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Two pawpaw fruits sit on a forest floor.
Pawpaws, Ohio’s largest native fruit, are in season from the end of August through early October. [Erin Gottsacker | The Ohio Newsroom]

It’s pawpaw season. Here’s how to find and cook Ohio’s largest native fruit

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MARIETTA, Ohio (The Ohio Newsroom) — A pawpaw lassi might sound like a drink made in the tropics, and it tastes that way too — like a blend of banana, mango and pineapple.

But pawpaws aren’t found in India. They’re native to Ohio, and there’s a chance the plant is growing in your own backyard.

Pawpaws are the largest edible tree fruits native to North America, said Sara Bir, an Ohio writer and chef. But they’re not well-known. She herself didn’t know about them until she was in her 20s, despite the fact that she grew up in pawpaw country.

A woman with a bucket hat on kisses a pawpaw fruit in the woods.
Sara Bir is an Ohio writer and trained chef. She’s been cooking with pawpaws for years. [Erin Gottsacker | The Ohio Newsroom]
“I had a boyfriend who was from West Virginia, and he told me about pawpaws and it sounded completely made up,” Bir said. “The name sounded preposterous, and the idea that there’s a fruit that no one has any awareness of.”

It wasn’t until years later that she stumbled upon one in the woods.

“I literally stepped on one and it splayed open,” she said. “And the flesh is this saffron color. It’s very, very bright. It’s unlike the color of anything else you see in the woods here.”

The experience sparked her curiosity.

“As a trained chef, I really wanted to know what to do with these things. A lot of people will just eat them, but I wanted to use them in recipes,” she said. “So that’s how I became a pawpaw convert.”

Foraging for pawpaws

Pawpaws are in season for only a short time, from around the end of August to early October. So right now, they’re plentiful in Ohio’s woods.

“When pawpaws are on the tree, they are a very unassuming green, so they completely melt away into the canopy,” she said. “You won’t notice them unless you’re looking for them.”

The fruit is about the size of a small potato, and when ripe, it falls to the forest floor. That’s where Bir trains her eyes to find the camouflaged fruit on a tromp through the woods of her hometown, Marietta.

A pawpaw fruit is processed by two hands pulling it apart.
Sara Bir splits a pawpaw open to separate the skin from the fruit’s flesh. It’s the first step to process pawpaw pulp. [Erin Gottsacker | The Ohio Newsroom]
“Here we go. We’ve got quite a few,” she said, a few minutes into the hike. “This is when it starts feeling like an Easter egg hunt.”

Pawpaws litter the ground here, but most are a deep brown.

That’s typical, Bir said. Pawpaws don’t stay good for long, which is why you’ve probably never seen them on supermarket shelves. Plus, overripe pawpaws taste bitter and can make you sick.

The pawpaws she’s looking for have a few key qualities:

  1. The best pawpaws are light green to yellow in color. A few brown spots are okay.
  2. Ripe pawpaws are soft, Bir said. They should yield to the pressure of your thumb.
  3. Pawpaws have a tropical smell. There’s nothing like it, Bir said, and once you forage for them, you’ll start to recognize their scent.

Bir collects pawpaws like this in a small backpack. When she finishes, her pack is full and so is her heart.

“[Foraging] helps me recalibrate,” she said. “And I think less about myself as an individual and more about myself as part of a larger system.”

Here’s a pawpaw lassi recipe

You can eat pawpaws plain, fresh off the forest floor.

But Bir has literally written the book on cooking with pawpaws — it’s called the Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook — and the pawpaw lassi is one of her favorite recipes.

A recipe for a pawpaw lassi, from Sara Bir's cookbook, a Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook.
A recipe for a pawpaw lassi, from Sara Bir’s cookbook, a Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook. [Erin Gottsacker | The Ohio Newsroom]
It starts the way all of her pawpaw recipes do — by processing pawpaw pulp. Pawpaw flesh is edible and tasty, Bir said, but the fruit’s skin isn’t, and eating its big black seeds would likely cause a stomach ache.

“So we’re going to separate the flesh and seeds from the skin,” Bir said. “And the way I like to do that is I just pick up a pawpaw and I crack it open like an egg. Then I take my thumb and I run it between the flesh and the skin.”

She tosses the skin in a pile to compost later, and puts the fruit and seeds into a colander. Then, she mashes the fruit through the colander’s tiny holes. Pawpaw pulp oozes down the sides and into a clean bowl.

It’s messy and it takes a while, but eventually, only the slimy seeds are left in the colander.

Now for the easy part — Bir blends one cup of the fresh pawpaw pulp with a handful of other ingredients:

  • 1 cup full fat buttermilk (you can substitute plain yogurt, preferably full-fat)
  • ¼ cup cold water
  • 2-3 teaspoons granulated sugar

She garnishes the drink with a pinch of ground mace, nutmeg or cumin, and the pawpaw lassis are ready to serve.

It’s just one of countless treats you can make with the native fruit, from salsa to smoothies, pudding to pie. A whole lot more will be on display at the annual Ohio Pawpaw Festival. It starts Sept. 13 in Albany.

The pawpaw lassi recipe comes from Sara Bir’s book, The Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook, reprinted with permission from Belt Publishing.