All hail the Homewood Banana!

I am happy to report that pawpaws – an elusive, largely unknown native American fruit – are real. Also, that they are unlike any other fruit you’ve ever had, including bananas, and taste very good.

On Sept. 1, a day I will long remember, Rachael Middleton brought over five pawpaws from one of her three trees. Rachael, who lives in Homewood, had read my column on pawpaws – which first appeared in the Chronicle’s May 19 print edition – and contacted me in mid-July to say she had real, live fruit-bearing trees in her backyard.

“We have them,” she wrote. “(We’d) be happy to share. We have WAY more than we can eat. They are an acquired taste.”

Patty and I visited Rachael’s yard and she showed us her pawpaw trees, which are about 15 feet tall and were filled with golf ball-sized green fruit. She said they usually ripen in the middle of September but there is no way of knowing for sure. When the fruit is ripe, it just falls off the tree, she said.

At this point, I should probably give a brief recap of my own pawpaw experience. As I explained in May, I have been very interested in pawpaws – some might call it an obsession – for the last several years. The pawpaw, scientific name Asimina triloba, is the largest indigenous American fruit tree. However, it appears to be a tree, and fruit, that defies domestication. As Rachael said, when the fruit is ripe it just falls off the tree. That makes it nearly impossible to plan for any kind of growing season during which pawpaws can be sent to market.

The fruit is sweet and creamy inside – or so I was told – and is known in different locations as a Michigan banana, Indiana banana and other variations on that theme.

Pawpaws are considered semi-tropical fruit trees and our part of Illinois is about as far north as they grow as wild plants. At least that was the case prior to the ongoing climate change.

When our backyard ash came down four years ago, we planted a number of trees to make up for the loss. I insisted on getting pawpaws and there are three of them in the rear of the yard. To be honest, until this year, they were always kind of a disappointment, slow-growing and giving no sign that they’d ever amount to anything.

Then, this spring, the paws paws flowered for the first time. That was pretty exciting. If fruit is to grow, the trees must cross-pollinate. I took a stab at pollinating the plants with a paintbrush. That didn’t work but it was still a very good year for the pawpaws. Two of them grew nearly two feet this summer and they are no longer the runts of the backyard.

Still, I had never seen pawpaw fruit and was a little dubious that they actually existed. That changed when Rachael brought them over.

Following the May column, I also heard from Nick Epley, who offered to share pawpaws from trees in his backyard in Flossmoor. He said he has two trees that are “bearing pretty heavily” and that last year he harvested about 30 pounds of the fruit.

“We had more fruit than we knew what to do with,” Nick wrote. “They taste great and smell even better.”
All of which leads to one final question: What are pawpaws like?

For starters, they are green and about the size and shape of an egg. I thought they had a tart smell, which, as Nick mentioned, is quite nice.

When you cut them open, the flesh is bright orange. It is very soft. Again, this appears to be a fruit that does not have much shelf life.

We found the softest of the five pawpaws and sliced it in half. I took a picture before we ate it.
The pawpaw lived up to its billing. It was sweet and creamy and had a taste unlike other fruit. Also a sight aftertaste, but nothing unpleasant. Patty ate the skin. I did not. We both agreed that the pawpaw had something of an odd taste but that we liked it a lot.

One more thing. The pawpaws contain five or six big black seeds – they are the size of an olive. Rachael warned us that they are reportedly extremely poisonous. I was not going to find out for myself.

The pawpaws appeared to be tropical fruit. We bought a papaya to compare the flavor and texture. There are some similarities but many more differences.

Again, I am just glad that you can grow these in our backyards.

And who knows? In three or four more years I may have some of my own.