Pawpaw

A tropical fruit that grows in Ohio

Pawpaw is the largest edible fruit native to North America — and unlike its cousins (cherimoya, soursop, sweetsop), it grows in temperate forests from Florida to Ontario. The tree thrives in shaded river valleys across Appalachia, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic.

Walking through a Kentucky or West Virginia hardwood forest in September, you’ll occasionally find pawpaws on the ground — soft, fragrant, and ready to eat. Most North Americans have never seen them because they don’t grow well in cultivation orchards.

Why aren’t they in stores?

Pawpaws have two big commercial problems:

1. Shelf life — fully ripe pawpaws have only 2-3 days at room temperature; refrigerated, maybe a week
2. Bruising — the soft skin and custardy flesh damage in any handling

Together these make the fruit essentially impossible to ship through normal grocery distribution. Only farmers’ markets, festivals, and direct-to-consumer sellers move significant volumes of pawpaws.

A historic American food

Pawpaws were a major foraged food of indigenous peoples across eastern North America — the names “pawpaw” comes from a Powhatan word, and many Algonquian languages had specific names for the fruit. Lewis and Clark survived on pawpaws during the late stages of their expedition.

Thomas Jefferson grew pawpaws at Monticello. George Washington named them his favorite dessert. The fruit was a staple of frontier and Appalachian cuisine well into the 19th century.

A revival movement

Since the 1990s, a pawpaw revival movement has been growing — the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, university breeding programs (especially Kentucky State), small commercial orchards, and a craft-beer pawpaw market.

Pawpaw beer (sometimes blended with traditional ales, sometimes a specialty saison) has appeared in craft breweries from Cincinnati to Asheville. The fruit’s distinctive tropical flavor — banana, mango, hints of vanilla — surprises drinkers who didn’t know it could grow in North America.