Papaya was once a tremendously exotic fruit in the West, but now it is familiar to most people. Of course, all around Asia, it has never really been particularly special, for it grows easily and needs little or no care to produce a prodigious crop of heavy, lusciously sweet fruit.
It was primarily as a fruit that I have known it as a child, and while it was perfectly acceptable as an after-dinner mouth cleanser, its soft, often pulpy texture never really appealed to me. Once or twice in a season I would taste one that was outrageously sweet and firm, and this really was ecstasy, but otherwise a couple of pieces would be sufficient. Eaten as a fruit, I find that a squeeze of lime or lemon helps bring out some hidden sweetness. I recall its abundant use as part of a tropical fruit salad, but be careful only to add it just before serving, as combined with other fruit, it seems to induce a collective mushiness in everything it touches. It is an excellent companion to mango, also coming into season just now, with delicious Alphonso mango beginning to make its appearance on fruit stands.
Papaya is a native to the Americas, but for many people it is now more closely associated with Southeast Asia. It is rich in vitamins and minerals, and is a powerful anti-inflammatory and is rich in the enzymes papain and chymopapain, which have been shown to ameliorate the condition of sufferers from a wide variety of conditions including asthma, osteoarthritis, and rheumatoid arthritis that are worsened by inflammation. Papain is particularly abundant in the unripe fruit. It is also supposed to be excellent in preventing ear inflections, colds and the flu.
Photo: Ian Bartholomew
Alan Davidson’s The Oxford Companion to Food also alludes to the folk medicine that credits papaya as a great healer of upset stomachs and adds that the “bitter leaves (of the papaya plant) are believed to prevent malaria, as the mosquito avoids people whose blood is not ‘sweet.’” If only it were so.
The papaya itself is such a visually stunning fruit when cut open, its black lustrous seeds nestled in the hollow of pale green or orange flesh that oozes rich sap-like juices that one is tempted to believe almost anything of its powers.
It was the explosion of Thai cuisine all around the world that introduced me to the use of papaya as a savory, and I have since found a new love of this fruit that I have neglected for so long, despite its easy availability around Hualien. So many people here have a tree growing on the edges of a vegetable patch, often nothing more than an afterthought, casually chopped down if it gets in the way, confident that new trees will spring up the following year. The fruit is so abundant that waiting for them to ripen means a bumper harvest that is often too much to consume fresh (last year I made a papaya and mango ketchup which was absolutely heaven with a fatty slice of pork), but this year it seemed an idea to pick the unripe fruit and mix up a Thai-style green papaya salad as a cooling antidote to the scorching heat of the summer. Living in the countryside, it was a simple matter of walking down the road, having a word with a neighbor and plucking the low hanging fruit, and I was set for the noonday meal.
Photo: Ian Bartholomew
Just in passing, it is worth mentioning that green papaya is quite an effective meat tenderizer. This use was introduced to me by a butcher who was trying to sell me a rather tough (but cheap) cut of beef and I can say from experience that it was effective in making the meat softer, if not necessarily any more tasty.
Sea Bass with Green Papaya Salad (serves two)
I cannot claim any great originality in coming up with a dish of sea bass and green papaya salad, as the salad itself is traditional all around South East Asia, with some studies suggesting that the salad originates in Laos, but with versions all around Indochina. The basis of the salad is the grated green papaya, which has a lovely crunch and a slight acidity that makes it a perfect foil for all kinds of flavorings. With pineapple and mango now in season, it seemed a nice idea to go for a kind of savory fruit salad with the herbaceous hints of chili, basil and mint.
Photo: Ian Bartholomew
Ingredients
Fish
2 pieces of sea bass (or other white meat fish)
1 tbsp olive oil
Salt and pepper to season
Salad
1/4 unripe papaya
1/4 pineapple
1/2 unripe mango
1 Lebanese cucumber
1 large chili (not too hot, primarily for color)
2 spring onions
Handful of basil leaves, torn
Handful of mint leaves, roughly chopped
Handful of roasted peanuts, crushed
Dressing
Small nub of ginger, minced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 small Thai chili, finely chopped
2 tbsp brown sugar (or palm sugar if available)
1 tbsp fish sauce
Juice of 3 small limes
Salt
Directions
1. First prepare the dressing. Put all the ingredients together and mix well. Season to taste with additions of any of the ingredients.
2. Prepare the vegetables.
3. Peel and remove seeds from the papaya. Chop into matchsticks.
4. Dice the cucumber and mango. As for the pineapple, I generally only use the fibrous heart for this salad, which has a very mild taste and like the green papaya, is great for sucking up flavors. Put aside the sweet flesh for eating separately.
5. Julienne the spring onions. Combine all the ingredients, except the peanut, and mix thoroughly with the dressing. Garish with peanuts.
6. Then prepare the fish. Pat the fish fillets dry and season with salt and pepper.
7. Place the fish skin-side down in a pan of hot olive oil. Cook over medium heat for five minutes. Turn over and cook for two more minutes.
8. Serve the fish on rice, complimented by the salad.
Ian Bartholomew runs Ian’s Table, a small guesthouse in Hualien. He has lived in Taiwan for many years writing about the food scene and has decided that until you look at farming, you know nothing about the food you eat. He can be contacted at Hualien202@gmail.com.
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