Paw Paw's ?

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Gowers Choice

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I'll soon have a few 5 gal buckets of paw paw's. Never tried them before, does anyone have some advice? Thanks in advance.
 
Apparently there are 2 types of paw paws: what we call pawpaws in Australia are very similar to papaya. Then there are 'American pawpaws' which are completely different, like a custard apple.
If you're talking about the former they have a reasonably low sugar content and a bit of a funky tropical fruit flavour, might do well fermented with honey?
As for the latter (which are probably the ones you're talking about)... no idea!! :h
 
Just about the only paw paw recipe you will find on the interwebz is Keller's recipe...the same one you will find in threads on this forum.

I suspect that the scarcity of alternative recipes probably reflects either the relative scarcity of the fruit OR the fact that paw paw wine just really doesn't turn out very well.

I have one each of 'Mango', 'Shenandoah', along with 6 others, unclear if they are different varieties or if they are clonal. They are growing very well and in fact sending up volunteers, but I haven't had fruit set yet. One of my goals is paw paw wine, but I'll be using 4-6# of fruit per gallon to start.
 
While I've never made just pawpaw wine, I use mine as an extra fruit in juice buckets. Don't pick them, wait till they fall for best quality. I then let them get really ripe so it's easy to pull the skin off. Quite messy but I also remove the seeds at this point, then freeze the pulp. Use a fruit bag as just like mango pawpaws have a lot of lees. I feel the flavor is a bit like peach and banana plus touches of other flavors. So far the Chardonney pawpaw combo has been my favorite.

If I had to try pawpaw straight, I'd use a peach recipe. I'd also throw in a few frozen fruit juice concentrates like a passionfruit and a couple apple juice to increase complexity.

Pam in cinti
 
Need to add more info. It only takes a couple days for them to get ripe. They do turn bruisy black pretty quickly, but it is only on the outside. You'll know it's ripe when you squeeze at the bottom and it tries to push the entire pulp out the top. If they aren't fully ripe it is difficult and wasteful to peel them because you lose so much pulp with the skin. Since most of the bitter in a pawpaw is in the skin, so best to skin and deseed before freezing.

Pam in cinti
 

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