Making ice cream with paw paw, Illinois’ native fruit

There is nothing like ice cream made from fruit that you pick yourself.

Most of the fruit found at the grocery store isn’t native to Illinois, but an import introduced centuries ago from Eurasia, Africa or South America. Though grabbing some apples at a u-pick or finding a random peach tree in the wild is a fun experience, nothing quite compares to foraging for a fruit in the same way people have been doing in Illinois for thousands of years.

Enter the paw paw, a tropical green fruit with a pulpy inside that tastes somewhere between an mango and a banana.

These succulent fruits grow on trees and are ripe from late August to early October. To find one, look for a heavily wooded area near a waterway and find for a dangly, houseplant-looking tree. The ripe fruits will likely fall off the skinny trees when you shake them, but you might want to give them a feel before picking them — these don’t ripen on the shelf as they do in nature.

Though cooking them isn’t advised due to lost flavor and gastro-intestinal distress caused by heating the fruits, there are still many ways to prepare paw paws — eat them raw, use them in salads, or even make them into a soda. Nothing is quite as satisfying and loyal to the original taste quite like making them into an ice cream.

To prepare them, cut about 20 of them open and place the fruit into a bag. The fruit will come out lumpy and misshapen. It’s important that you leave out the skin so it doesn’t taste bitter or cause an upset stomach.

Put the bag in the freezer for at least an hour. If you let it sit overnight, you’ll have to hit it with a tenderizer to break it into blendable chunks, so be mindful.

From here, you can make an ice cream that will be all the rage at any dinner party or gathering.

How to make paw paw ice cream

Ingredients

• 3-4 cups of paw paw, frozen
• 1 14 oz. can of sweetened condensed milk
• 2 cups of heavy whipping cream
• 3/4 cup of sugar
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 teaspoon of rum (optional)

Steps

Step 1: Whisk heavy cream and 1/2 cup of sugar until you have peaks in the cream but keep it viscous enough to pour. Chill for at least 20 minutes.

Step 2: Put the frozen paw paws in a food processor or blender with remaining 1/4 cup of sugar, lemon, and vanilla. Blend until smooth.

Step 3: Once the paw paw puree is smoothly blended, pour in the can of sweetened condensed milk. Use a rubber spatula to spoon it to the bottom of the processor or blender.

Step 4: Pour whipped cream mixture in ice cream maker and slowly fold in the pureed paw paw mixture. Run the machine for at least twenty minutes. OPTIONAL: put the teaspoon of rum in to give it an extra sweetness and to keep it from becoming too frozen in the freezer.

Step 5: Scoop it out of ice cream maker and eat it immediately or let it chill as long as you’d like. It’s best paired with citrusy toppings like chimoy or tajin, but goes surprisingly well with maple syrup.

This story was originally published September 23, 2025 at 10:31 AM.