Here’s a fruit that is native to Ohio, but you’ve never tried.

The pawpaw is native to Ohio, but the fruit has to be picked when ripe, and then eaten.  The fruit doesn’t ripen after it’s picked and only lasts about week in the refrigerator, so there isn’t a big commercial potential.  Pears can be picked weeks before they are ripe, and apples can be refrigerated for months.

The fruit is finicky, but the tree sounds badass.  Almost every part of the pawpaw tree is laced with a neurotoxin called annonacin that causes Parkinson’s disease, so deer don’t eat it.  For some reason, people in Guadeloupe make tea out of the leaves because they need more brain lesions.

My friend Peter has a few pawpaw trees, so brought me a pawpaw to try.

Sparky is in the photo because he’s awesome and was just teasing my brother about eating a pawpaw even though Dave already has a dramatic loss of neurons in his basal gaglia.  We explained that Dave recently had a knee replacement, which causes his lurching gate, and he isn’t suffering from poor regulation of voluntary muscle movement.

Sparky stopped laughing when he realized that the doctors discarded Dave’s old knee joint.  Sparky figured it would be quite like a ham bone, and he really likes those.

Pawpaws smell great.  The smell is floral and tropical, but without being overpowering.  It would make a great shampoo smell. 

Ohio botanist William B. Werthner wrote, “The fruit … has a tangy wild-wood flavor peculiarly its own. It is sweet, yet rather cloying to the taste and a wee bit puckery – only a boy can eat more than one at a time.” 

I don’t know who that guy is, but he wrote a book about a hundred years ago, so we don’t really know what he’s talking about.

The fruit is eaten with a spoon, scooping out the inside.  We didn’t eat the skin, but it is probably Parkinson flavored.  The texture is smooth, like custard.  It had a melon and mango flavor.  I didn’t notice anything puckering, but the phenomena may have been subtle. 

I can enjoy one circus peanut, but a second one makes me queasy.    A pawpaw doesn’t taste anything like a circus peanut.  In case the terminology isn’t universal, circus peanuts look like this:

Circus peanuts seem to be made of sugar and an industrial solvent.  It might be lacquer thinner.  Pawpaws are much different, and contain several vital nutrients.  We only had one, so my brother and I each had a paw.  I am an old fella, but would eagerly eat a few of them.

The pawpaw seemed like a completely satisfactory fruit, like grapes or raspberries.  Other fruits need some other ingredient to bolster the appeal.  Strawberries benefit from cream or dark chocolate.  Apples need a whole pie to be at their best, while a watermelon is improved with vodka.  The idea of bananas is better than actual bananas.

Pawpaws are nice, right out of the box.