I can not thank you all enough for having this candid conversation about cooked pawpaws. Like many of you, I have eaten raw pawpaws for well over a decade with no ill effects. Today, however, I thought I would try a recipe for pawpaw cookies ( see link here:
https://hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/ksu-pawpaw/cooking.html ). I was just fine making the cookies and, in fact, they tasted incredibly delicious. My wife thought so too. Although I gave some to my children, I am overjoyed that they did not like it and spit it out. The reason, like for many of you, is that we who did eat the cookies were vomiting within a couple of hours after ingestion. I sincerely hope that this is the end of our reaction to them.
I completely agree that pawpaws are a wonderful fruit, but, as has been said in other circumstances, "To thine own self be true." For those of us who can not eat pawpaws cooked, we should not do so. It also would be well for extension schools to begin a well-documented scientific study of the fruit-- raw, cooked, frozen, and processed in other forms. Has anyone learned of this happening since the first post of this thread? Does anyone know how these types of studies begin and where funding might originate?
