Recipes from Bloomington, Indiana

Recipes include dishes prepared using locally available market, wildcrafted and store foods.

Pawpaw Bread

Pawpaws are available at the farmer's market right now (October
2002)--it's been a great year for them. Or go out in the woods and
shake down your own.

You will need about as many pawpaws as will fill a brown paper lunch
sack. If they are not all ripe at the same time (they usually aren't),
put the ripe ones in a tightly sealed plastic bag in the fridge and they
will wait for the others. A pawpaw is ripe when it is easily dented
with your finger.

Start by preparing the pawpaws. This is a messy job, and not as easy as
mashing bananas, but it's fun. You just need a paring knife. Cut them
open, dig the seeds out, scrape the fruit into a bowl. You can pop the
seeds in your mouth and suck the excess fruit off of them until you get
overwhelmed with the flavor--after that, you can strip the fruit coating
off of the seeds with a knife, and get a little extra fruit for the
bread--but the raccoons at the compost pile will appreciate it if you
don't, so don't feel obliged.

Mash the pawpaws with a potato masher or a fork.

Now you can preheat the oven: 350 degrees. And oil two loaf pans, or
8X8 pans. Here's the recipe:

2/3 cup oil (I use canola)
1/3 cup honey (use 2/3 for a cake-like sweetness; this gives a bready
sweetness)
4 large eggs or 6 small

Add these ingredients to the mashed fruit and mix really well. In
another bowl, mix well:

3 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
2 t baking powder
1 t soda
1/2 t salt

Add this to the pawpaw mixture and mix just until it's all combined.
Pour into pans and bake 45-50 minutes, until a toothpick comes out
clean. Be careful not to overbake; it gets dry easily.

This bread doesn't quite have the flavor of raw pawpaws--there's a
little edge that develops during cooking--but it's a great way to enjoy
them after you are tired of just munching them raw. I recommend vanilla
ice cream--in my case, the non-dairy kind--to make it perfect.

by Denise Breeden-Ost

Denise lives in Bloomington and spends most of her time being a mom at the moment,
with occasional writing breaks. Picking pawpaws and baking count
toward being a mom.

Click pawpaw to get more information on this exotic fruit.

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