North America’s largest native tree fruit took center stage at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival on Friday. Asimina triloba, more commonly known as the pawpaw, is the center of attention for one weekend every year.
The Ohio Pawpaw Festival is an annual, weekend-long event, held in celebration of the pawpaw fruit. The fruit has a unique, creamy texture, tasting like a mix of mango, banana and other tropical flavors.
The festival highlights the pawpaw through food, music, events and local vendors, telling the story of the fruit, while exploring all of its possibilities.
Joan Goguen, lead curator for the Mini Pop-up Pawpaw Museum, has researched pawpaws since 2010. Goguen said the museum was a personal project of his. His interest in the tropical tree fruit sparked from an equally unique experience, inquiring about a yard taken over by pawpaws.
“My first ever pawpaw was from this woman named Ruth,” Goguen said. “I knocked on her door and I said ‘I’ve never had a pawpaw before.’ She’s like, ‘Well, come around back.’ She cut the fruit open and she handed it to me and then she stared at me.”
Goguen said being introduced to the fruit was a powerful experience, leading him to question how he had gone so long without knowing about the pawpaw. Since then, Goguen has traced the full history of the pawpaw back to the first published image and sketch in the 1700s.
The museum is still in its early stages, with plans to establish more funding in the future and a focus on informing others about the fruit's interesting past.
“These sort of strange bits where you kind of go, ‘that’s odd,’ that's what my museum is all about,” Goguen said. “The weird pawpaw history that connects to the weird pawpaw present.”
Goguen is not alone in his reporting on the native fruit. Mother Earth News, a national sustainability magazine, has focused on the pawpaw in recent years.
Josh Wilder, content director at Mother Earth News, said he felt strongly that the magazine highlighted the pawpaw correctly.
“I knew the area, I knew the people and this is our third year at the event,” Wilder said. “It’s great, we’re really glad to be here.”
Wilder said partnering with and being a part of the festival has produced a space to ”explore what pawpaws can be.” Looking at the region through “the lens of a pawpaw” poses a way to talk about the region while enjoying its unique characteristics.
Pawpaws are not usually found in grocery stores or markets due to their extremely short shelf life. This becomes a problem for those not near a pawpaw farm, or better yet, a pawpaw festival. This has urged vendors and artists to find different, unique ways to celebrate the fruit.
Laura Northrup Poland, owner of Strawberry Moon Farm, harvests her own pawpaws and uses the fruit to produce products.
“I have this whole line of ceramic pawpaw charms that I make by taking impressions of real baby pawpaw fruit slices that I harvest out of my young orchard,” Poland said.
Poland is a returning visitor to the Ohio Pawpaw Festival after attending for over a decade and serving as a vendor and speaker for the past four years.
“My favorite thing about being here is that I'm really able to connect with so many amazing, like-minded people who are also interested in sustainable agriculture and sustainable eating,” Poland said.
The pawpaw pairs well with fun food combinations, such as pawpaw barbecue or pawpaw ice cream. While attendees of the festival try to enjoy as many of these combinations as they can, some get to decide which are the best.
Joe Mitchell has been a judge for cooking competitions in previous festivals, as well as this year's competition.
“I just tried a pawpaw queso on some fries, a pawpaw macaron,” Mitchell said. “I was a chef for the longest time, so I always liked making a pizza sauce with it, mixing it with yellow tomatoes and doing that as my base.”
Despite trying numerous forms of the fruit, Mitchell said he thought the “weirdest” was the original taste, which he describes as a melon, banana and vanilla flavor.
“I don’t really know if there’s a weirder one besides the flavor of the pawpaw,” he said.
This year, festival attendees had over 15 food vendors to choose from, most of which offered pawpaw-specific menu items. With options like pawpaw Thai Noodles from Dr. May’s Thai Kitchen and pawpaw sorbet and caramel sauce from Pure Joy Ice Cream, attendees can decide for themselves which variation of the fruit they like best.
