws, but not for the fruit; if we find them, the trees will show only the earliest signs of leafing out. We search instead for a confetti of maroon blooms: pawpaw flowers. Today Steve is working on a study for the Geauga County Park District to learn how pawpaws influence the development of forests, including the mycorrhizal fungus around the trees’ roots. In addition to our current trek, he will visit such colorfully named places as Big Creek, West Woods, Swine Creek, Frohring Meadow, Eldon Russell, Beartown Lakes, and Chickagami. But Steve is not a scientist by profession; a former teacher, he just happens to be very interested in pawpaws.

  Between us we’re carrying a diameter reader, a PVC pipe for carving out root and soil samples, ziplock bags for the collections, two apples, and a recently purchased iPad for GPS mapping. With pants rolled and boots in hand, I cross the river. The cold begins to sting, but our gear and my boots remain dry. We head into the woods.

  With a full pack, Steve darts up the first hill with the energy and agility of a twenty-something. In fact, when I first met him, at the intern
ational pawpaw conference in Kentucky, I’d assumed he was around my own age. At forty-three, he sports a pointed goatee and mustache, a red flannel hunter’s cap, and with his tools and knee-high rubber boots looks the part of quirky woodsman scientist. Steve is also a beginner farmer. In addition to various heirloom vegetables, he cultivates currants, persimmons, Russian seaberries, nut trees, and a sizable young pawpaw orchard. He grew up a short distance away in Mentor, Ohio, and went on to Ohio University in Athens. But he didn’t catch pawpaw fever there. Oddly enough, he caught it in California.

  Steve had moved west, to the San Francisco Bay Area, smitten with that region’s landscape and culture, where he met his wife, Tatiana. But after a while, they got the urge to try their hands at farming. The couple, now with two children, envisioned life in rural California, but eventually it was Ohio, near where Steve grew up, that was the most practical choice. Before moving back east, though, he had a serendipitous encounter at a farmers market in Oakland, California. Arranged on a vendor’s table were round green fruits, and though this was California, they weren’t cherimoyas, smooth-skinned avocados, or even mangoes. Here, twenty-five hundred miles away from their native range, were fresh, farmers market pawpaws. If Steve needed a reason to be excited about moving back to Ohio, here it was: a fruit that was not only native to his home state, but would actually thrive better in the humid East than in the otherwise famously fertile valleys of California.

  Steve and his family moved to Geauga County in June 2010, and by spring 2011 his pawpaws were planted. Steve ordered half a dozen grafted pawpaw trees and one hundred seedlings. He attended the International Pawpaw Conference in Frankfort, Kentucky, and the following year planted an additional sixty grafted cultivars and fifty more seedling trees. Steve saved seeds from both the wild and the cultivated fruit he ate, and raised them in containers. Not all of these seedlings would survive, but when I arrived earlier in the day, nearly two hundred were beginning to leaf out. The family’s homestead had in just three years become a pawpaw headquarters in the making.