ARTISAN
Pickin’ up pawpaws, put ’em in your recipe
Sara Bir foraging (Photo by Melanie Tienter)
Chef Sara Bir takes the elusive woodsy treat to new levels with her latest cookbook By Wynne Everett
I
f you love pawpaws—as more and more people do—you probably have discovered the pleasure of enjoying Ohio’s native tropical fruit in its simplest form: fresh, raw and immediately after you’ve foraged one from the woods or trail.
Chef and cookbook author Sara Bir even begins the newly released second edition of her The Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook with a passionate argument in favor of eating pawpaws in just this way. “Work the flesh out of the skin. Raise it to your lips and slurp. It will be sweet and creamy and totally new—every pawpaw in the woods is like your fist pawpaw all over again,” Bir says. So, as even Bir asks, if pawpaws are so good plain, why cook with them? For many, including her, the urge to play with a new and exotic ingredient is hard to resist. What other flavors and textures would go well with this? What new dish can highlight the pawpaw’s charms? But also, cooking pawpaws into recipes is one way to make the fruit last beyond its brief late-summer-to-early-fall season. The scarcity and seasonal limitations of pawpaws are part of what make them so magical. We’ve gotten used to being able to shop for most other kinds of fruit all year round, and we’ve lost sight of the notion that they even have seasons. Pawpaws do not allow us this luxury. “We can go to the grocery store and order things online and have whatever we want wherever we are,” Bir says. “That’s an artificial construct.”
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