I Can Always Smell Papaya

When you have a papaya ripening on your counter for two weeks, you get to know the nuance of the aroma of papaya. How to describe the smell is tricky, though. There’s a floral softness, a musky bouquet that makes me dreaming of biting into a juicy, pink-fleshed piece.

The internet tells me that’s the phenolic and carotenoid profile of the fruit talking, which comes with a papain-induced note of something funky. But my romantic side thinks it’s the memory of sweet fruit in abundant stalls in Vietnam; mini, speckled wonders picked up in an Arizona Whole Foods (because they get the delicious Hawaiian ones that Montreal doesn’t); or cut directly from a tree on an organic farm in Malaysia (where I wonder if it would have been better if the snake got me rather than the mosquitos).

Or maybe it’s the mountains of beach ball-sized fruit in Peru with their petroleum-like smell that’s a little too addictive. That’s when I remember papaya smoothie mornings and late night juices at The Dwarf.

Either way, if there’s papaya around, I’ll recognize it instantly. It sucks me in like a gingerbread house with a trail of cinnamon-sprinkled breadcrumbs.

Papaya Ripening

So when I stare at my fully green organic papaya that was not picked fresh from the tree (they soften and slightly sweeten after picking, but this one was picked well before its prime, with knowledge of the long road ahead), I wonder if it will turn into the delicious concentration of sweet and funky flavour that is the organic dried papaya from Yupik, a bulk importer in Montreal. Their most recent batch was semi-soft, fresh from harvest and drying, and it’s heavenly with their melt-in-your-mouth pecan halves.

The only problem is that it’s a little harder to make juice or smoothies with dried papaya that with fresh. But I champion flavour over texture in this case, so I’ll take the dried. I’m also practical; I know I just can’t taste that sweet, intense flavour with an imported papaya anyway – at least not at this time of year.

As I watch my papaya ripen day by day, those phenols get stronger, becoming an impossible-to-miss waft of expectation, which is a less exciting way of saying that I like walking into my kitchen and being reminded olfactorily that the day is coming when I’ll get to bite into a memory. Because memory – miraculous little trick that it is – can make up for anything lacking in the papaya itself. Or almost.

Ah papaya, a metaphor for life.

Disclaimer: I’m making zero commission from promoting any products or companies in this post. That being said, if the World Papaya Foundation (which is probably not a thing) wanted to reach out to me to sponsor a series of papaya-tasting blog posts, I’d probably be open to that.