Hello everyone! Welcome again to All
Things Food! I'm back this week after a
nice long week off taking care of my
garden and hanging out at home.
Today we're going to talk about
another interesting fruit.
But before we get down to that, um,
we're going to talk for about 15-20
minutes and then we're going to open it
up for questions.
So, you can ask questions um either by
writing in the chat or raising your hand
or um messaging on Facebook. So um thank
you for joining us again this week.
I picked a fruit this week that is
very delicious to some people and really
not that delicious for other people
but it's something that I really love
and have experience
farming and harvesting but but also
using in a lot of different recipes
and fruit carvings and things like that,
and that
is the papaya.
So if you've never had this before, it is
majorly delicious.  One way for you to be
able to tell whether or not you're going
to like this fruit
is if you like its smell. So I have,
you know, I used to eat these almost
every day when I lived in a place that
they grow, which is the tropics.
These do not grow here because they do
not tolerate frost
at all but you could grow one if you
have a very green thumb and are great at
container gardening and have a beautiful
south-facing sunny window all winter
you could grow these um but otherwise
you're mainly going to find these
growing
in the tropics primarily. You can grow
them in the US, but they really only
grow
in southern California and southern
Florida and maybe the tip,
southern tip of Texas uh because
if any of these plants here get down to
like
uh 29 or 30 degrees they're very badly
damaged.
They really like it hot with very
wet feet.
They like having uh well well-drained
but moist soil
um, but not too moist because if it's in
a boggy area
uh the tree that grows this fruit um if
it's soaked for
24 hours like if there was a flood or
something it could die.
So it's kind of tender um if you're
growing it out of its comfort zone
um but if you are growing it in its
comfort zone all you have to do is take
some seeds and go like that
and they'll sprout. It's really, when it's
in the right place this thing will
absolutely take off.
So let me show you what the actual tree
looks like
because there's something so weird about
certain kinds of fruits in,..
in tropical regions that will grow
directly off the trunk.
So here is a picture
looking upwards at a papaya tree.
So if you notice if you're looking up
there's the fruit and it's attached
directly to the trunk.
This tree doesn't really branch off very
often, it primarily grows in one long
trunk without bark
and the fruit grows directly off of
the tree and then the foliage is
absolutely gorgeous it's the most
beautiful foliage. It's like
 really interesting fractile patterns.
It almost looks like a palm tree but it
definitely is not a palm tree,
but it grows in the same regions that
palm trees would.
So um this fruit is very delicious or to
some people
it will be the most the grossest thing
you've ever smelled. I don't know why.
It must be something genetic. I don't
know if there's any research to that.
There definitely is for things like
cilantro. Some people think cilantro is
the most delicious thing, me included,
and then about 10 percent of the
population thinks it tastes like soap or
smells like soap.
It's sort of like that with this. It'll
either smell like
totally delicious and tropical like
juicy fruit gum
um or it will smell like really bad and
like like rotting food.
I don't know why. One of my best friends
in the world, she
just cannot, like I couldn't even do like
fruit carvings with this around her. She,..
if I knew she was coming to a party at
my house papaya would not be on the menu
because just the odor of it,
she just couldn't she couldn't stand it.
So this is also a really interesting
crop
because um it uh
if you're allergic, like if you're really
really allergic to latex gloves you're
probably not gonna wanna,
you probably won't like even the smell
of the papaya, but even if you did like
the smell it might cause
you to break out in hives. So um, you can
always test that by just tasting a
little bit of it or putting a little
touch on your skin and if you break out
then you're not supposed to eat a papaya.
But that's very rare. More people are
allergic to milk and fish and soybeans
than are allergic to papaya, but just
something to keep in mind.
The latex that comes out of here, when
you, when you harvest these, because this
is the end that attaches to the tree
and to get this down from a really tall
tree... it's growing up on the trunk
and there's this little nubbins on the
bottom, the blossom end,
and you take a stick and you push
upwards and break the stem
and then you catch it. So you can imagine,
this one's almost six pounds
and uh catching something like this
coming down from very tall tree
takes quite a bit of skill. So um let me
show you this one.
This is another variety of papaya. This
one is called a maridol papaya
m-a-r-i-d-o-l
and it grows primarily in mexico. Um
and you'll this is the most common
papaya that you'll find in most grocery
stores.
A solo papaya, Hawaiian papaya, you're
only going to find that
um in specialty stores, like maybe Whole
Foods or any of your kind of
fancy stores, you'll find them a couple
of times a year. But there's many
varieties of papayas, it's just these
ship really well and they grow really
widely in Central America and Mexico
where they are native. So um papayas were,
during the Colombian exchange when
Columbus came from
the old world to the new world and
started you know discovering different
lands,
there was a big exchange of the
different kinds of food crops
um between the old world the new world
and then all of the Pacific Islands.
And so that's how papaya ended up being
very popular in Laos,
Thailand, uh Philippines um, was because
of that exchange.
Now you can cook green papaya. If a
papaya is very, very green if it doesn't
have
any color on it at all except for green,
you don't want to eat that papaya unless
you cook it,
but once the papaya starts to ripen you
can actually
grate it up and make something called
green papaya salad.
um you'll see this in Laotian recipes,
uh there's Philippine varieties, there's
Thai varieties.
And you've ever had a chance to have
green papaya salad it is the most
delicious thing.
Um there are lots of places like if you
travel to the tropics and you go to open
air markets
they'll always be a lady grating papayas
and
they have this big sort of mortar and
pestle vessel that they smash
together vegetables including um green
papaya and they usually serve it with
like a peanut sauce on it
and it's spicy and flavorful and
absolutely delicious.
It does not, this has almost no smell, um.
When it really starts to smell is when
it gets ripe.
So i'm going to cut this open so you can
see what it looks like inside.
When a papaya is ripe it should be
pretty soft but it will also be this
beautiful color.
They bruise really easily so make sure
that you don't let if you buy
one make sure you don't let the person
bagging your groceries just drop it in
there because it bruises like a banana.
So look at the seeds inside of this.
Isn't this beautiful?
It smells so good! I love this stuff!
So we've talked before, when we were
talking about
different proteases um, and this one,
the protease, which is an enzyme that
cleaves proteins,
the enzyme in here is called papain. if
you've ever purchased
meat tenderizer just commercially
available meat tenderizer
in the, in the spice section, if you turn
it around
and read the ingredients it will often
say
that it is papain based or bromelain
based or ficin based.
This is the most popular one um so if
you ever wanted to
use this as a meat tenderizer, all you
would have to do is either grind up the
seeds ,which is where the commercial
tenderizer comes from, or you could blend
up the um the flesh into a smoothie.
I would make a savory smoothie with
papaya and soy sauce and ginger,
maybe a dash of fish sauce if you have
that lying around,
and then coat the meat in it or
vegetables in it
for um a really short amount of time. So
if you have something really uh soft
like fish,
it would probably only marinate uh and
probably for like a half an hour
in this. If I had like a really tough cut
of pork or um or beef
you could marinate up to 12 hours. But if
it's like a steak something that
is a muscle of attachment rather than a
muscle of locomotion
um it doesn't have that um hard protein
structure
so this would break it down pretty
quickly because it is a very powerful
protease.
In order to keep that from happening,
like if you wanted to put papaya
in jello... There's a lot of people who
like to make jello and put fruit in it,
um it,... you won't want to put raw papaya
in it because your
jello is made of protein and it will
never solidify because the
papain in here will, break down, will
not allow the gel,...
or the gelatin to make a gelatin network.
It will break it down and it'll just be
like liquid.
So if you just cook this really lightly
and then stir it in
or you get like canned papaya or papaya
pulp,... um that's a really nice thing to
put in there because it's already been
pasteurized,...
and that... When you cook something, when
you raise the temperature
of something that has active enzymes in
it, it cooks the enzymes, also called
denaturing enzymes,
and then they don't have the mechanical
ability to break and cleave proteins
um like they did previously. And you'll
see that on,
if you look on a package of gelatin
dessert that you're going to make
yourself at home,
you'll read that on the back do not use
raw pineapple, and that's because
pineapple also has very similar
proteases only that's called
bromelain. So bromelain, papain
um very useful. You can also make a
really delicious, it was really popular
in the late 80s and early 90s, papaya
seed dressing.
It was on everybody's menus
to go with salads. It's very delicious.
You can buy it commercially made or you
can make your own. There's lots of
recipes online.
So I want to show you um how it would
make like a really simple impressive
beautiful
um like uh gorgeous uh
like fruit uh presentation with
something like this.
So what I would do is take a bowl,
and you can do this with all kinds of
you know things that have that are a
nice cone shape,
um to do a presentation. So when you
remove the seeds from it, don't just
scrape,
because you want this to last and so
you're just going to gently separate
the seeds from the inside just really
gently
because if you scrape it the
the fruit will break down a lot faster.
if you start tearing apart its cells.
But if you just really lightly remove
the seeds
from the inside it will
stay fresher longer. So
remove this here
and then this is,... doesn't really sit flat.
It's going to do this action right here,
so i just cut a little piece off the
back
and it sits nice and flat like a boat.
Now you can like go to the Dollar Store
and get yourself like a little melon
baller. They're at every Dollar Store
and then you can do either chopped fruit
in here
or you can like take a melon baller and
and make little balls of fruit in here.
So
it's a way to take something that's
relatively inexpensive and make it look
super fancy.
So that's one of the things that you can
do. Now if you're gonna store the other
half,
leave the seeds in it. For some reason
and you this is very uh evident when you
buy
a like something like a an avocado. If
you're only going to use half the
avocado
you're going to use the half that
doesn't have the seed in it and if you
store the other half of the avocado,
store it with the seed in it and it
won't turn brown. But as soon as you
remove the seed
the plant just starts to die. So same
with this.
If you want this to stay fresher and
last longer in the refrigerator so that
you can use it on another couple of days
away,
go ahead and store it. just wrap this in
plastic and store it in the refrigerator
with the seeds,
and it will last days longer than if you
remove the seeds out of it.
So just something to keep in mind to
kind of lengthen.. this is... These are very
they're a little expensive to buy. This
one was a dollar sixty two a pound today.
Um they're cheap or almost free if you
get them in a place where they grow
of course um but this is kind of
considered more gourmet item.
I would, if you wanted to find any of the
Mexican papayas, the maridol papayas,
they're always going to be,.. just like
everything else,.. always less expensive
at a place where um like a Latinx
grocery store because this is
that's a Latinx country is Mexico and
this is where this is what a lot of
Central
American people and Mexican people eat
for desserts and they put in smoothies
and things like that.
So you're gonna pay a lot less per pound
than I did for this one.
I had to go to another store for this
one and this one was like three dollars
a pound because I went to a fancier
store and it's considered like specialty,
so but they're pretty much almost the
same. So
alright and then,
for anybody that was here during the
bananas episode a couple of weeks ago
um we talked about the sap of banana
trees.
This one also has similar sap. If it gets
on your clothes
it never comes off. So um
it's, it's a pretty nasty sap. Um it
doesn't hurt you unless you have a latex
allergy
but it will ruin your clothes forever. By
the time you get one of these in the
store that
it's not going to have any sap attached
to it so you'll be fine but if you're
going to pick it off of a tree
you have to be careful about it getting
on your clothes. Now some of you may be
saying, "I'd really like to try to grow
one of those'.
And in fact you can accidentally grow
these very easily during the summer
months.
I eat a lot of papaya and I have a huge
compost pile,
but i don't hot compost it I um I don't
actively compost, I just let it sit. I'm
a passive composter.
And then once a year I go out and I
harvest the compost out of it. It breaks
down slowly. 
But if I, if you don't hot compost if you
passive compost it doesn't get hot
enough to deactivate the seeds.
So I'll sift the compost, throw it in
there in the spring in my garden
and then I'll have papaya,.. little
miniature papaya trees coming up all
over the place.
So um I don't recommend, you, you can grow
them from seeds very easily,
but these trees get to 12- 15 feet high
and they'll never survive, um you know,
long enough for you to harvest fruit off
of them in our ecosystem here in the
Piedmont of North Carolina.
But if you have a green thumb and you
have a warm house and a sunny window
for just a couple of dollars online you
can actually grow
dwarf varieties of papayas that only get
maybe five or six feet tall
and they start fruiting in about five to
six months.
So you know, once the tree is starting to
grow, and it's kind of cute because
these guys the tree is a good you know
10-12 feet high when it starts to fruit,
whereas those little dwarf papayas they
can be just a couple of feet tall and be
really
like rich with fruit. So those would
probably be the ones that would be
easiest to maintain
in your home. So, so that's all about
all that I wanted to really say about
the papaya. If anybody has any questions
please
ask.
Alright I see some questions coming in
here.
So the first one is about um the papaya
um as a medicinal cure. So the person is
asking, I've seen papaya
in the store as a pill for the stomach.
What is that based
on?' Okay, so that is based on the protease
nature of of this, so um.
You know, yes, there's a lot of folk
medicine and not to say that it isn't
true,
it's just that um it...
although it may help some people with
digestion, there's not any research to
necessarily support that.
Mostly this is studied for things like
allergies and you know different things
like that as people would consume them.
However, you know before we had modern
medicine people have been eating these for
thousands of years and using them for
different things.
So um, I would urge you though that if
you were going to take papaya as a
supplement, go ahead and eat a papaya.
Because if you're taking it for
digestion, it's,..
what they're basing it on primarily is
the protease
um activity of the papaya. Once you heat
an enzyme like protease it denatures it
and so
if you want to help with breaking apart
proteins go ahead and eat a fresh papaya.
Try that first rather than buying it in
a pill because all it is is powdered and
dried and a lot of times
you don't really know what you're
getting .You really have to look into the
sources of exactly what you're getting.
There's just not a lot of a lot of
oversight for supplements in our country.
Not to say that the placebo effect
is not real. It is... placebo effect.. There's
more research on the placebo effect than
there is on a papaya, I'll tell you that
much.
So if you take something and you swear
it works for you, go with it.
is... you know... as long as it's not hurting
yet and you feel better
do it.  That's great!
Um, so the next,  it's actually two
questions about removing of the seeds.
Um so you said that the seeds should be
removed gently
and that leaving the seeds in is good
for keeping the fruit fresh
longer. Um and so the question is, are
those two traits
um true of other fruits, for example like
melons?
You know um that is a really great
question.
Actually now in the case of uh
you know like,.. a in the case of a... of a
watermelon,
they're either there or they're
not and it's very hard to dig them out
of there.
Um but just as a general rule I usually
keep the seeds into the side that I
store,
so um that's you know that's because I'm
only feeding two people. But if it's
something that we eat a lot of, like
a honeydew or something like that.. My
husband hates this by the way so I have
to store half of it because I can't eat all of it,
but he likes melons. So a lot of times
you know, this is a whole lot more food
than a cantaloupe. This is like two to
three times more food than a cantaloupe,
so I will usually you know just cut up
the cantaloupe when we eat it really
fast.
But you know were my husband allergic to
musk melons or something then I would
store half of it with the seeds in it
because they just last longer.
We have a great question here. What will
happen if you eat the seeds?
You know, I don't know. It may be a little
much. I don't know that would hurt you
because there's papaya seed dressing um,
but you know,  I don't know it's not
like they'd sprout in your stomach or
anything but they may pass right through
you.
Um you know that's what happens with
birds. They eat the fruit
and they eat the seeds and it passes
right through them and when they fly off
and
drop their little packages it's like
compost, it's like
you know a little pelletized seed almost.
It's a seed inside of its own fertilizer.
And then they sprout in other places. Um
you know you could make papaya seed
dressing out of them, there's nothing
wrong with that, but just like eating a
bunch of seeds,
I don't know, I don't know if it would be
very good and you might get a lot of
proteases. Do
try a teaspoon and see what you think,
but I wouldn't just eat all of them
because you don't know how your your
body is going to react.
And if you've never had a papaya before,
eat the flesh first and see what you
think before you go eating a bunch of
seeds.
Um okay, the next question is, 'What mixes
well in papaya salad?"
Anything tropical. I love it, um, you know
pineapple, uh, papaya, banana.
This is great to cut up and stick in the
freezer so that,... because
finding frozen papaya is kind of hard to
find, you can find frozen papaya pulp
in some Latinx grocery stores and some
and also in some Asian grocery stores,
you can find frozen pulp
um but primarily you know it doesn't
freeze and transport well.
So sometimes you'll find it in mixes.
Like you find like papaya banana
pineapple or something,...
but really strawberries any kind of
acidic fruit is beautiful with this.
But this is very soft so if you're going
to serve something in a couple of days
um I recommend cutting it as close to
service as possible because it's,
it's pretty soft. Yeah, but oh my gosh all
kinds of great things go with it. You
could yeah we're talking about melon
ballers, you could do
all kinds of berries in this. I probably
wouldn't do apples. I don't do a lot of
apples in fruit salads because they
turn color so fast.
I would rather cook an apple and
serve it
or eat it fresh out of hand or slices or
something like that on a
cheese tray but anything that doesn't
oxidize
is beautiful in here. So you could make
this overnight, you know put
your beautiful fruit salad in here and
then right before you serve
it chop up uh like some you know fresh
bananas or something and then serve it
just like that. So it's very fancy at a
like a brunch or something like that.
I'm ready for my second lunch now. Thank
you!
Um our next question was about the dwarf
papaya that you were describing that we
might be able to grow here.
So um could you explain a little bit
more about how we might be able to grow
a dwarf papaya tree here and how we
could get
the seeds for such a tree? There,.. you know
what? There's all kinds of fruit
companies that sell the seeds
and um I think it's a little bit late in
the year to start them because they
really like
sun all day and they like well-drained
soil. So if you got like
um cactus soil or you can even use
general potting soil, so long as you like
soak it and keep it wet,
keep it moist but then it drains really
well. You don't want it to hold on to
water,
um you want something where you know it
drains all the way out
um and a pretty big pot because it's
still gonna be a pretty stocky plant.
Um the difference with these papayas is
the ones that you get commercially
there are um hermaphrodite seeds so that
there's male and female
on the same plant um and anything that
you buy for a dwarf papaya
the the uh horticulturalists know that
you're gonna want that kind of tree.
There's other kinds of trees. If we lived
in Florida we'd be available... we would
have so many other varieties available
to us
and you could grow.. You know, the fruit
comes on the female trees
or the hermaphrodite trees that have
both male and female. The male trees
they're just great for pollination. You
don't need a ton of those. Like one
papaya tree per 15 female papaya trees
will give you a ton of papayas. But if..
These are very easy to sprout. So even if
you buy
a papaya you could,... these are super easy
to sprout. But I would go for,...
You know you can buy a small tree.
They'll send one to your house or you
can buy
uh you can buy a just the seeds. But I
recommend starting, like if you're gonna
get a papaya tree,
get it in like March April when our days
are getting longer
and then you can put it outside when
it's hot and awful outside and then
you've got a big beautiful tree that's
starting..
big, big, it'll be like four or five feet
tall, but it'll eventually start to give
you fruit when you're bringing it inside
and keeping it warm. The plant will have
a much better possibility of thriving
if it's already a little bit larger when
you have to bring it inside and
over winter.
So. And it's a perennial. It's not,
it doesn't last for years. It lasts, you
know, a couple few years but it's a,..
it's like considered a long a short
living perennial because it's not like
an oak tree that's going to get to be
100 years old
but you can get fruit off of it for a
couple few years. I say give it a whirl!
See if you can do it! Oh coo!l Very cool
um
So we have another question that I think
is not really related to the papaya but
maybe it is.
um What if you see ants on your plants?
um Is that a bad sign or a good sign?
Particularly when it seems like a sweet
um fruit like this one. Ants on your
plants.
So it ...Would it be an indoor plant or an
outdoor plant? Because ants
are usually a good sign um, if they're
not fire ants.
um They're usually not going after the
fruit
a lot of the time. Um this is susceptible
more to fruit flies than it is ants.
Um ants are actually great in the
landscape. They you know make underground
tunnels they aerate soil. They break down
organic matter a lot of times they'll
eat other pests that will eat your
plant,
um except for fire ants. Fire ants- no
place for them because they'll attack
you.
So it's a it's a different,... it's a...
they're,... they're fascinating.
Um they're the class of hymenoptera,
non-flying hymenoptera.
They're amazing but they're you know
I respect um wasps,
vespids, hornets, ants um but,
they have this special ability to group
together and sting you all at the same
time and fire ants are of that class of
hymenoptera, whereas like a little black
ant or a carpenter ant doesn't want to
mess with you.
They're after something totally
different. Um but a fire ants
imported fire ants are like a special
kind of animal, a super
organism. So as long as it's not fire ants
i wouldn't worry too much about it.
If you do have broken fruit on a plant
somewhere, they may be going after that.
So if you clear that away,
I wouldn't worry about it too much. So
long as they're not, sometimes they're
leaf-mining ants
and they're coming and they're like
taking apart leaves to go down and
and um use in their nest. So, but a lot of
times they're not attacking your peppers
and tomatoes
and things like that so I wouldn't worry
about ants too much unless you have an
infestation in your house
and at that point... If you're worried
about them you can just puff them with a
little diatomaceous earth
and they will um desiccate and die and
it won't hurt you to put that on your
plants or your food.
So it's harmless. So is that word
uh hymenoptera, is that our vocabulary
word of the day?
I didn't have a... oh my gosh! And i only
have a pencil. Isn't this awful? I'm not...
let me see
hy- men-op-ter-a
Do this includes bees, ants,
wasps, vespids, hornets. And they're
fascinating! 
That's great! I was, I wasn't gonna let
you get away without a vocabulary. Oh
yeah! I
I didn't bring my marker. I was so
excited about papaya seeds.  And what am I
thinking?
Um so we have another question, maybe
your last question.
It's back to the seeds. Is there any harm
in swallowing watermelon seeds?
No, not at all and in fact it's actually
the most nutrient dense
part of the plant. And in fact in Africa,..
if you go into
African grocery stores or grocery stores,
international grocery stores that
have aisles that cater particularly to African populations
you can buy them dried in bulk
in bags and you can cook with them. So
they're rich in protein. They're rich in
minerals, vitamins, and minerals,
um polyunsaturated fats that are good
for your heart.
So while we have developed, especially
here in the US
we like seedless things because people
have not ever developed a taste for
watermelon seeds, but um in Africa
they actually eat the flesh and collect
the seeds
and either eat them then or use them for
other things or you know beat them into
like
um you know smooth butters or put them
into stews. They're actually very
nutritious so go for it!
In fact it's better if you crunch them.
You'll get more out of it. If you swallow
the whole,
they'll pass right through you so um
chew them up and and you'll actually get
some
some good nutrition out of them. But you
can look up recipes actually.
I said that's super cool right before I un-muted
myself. Um i think we have time for one
more question if anyone wants to
unmute them, I can unmute you or or put
it in the chat.
Anyone else? I have one hand raised.
Alright, Ms. Yvonne, would you like to
speak?
Please unmute yourself. There you go. Yes, so with
the watermelon seeds, Cheralyn,
because I tend to kind of spit them out
and I'm a watermelon fanatic.
So you are saying Ican take the watermelon um
seeds and make a smoothie with them?
You can definitely add them to a
smoothie. Definitely you could.
But I would probably put them a little
bit of them
in the bottom of your blender and add
just a little bit of liquid and blend
them up so that you're really able to
break them up well before you add all
your other stuff to it.
So that would be my recommendation if
you're going to eat them fresh
but they are very nutritious. They're
rich in protein. They're great for you- a
lot of fiber.
Um yeah, they're they're good for you. You
can save them or you can spit them out.
There's...
there's no um lack, I would say or
shortage of
watermelon seeds in the world. So yeah
you can definitely use them in a
smoothie.
Wonderful! I can't wait to try my papaya!
Well, thank you everyone for joining us.
Sorry I was gone last week but
we'll keep this thing going and I'll go
and hit the produce department and see
what's good.
And um and then we're also... All the
chilies are coming in at Briggs so
start looking for the chili of the week
because it's going to be spicy, baby!
See you next week!
