Here are a few tips for cooking with pawpaws. But if you want to experiment in the kitchen, the pawpaw is an excellent addition to desserts, breads, vinaigrettes and sauces. Like papaya, mangoes and other tropical fruits, many people eat pawpaws straight up by simply slicing the fruit in half, removing the seeds and scooping out the sweet yellow flesh. “It gives me a connection to the long geological history of this landscape.” How to eat pawpaw “I love the idea of thinking about the giant sloths 200,000 years ago in what is now the Carolinian biosphere, eating the fruit and spreading the seeds behind them,” he says. But the other part is the rich history it evokes. (Presales start in July and are shipped the following March.)įor DeCampo, part of the joy of growing pawpaw is introducing the fruit to neighbours, friends and family.

Grimo Nut Nursery in the Niagara region, Ontario’s main supplier of pawpaw trees, has seen interest skyrocket in the past decade, with sales increasing to around 800 trees a year from 30. Every fall, foodies and chefs anxiously wait for the fruit to arrive. Instead, they grow at orchards dotted throughout Southern Ontario and as far north as Owen Sound, each with less than a dozen or so trees. Because of the short window of ripeness, there aren’t any large commercial pawpaw farms in Ontario. With only around a week-long shelf life, the pawpaw is a rare treat – and an outlier in Canada’s current food system, where we can buy seemingly any fruit or vegetable from anywhere in the world, at any time of the year. “There’s always this tension at the end of the season between waiting for optimal ripeness or losing them to predators.”Īn Indigenous chef showcases the food culture of coastal First Nations They knocked five to the ground,” says DeCampo, who in some years has lost all of his fruits to critters. “We had a bit of a raccoon party on the roof. The biggest threat to DeCampo’s harvest is wildlife. Pawpaw trees are naturally pest-repellant, mildew-resistant, thrive in partial shade and don’t require much pruning. “But that shouldn’t scare people away,” DeCampo tells me. These seeds are from cultivated trees selected by University of Kentucky to provide large and tasty fruits. (Uvaria triloba, Pawpaw) Perennial deciduous tree native to the Southern and Eastern United States. Family: Cuatard Apple (Annonaceae) Hardy to Zones 5 to 8. He tracked down someone selling seedlings (or really, “two sticks with roots,” he says), planted them in his front yard, and then waited 10 years for the trees to bear fruit. Paw Paw (Asimina triloba), select, fresh, packet of 10 seeds. He grew up in the food business – his grandfather had a fruit farm and his father was a produce supplier – so he was surprised to read of a tree indigenous to Ontario that he hadn’t heard of before. Duane Cole/The Globe and MailĭeCampo first heard about the pawpaw in the late 1980s in the reference book Native Trees of Canada by R.C. Paul DeCampo sits on the stairs leading to his house with his Pawpaw fruit tree in his front yard on Aug.

Pawpaw seeds for sale