Fruits World : Papaya

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Papaya (Carica papaya L.) is a popular fruit native to tropical America. It is usually grown for its small to large melon-like fruit. It is a herbaceous perennial, bearing fruit continuously at the leaf axils spirally arranged along the single erect trunk. The papaya is also called papaw, pawpaw, papayer (French), melonenbaum (German), lechosa (Spanish), mamao, mamoeiro (Portuguese), mugua (Chinese) and betik (Malaysian, Indonesian). The fruit is the major product from this species, though young leaves and male flowers are used as vegetables and in soap. Nutritionally, the papaya is a good source of calcium (30 mg/100 g), and an excellent source of provitamin A and ascorbic acid (Wenkam, 1990). Papayas are consumed fresh as breakfast fruit, dessert or in salads. In Asia, green fruits are cooked as a vegetable or made into preserves. Papayas are also processed into various forms, such as dehydrated slices, chunks and slices for tropical fruit salads and cocktails, or processed into puree for juices and nectar base, usually frozen, and as canned nectar, mixed drinks and jams.

Papaya puree is the basis for remanufacturing of many products. Papaya puree is processed aseptically or frozen, with yield of ca. 50%. The flavour of aseptically processed puree is stable during processing and after 6 months in ambient storage, with some colour changes noted. Papain is a proteolytic enzyme that digests proteins and is used as a meat tenderizer, as a digestive medicine in the pharmaceutical industry, in beer brewing, tanning industries and in the manufacture of chewing gum. Papain production is primarily centred in Tanzania and India, where labour is abundant and inexpensive. The latex is obtained from green papaya by making about four surface lancings on the fruit and catching the drippings in cups, with yields of 88.5–227 g/tree of dried latex per year. Approximately 2.27 kg of fresh latex will produce 0.45 kg of dried latex (Paul and Duarte, 2011).