Pawpaw Is the Tropical-Tasting Fruit That Grows Wild Across the Eastern US

Walking the hiking trails near her daughter’s preschool in Ohio, chef and recipe developer Sara Bir came across something that felt almost mythical. 

“I saw it in the middle of the trail — a bright, saffron yellow kind of squash fruit, and I couldn’t make any sense of it,” she recounted more than a decade later. “They were like this obscure ghost fruit.”

She realized, after somewhat brashly deciding to taste the fruit, that she’d stumbled on a wild pawpaw: Asimina triloba. Despite being native to North America and easily grown in most of the eastern United States, this fruit is still relatively unknown. Bir — who later authored The Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook — and a legion of fans have set out to raise its profile.

What is pawpaw?

Pawpaw is a tree fruit native to eastern North America, growing naturally from southern Canada to the Florida panhandle and from the coastal plains of North Carolina to “the very eastern tip of Texas,” according to Christian Flores, a horticulture agent with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension. Pawpaws grow as “understory trees,” he says, meaning they grow under the canopy of a forest. They’re the largest fruit native to the United States.

Perhaps most notably, pawpaw is related to tropical fruits like soursop and custard apple, and has a similar tropical character despite growing in a temperate region. “They kind of taste like a mango and a banana,” says Flores, who recently taught an introductory class at the PawPaw Palooza festival. “They usually stay custardy. It’s kind of like a really soft mango; it’s not fibrous in any way.”

Elsewhere, the fruit’s taste has been compared to a pineapple or soursop, but Bir agrees on mango and banana as the closest flavor profiles.

When is pawpaw in season?

Pawpaw season generally begins in late August, peaking in September. 

“The farther north you go, you’ll have ones ripening a little later,” Flores says, adding that cultivated pawpaws might be ready slightly earlier or later than wild pawpaw patches but will generally follow the same timeline.

You’ll know the pawpaws are ripe because they’ll start falling off the tree. “If you’re foraging, you can smell them if there’s a lot of them,” Bir says. “When they fall, they split open and they’re very aromatic.”

You can also give a pawpaw tree a gentle shake to see if the fruit is ready because they’ll fall to the ground if so, Flores says.

How to prep and cook with pawpaws

Like similar fruits, pawpaw can be enjoyed raw. Otherwise, people most often use pawpaw to make a quick bread, ice cream, or custard — but you’ll also find home cooks getting creative and breweries making pawpaw beer.

In her book, Bir includes 30 recipes with the fruit. Its flavor pairs well with mustard and hot sauce, she says, but works best in frozen desserts and custards. “I realized when you heat the pawpaw pulp, the flavors become really muted,” she said. That’s why she recommends dishes like pawpaw gelato, sorbet, cheesecake, or panna cotta.

If you’re experimenting at home, try substituting pawpaws in a recipe that calls for banana or mango, Bir suggests — just know it isn’t always a 1:1 substitution. You can also freeze the pulp to use later, she adds.

Where to buy pawpaws

Pawpaw availability varies considerably based on where you live. The Pawpaw Map tracks locations across 36 states that sell pawpaw fruit, seeds, and trees.

Only eight stores or markets are currently listed, ranging from Vermont to Michigan, but the site also mentions 30 festivals and 74 plant nurseries with pawpaws. There are almost two dozen pawpaw orchards accounted for, with the highest concentrations in North Carolina, Ohio, and Indiana, and others scattered from Rhode Island to Louisiana. 

Some online sellers, like Foraged, do ship the fruit, but often have a waitlist. Flores has also seen pawpaw trees or seeds for sale on Facebook.

If there isn’t a festival or orchard nearby but you live within the pawpaw’s natural range, your best bet may be to grow your own cultivar. “They taste much better than the wild varieties,” Flores says. “You can cut it open and eat it like a fruit, and they’ll be dripping from your hands.” Growers like Broken Arrow Nursery in Hamden, Connecticut, sell several named cultivars of pawpaw like Asimina triloba “Mango,” which looks and tastes even more like mango than usual, and Asimina triloba “Sunflower,” which can produce fruit from a single tree, unlike most varieties that must be cross-pollinated with other trees.

Bir has tried growing her own, but she prefers the “crapshoot” of foraging them. “To me that’s so much of the appeal; looking for them, smelling the woods, feeling the humidity in the air and the special transition from summer to the earliest bits of fall,” she says. “Pawpaws are really quite abundant, and they’re oftentimes right there under your nose. There’s enough for everyone.”