After eating durian, and not greatly liking it, I question the claims made for unusual fruits. But this article intrigued me. I’ve never eaten pawpaw. I did not know it grew in Canada.
Personally, I found durian to be of agreeable flavor but too mushy, and the smell to not be as bad as I was expecting, but I only got to taste it in the form of vacuum-sealed frozen fruit meat. Perhaps the fresh stuff is less mushy and more disagreeable to the nose.
I haven’t eaten pawpaw, but I’ve eaten similar fruits. The article says (at the end) that pawpaw tastes like “atis , a relative of the pawpaw known in English as a sweetsop or sugar apple”, which isn’t surprising, considering that they’re from the same family. I’ve eaten both sweetsop/sugar apple and also soursop, another related fruit, and they’re delicious. They don’t have the unpleasant smell of durian.
They may be “exotic” fruits in the US, but they’re ordinary fruits in the tropics.
Sugar apple - Wikipedia
" The flesh is fragrant and sweet, creamy white through light yellow, and resembles and tastes like custard."
Soursop - Wikipedia
" With an aroma similar to pineapple,[5] the flavor of the fruit has been described as a combination of strawberries and apple with sour citrus flavor notes, contrasting with an underlying thick creamy texture reminiscent of banana."
I like to get annona where and when it is available fresh, but I do not think that is precisely the same thing as pawpaw (or durian!).
Gosh yes, common as muck for me but I grew up in Brisbane (sub tropical). We always had a couple of paw paw trees in our back yard. Most people did. During my last pregnancy (a long time ago), I had a craving for paw paw and an obliging neighbour used to keep me supplied from her garden. They are readily available from most supermarkets depending on the season. They tend to be a bit expensive in the southern states where I now live so I haven’t bought any for years now. They are also called papayas.
@DPRK which annona do you eat? The sugar apple/sweetsop and soursop I linked above are different types of annona. They’re tropical, and not the same as pawpaw, which is temperate.
The American pawpaw in the Atlantic article in the first link is Asimina triloba
@dorabella are you talking about carica papaya, which is sometimes known as pawpaw but isn’t the American pawpaw?
Yes, the second picture is the one I am familiar with I don’t know anything about the American paw paw. I didn’t realise they were different from what we have in Aus.
Typically the “sugar apple”, though I have had soursop. They are widely available everywhere—except where it gets too cold, think the Caribbean or Vietnam before Canada. I have eaten the species of papayas pictured, and I have tried durian though not recently (did not find the smell particularly objectionable but that is subjective), but it seems not American pawpaw, at least not that I can recall.
Wish I had more time to spend in the tropics, though. You can find a dozen varieties of just mangoes, for example, before you even go on to other tropical or “exotic” fruit.
No, but I bet mawmaw has.
You should check out the Weird Explorer channel on YouTube:
I Spent 10 Years Trying To Eat EVERY FRUIT in The World
I’ve had soursop in St Martin, but it’s a real rarity. Maybe once every 5 years we’ll see one at a roadside stand and buy it. There’s always just one.
Papayas and American paw-paws are not the same fruit.
The American paw-paw, sometimes referred to as the “Indiana banana” is, as the name implies, native to North America. The North American paw-paw was name “paw-paw” for its superficial resemblance to some papaya species. They are related to sour-sop. Last I heard they still were not considered a domesticated crop and weren’t being planted outside North America. (Maybe a few in botanical gardens as examples of foreign specimens)
Despite living in Indiana for 25 years I have never had one myself. I keep hoping to encounter one at a local farmer’s market. I’m told they’re a bit tricky to determine ripeness at first - unlike many fruits you don’t do this by color, you determine ripeness by scent.
I gotta get up earlier in the day if I’m gonna keep up with you.
For a long time I thought that pawpaw was another name for papaya, so I am sympathetic to @Dorabella’s confusion.
I’ve had both sweet and soursop, but not pawpaw.
As to durian - if you haven’t had fresh durian on multiple occasions, you can’t be sure you have any sense of what durian is really like. Before I moved to Indonesia, I tried frozen durian from a market in Boston’s Chinatown. It was pretty awful, but I thought that was because durian is awful.
Now I know better. You can’t really know what durian is like without having a chance to teste it fresh multiple times. Durian fruit is a bit like pears - if you ate a single pear in your life, it wouldn’t be representative since some pears are crisp, soma are soft, some are sweet, some are tart, some are smooth, some are grainy … you get the idea.
A good durian is creamy and tastes a bit like high-quality black walnuts. The smell is pretty intense, but whether it smells good or bad is a matter of opinion. I used to walk into grocery stores in Indonesia and immediately say, after one sniff of the air, “ah, so they’re selling durian today.” The point is, durian small is STRONG, not necessarily good or bad.
An old co-worker of mine had a couple pawpaw trees in his backyard and, each year, would give me a large bag of them. My wife liked them and he didn’t really have anyone else who wanted them but also didn’t want a million rotting pawpaws in his yard. I found them to be the sort of thing I was okay eating two or three a year – a sort of custard consistency and a taste reminiscent of a mushed banana but not as sweet. My wife says they reminded her of papaya from back in Peru and would eat a number of them.
As I understand it, the pawpaw isn’t domesticated in that we haven’t bred it into a more useful crop. They don’t transplant well, it requires a couple trees for pollination and the fruit doesn’t travel well. A ripe pawpaw looks like a spoiled papwpaw with black blotches all over the greenish-yellow rind which probably wouldn’t help their marketing. They also don’t ripen well off the tree – sometimes the sack o’ pawpaws would still be fairly green and few would actually become edible. But he was fighting the raccoons who would climb the trees for the fruit, breaking branches and scattering unripe fruit around so couldn’t wait for them to fully ripen. Anyway, seems like a real pain in the ass to cultivate, grow and harvest.
[Edit: The OP linked article says that pawpaw ripen after being picked. This hasn’t been my experience and our paper bags of harder green pawpaws mostly stayed inedible. But I’m not an agricultural scientist, just a guy who spent ten years getting gifted pawpaws early each fall]
I’ve never had a pawpaw. Years back when buying some fruit trees I thought about buying some saplings on Ebay and read a lot about them, but ended up never ordered them. (Among the other problems with commercializing mentioned, they are understory trees, best grown in the shade of larger trees.) But the absence (or rarity) of pawpaw fruit on the market reminds me of hicory nuts. They have a really nice meat to them, but come in a thick, hard wood shell that reaches deep into the interior, wrapping around the lobes of the meat. I have a hicory tree literally a few feet from my house, but go years at a time between eating one of the nuts. Somebody should breed a thin-shell variety.
https://sites.bu.edu/gastronomyblog/2019/12/06/the-hickory-nut-adventures/
I like pawpaws, but it’s true they aren’t very viable in a commercial sense because you pretty much have to wait for them to fall off the tree for them to be ripe and soft, and shipping them at that point is problematic. That’s why the song goes “picking up the paw paws, put 'em in your pocket”.
I have a friend in the Boston suburbs who has a tree, and gets much more fruit than he knows what to do with. They’re tasty, but have big black seeds you have to spit out. There are paw paw cake recipes I’d like to try.
I think you can make them into jam or freeze them - just like old times when you had to put up the harvest for the part of the year you couldn’t grow food, when you had so much surplus you couldn’t eat it unprocessed before it went bad.
I’ve never eaten a pawpaw, but we learned 
Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch in early elementary school class sing-alongs.
And I love papayas.
A guy at work has inlaws with a tree and he will bring some in to work when he gets them because his wife does not eat them