Abbey Duke had never tasted a pawpaw fruit in 2010 when she planted four pawpaw trees on the small Intervale farm associated with her South Burlington-based Sugarsnap Catering. Since starting the two-acre plot a few years prior, Duke had favored growing fruits and vegetables that other farmers are less likely to cultivate.
“The nice thing about catering is that we can almost always figure out a way to use something,” said Duke, 54, who is also a Democratic state legislator representing part of Burlington’s Old and New North Ends. Intrigued especially by unusual perennial fruits, Duke planted persimmons, red and black currants, gooseberries, and jostaberries along with pawpaws, a North American native that is the only cold-tolerant member of the tropical custard apple family.
Fourteen years later, pawpaws have proven among the hardiest of the bunch. When Tropical Storm Irene submerged the fertile Burlington floodplain, Duke figured her 1-year-old trees wouldn’t make it. But they rebounded after that flood and all the ones that followed, including the devastating year-upon-year flooding in July of 2023 and 2024. Looking to a waterlogged Intervale future, pawpaws seem like a promising crop.
“They’ve survived I don’t know how many floods,” Duke said on a recent Monday afternoon. She was standing beside two of the original trees, now 20 feet tall, their branches lush with foliage resembling large avocado leaves and clusters of oval green fruits reminiscent of small mangoes.
This month, the Sugarsnap team expects a bumper harvest of around 400 pounds — far more than easily deployed on its catering menu. But marketing the unfamiliar fruit is a challenge, especially within its short ripeness window.
An abundant crop is worth little if Vermonters don’t want to buy it, Duke noted. “People aren’t lining up for them like they do for strawberries,” she said. “There’s got to be a business there.”
To this taster, pawpaw evokes the approachable exoticism of Juicy Fruit gum.
The pawpaw has one alluring feature: its tropical flavor, unexpected in a locally grown fruit. When Duke first tried a pawpaw from one of her maturing trees, she found it to be deliciously different from any other Vermont crop.
The pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is distantly related to soursop and cherimoya and was most likely carried north in the digestive tracts of fruit-loving mastodons. (It is not related to papaya, although that is also sometimes called pawpaw.) The tree thrives in the wild in several East South Central states; Ohio has an annual pawpaw festival, and the University of Kentucky hosts a pawpaw breeding program.
In Vermont, the pawpaw is still relatively unknown. But interest is increasing, according to gardening expert Charlie Nardozzi, who cultivates two varieties at his North Ferrisburgh home. Nardozzi enjoys the fruit fresh and describes it as “custardy, like a ripe avocado,” with notes of pineapple, banana and mango and a touch of vanilla and butterscotch.
At its best, the creamy, golden flesh, with whispers of coconut and frangipani flowers, tastes like it was made to star in a tropical smoothie or frozen cocktail. To this taster, it evokes the approachable exoticism of Juicy Fruit gum.
But its peak is frustratingly brief. Underripe pawpaw is blandly sweet and chalky, while the overly ripe fruit can be bitter and almost smoky, like burnt caramel.
Patrick Shafer, who tends Sugarsnap’s farm with his fiancée, Jamie Cohen, first tasted a pawpaw when living in Philadelphia. It was overripe, he recalled, and he was underwhelmed.
Four years ago, when Shafer, 29, started working for Sugarsnap, he began cutting the weeds around the trees, trimming dead branches and removing suckers. As harvests increased, Sugarsnap’s cooks used the purée as a cheesecake topping, and the farmers sold fruit to Shy Guy Gelato and Miss Weinerz bakery, both in Burlington.
In the Intervale, Cohen, 29, demonstrated how she harvests fruit with a brisk shake of a slender trunk to loosen those ready to fall from the tree. The clusters then need a few days to ripen further, she said.
The thin-skinned fruits “have to stay local. They can’t travel,” Cohen said, although ripe pawpaws can be refrigerated for several days. The skin of ripe pawpaws is splotched with dark bruises, not always appealing to American consumers. The pulp freezes well, but processing it is labor-intensive, due to the fruit’s numerous large seeds. And cooking dulls the flavor, another limitation.
To explore Burlington’s appetite for pawpaws, Cohen and Shafer are selling them for $8 a pound this month at the Old North End Farmers Market, where they offer customers samples to entice them.
The couple said they’ve made pawpaw smoothies and successfully subbed pawpaw in banana bread, though baking mutes its distinctive taste. They think it could work well in salads, similar to mango. Shafer is also developing an ice cream with uncooked pawpaw and a wild Concord grape swirl.
Perhaps the Sugarsnap team should try a dessert recipe from the 1962 book Stalking the Wild Asparagus, by wild foods authority Euell Gibbons. The mousse, made with uncooked pawpaw, brown sugar, gelatin, milk and eggs, is so delicious, Gibbons promised, you will need to “lock the doors to keep the neighbors out.”
Sugarsnap expects to sell fresh pawpaws at the Old North End Farmers Market through the final October 29 market date of the season: Tuesdays, 3-6:30 p.m., at Dewey Park in Burlington. onefarmersmarket.com
To buy locally propagated pawpaw trees, try Perfect Circle Farm in Berlin (perfectcircle.farm) or East Hill Tree Farm in Plainfield (easthilltreefarm.com).
The original print version of this article was headlined “Pawpaw Potential | In Burlington’s Intervale, a native fruit tree from a tropical family thrives despite flooding”
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2024.
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