Love's Labors, Pulped

We had a heck of a lot of pawpaws to work through, but we could only do half, because only half were ripe enough to process. D'oh! Hence the pungency of my foyer at the moment. I will have to pay the piper tomorrow, because when they're ready, they're ready.

We wound up getting 9.5 pounds of pulp out of about 20 pounds of pawpaws--pretty much a 2:1 ratio of waste to food. I was surprised they were that pulp-rich--those huge brown seeds, the size of limas, are packed in pretty tightly.

We fed the pulp into Ziploc bags and froze it forthwith to use through the winter.

There it is: the fruit of our labor. Almost ten pounds of pawpaw pulp!

I sent half home with Anne to see what wonders she could create. Needless to say we shared a newly baked pawpaw custard for breakfast on Sunday. 

I went a little haywire on the nutmeg, but Anne was kind. We slurped it down. I have to say it was good especially when chilled overnight, so the flavor of pawpaw could pervade the whole custard. It bordered on elegant.

I beat two eggs with two cups of milk, a teaspoon of vanilla and 1/4 cup of sugar, added 1/2 cup of pawpaw pulp, added a rather too vigorous grind of nutmeg, and poured it into custard cups. Set them in 1" of water in a big Pyrex dish and baked at 325 for about an hour. They set up very nicely. Much better chilled than warm, surprisingly. It was kind of like a pawpaw flan. You turn them out of the cups and serve them upside down. Yum. Wish I had one now. Make that three.

Other uses for pawpaws, since you asked: Use it like bananas in breads, cookies, muffins. Use it in smoothies as you would bananas. (Cardamom sets the taste off very nicely). Flavor frostings with it. Make a yogurt sauce for spicy Indian food with it. My favorite use is in a cream sauce (start a white sauce using heavy cream and butter, and add about 1/2 cup of pawpaw, a squirt of honey mustard, a tablespoon or two of honey (sourwood is my fave!), salt and pepper to taste for a savory treat.

If you process your own pawpaws, be sure to get it done before they get too ripe, like my second 16 pounds did. (You'll know because they start turning black and get really soft).  Overripe pawpaw skin won't squeeze off the fruit on one piece. It goes into little bits that can sneak through the colander. And the skin can be allergenic. Believe me, I know. I'm currently on pawpaw embargo. When I'm hive-free, I'm going to try a little bit of Anne's Grade AAA skin-free pulp. Cross your fingers for me. It would be a cruel irony indeed if the Pawpaw Queen were barred forever from enjoying the harvest, processing and consumption.

For more recipes, see this awesome link Anne found:http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/pawpaw/recipes.htm

What fun we had. It was so great to have Anne down to pawpaw country, 

show her some nice birds

                                                              make the perfect BLT

give her some gen-u-ine Boston terrier love

see her soak it all up 

and send her home with a new taste sensation. We love to share what's wonderful about southern Ohio!

Come back soon, Miss Anne! And bring THREE TOYS this time!

Pawpaw Processing

Our Sunday dawned bright and beautiful, warm and partly cloudy. A good thing, because having done it inside and out, there was no way I was going to process pawpaws in my kitchen. It is a messy bidness.

So we set up outside on the picanic table.  Photos of the pawpaw witches by Phoebe Thompson.

First to go were the squishy ones. There's an optimum ripeness to pawpaws. When you can squeeze a pawpaw right out of its skin, it's ready to go. The pulp pulls away nicely from the shiny seeds and you get the most bang for your buck then. Too green, and the pulp sticks to the seeds and skin and you lose a lot. It tastes best when ripe. Overripe fruit turns black, and the pulp gets orangeish. 

Believe me, you can smell when they're ripe. Our friend Nina found her first pawpaw stand in the woods by smelling it!

You squish the pawpaws down into the colander until you have only seeds and skins left.

Anne developed a method of squeezing the pulp and seeds out of the skin before squishing it in the colander. This was a good innovation, because the green skin is a bit bitter, and you don't want it to find its way into the final product. Anne's pulp was Premium. Mine was full of little green bits that had to be picked out, and definitely would have been ranked Standard Grade.

photo by Liam Thompson

Ideally, what pours out the bottom is pure gold.

photo by Liam Thompson

 We worked out there in the sun all day. It was like making mud pies with your best friend.  It's the kind of thing country women have done for centuries, and don't do enough these days, in my opinion. Too much twiddling away at keyboards. Not enough gooshing.

Help Arrives!

 As I write, I can smell the pungent, fruity aroma of about twenty pounds of pawpaws in the foyer. I knew there would be a cost to my exuberance in hunting and harvesting 39 pounds of pawpaws.

I am blessed to have a friend who was willing to drive almost five hours to help me process them. Just another magical application of social networking...Anne, an old friend and fellow birdwatcher and foodie, saw my posts about the harvest and up and offered her services! It took me about two seconds to type back YOU BET!! When can you get here?

It turned out to be kinda late...about 10:30 on a Saturday night. Chet Baker stayed up to wait. He listened intently. He can always tell when someone's coming to visit.

The last time Anne visited, she brought two toys for Chet. He somehow knew they were in her suitcase, and he got down and dug for them until he found them, to gales of laughter all around. This night was little different. She put the toys on the kitchen table, and Chet invited himself up on her lap.

He commenced to sniffing around and quickly discovered the toys. I think he knew they were there all along.

Both were toast within a half hour, reduced to drifts of foam and Hollofil.

After a nice sleep, we started Paw Paw Processing Day with a great morning's birding from the tower. The view was spectacular, autumnal colors just aborning.

We held our own little Confusing Fall Birds workshop, with numerous appearances by Tennessee warblers

and their nearly identically-colored Doppelgangers, Philadelphia vireos (below). But note the vireo's bigger rounder head, much heavier blunt bill and shorter, heavier bright bluish legs.

There were lots of pretty magnolia warblers about

and a stunning fall parula, too. This is a spring parula, but ours wasn't much duller.

We could have stayed up there all day, watching for red-headed woodpecker flyovers, sharp-shins, sapsuckers...but there was work to do. 39 pounds of work to do. It was time to set up the Pawpaw Processing Plant.