Papaya - exotic tropical fruit, which can be bought in many local supermarkets. Papaya tree resembles coconut tree, a food composition, taste and appearance fruit is like a melon. Therefore, the plant is often referred to as the melon tree. This fruit is delivered to our country and European countries from Mexico, South Africa and Asian countries.

Sweet juicy fruits are not only very tasty, but also healthy, as they contain a lot nutrients... It is also a valuable raw material used in the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries.

There are many varieties of papaya, but the most popular among consumers are rounded, yellow fruits with bright orange pulp and melon smell. The sweet, juicy pulp can be eaten just like that, or you can use it to make the most different snacks, salads and desserts.

How to make desserts with papaya and how to eat papaya fruit correctly - we will talk with you today:

How to choose a ripe fruit?

In order not to harm your own health, you can eat raw or prepare salads and desserts only from well-ripened fruits. If they are not very ripe, they are best used in cooking. various dishes, that is, subject heat treatment... Unripe fruits contain a strong alkaloid and can be harmful to health when eaten raw.

When choosing papaya in the store, pay attention to the following signs of ripeness: the fruit should be firm to the touch, with a smooth, slightly soft skin. The pulp of this fruit is sweet and juicy.

If you bought a not very ripe fruit, do not be discouraged. Papaya ripens well at normal home temperatures. Keep it in a dark, dry place for several days, where it will gradually mature. Only then be sure to keep it in the refrigerator, but not longer than a week.

How to eat papaya properly?

If you bought a juicy, ripe fruit, wash it, pat dry with a towel. Then cut in half, remove the seeds with a spoon. Now you can eat the pulp with a spoon or cut it, like cutting a watermelon or melon, into slices.

If you want to put papaya on festive table, cut into slices (like a melon), cut off the peel from each with a sharp knife, and cut the pulp itself into cubes so that it is convenient to chop such a piece with a fork and eat it right away.

You can also make a platter of papaya and other fruits such as kiwi. Just peel them, cut them and arrange them beautifully on a platter. Cut the papaya into cubes and the kiwi into slices.

Popular desserts with papaya

If you want to cook from tropical fruit something tasty and unusual, use the recipes below. Your family will definitely like them and will not leave indifferent guests:

Milk dessert

Need: 2 ripe juicy fruit, with a total weight of about 1 kg, 400 ml of fat milk, 1-2 packs of gelatin (30 g total) and sugar according to your taste.

Preparation:

Pour gelatin with 200 ml of water, leave to swell for 10 minutes. Now mix it with milk and sugar, heat, stirring occasionally, almost to a boil, but do not boil. Remove from stove.

Cut the papaya in half (lengthwise), remove the seeds with a tablespoon. Pour the milk-gelatin mixture into the recesses. When it cools down, gently put it in the refrigerator until it solidifies completely. Now cut into slices (across), place on a platter and serve.

Curd dessert

This recipe is similar to the previous one, but a little more complicated in preparation and in the composition of the ingredients. Dessert possesses excellent taste and looks beautiful. It is quite possible to put it on a festive table.

We need: two fruits, with a total weight of approximately 1-1.2 kg, half a kilo fat cottage cheese, one and a half glasses of cream of any fat content, 30 g of gelatin, a glass of water, half a glass of sugar or powdered sugar (powder is better), the juice of one lime, vanillin - to taste.

Preparation:

Pour gelatin with water, leave for 10 minutes to swell. Cut the fruits in half, remove the seeds, cut the peel. Cut the pulp into small cubes and place in a bowl. Drizzle with lime juice, stir gently.

Heat the swollen gelatin in a saucepan, stirring constantly, almost to a boil, but do not boil. Remove from the stove, let it cool.

Remember cottage cheese with a fork, pour in the cream, add icing sugar and vanillin, stir until smooth. Pour in a warm gelatin solution, beat everything with a blender.

Put the papaya pieces into molds, pour in the curd-gelatin mass, mix gently and put them in the refrigerator until they solidify.

Dessert with soft cheese and honey

We need products: one ripe fruit, weighing about 600 g, 3 tablespoons of soft cream cheese (not salted), the same amount of honey and juice of half a lime.

Preparation:

Cut the papaya lengthwise, remove the seeds, cut off the peel. Chop the pulp and chop with a blender. Put the puree in a bowl, add soft cheese, honey, pour with lime juice, mix well with a fork. Place in the freezer. After 3-4 hours, remove and beat again with a blender.

Place the beaten mass in a container, close the lid and freeze well in the freezer. Remove before serving, place in bowls and serve. You can garnish each serving with whipped cream or mint leaves.

Advice to hostesses: experienced chefs recommend using papaya pulp for marinating meat. Even very hard pieces after such marinating become soft, juicy, tender and after cooking, they acquire an interesting, very pleasant note in taste. Bon Appetit!

A slender papaya tree reaches 5-10 meters in height. It is also called a melon or breadfruit, and this is no coincidence. They say that sweet ripe papaya looks and tastes like a melon. Bread tree it is called because papaya is eaten not only raw. Fire-baked, soft, golden yellow papaya begins to smell like bread. Now let's talk about how to properly cut and peel papaya.

Ways to eat papaya

Now we will describe how to eat papaya raw, how it is more convenient to cut it. Everyone can choose the way they like.

1. Cut the soft fruit in half lengthwise. The seeds are removed (this is easy to do with a spoon). Now you can just eat papaya with a spoon, as sometimes they eat watermelon or kiwi. If the fruit is really ripe and soft, it will be convenient to eat it with a spoon.
2. Also cut the papaya lengthways and extract the seeds. And then cut each half lengthwise into 4-5 slices, like a watermelon. So eat. For convenience, you can make cuts to the skin and bite off the pieces.
3. We do everything the same as in the second method, but peel the skin from each slice and cut the papaya into slices into a plate. You can eat with your hands, a fork or wooden skewers.

• Papaya is eaten mostly raw, but it can be cooked (more on that later).
• Papaya improves digestion, so eat it properly before the main meal, about 30 minutes.
• Do not rush to throw out papaya seeds. Dry them and use them as a spice instead of pepper, they are much healthier than pepper.
• Papaya goes well with lemon juice... Cut it into wedges in a plate (Method 3) and drizzle with fresh lemon juice.
• Papaya is capable of ripening. The ripe fruit is soft, yellow, sometimes with an orange blush, without any dark spots. The smell should not be harsh.
• A huge amount of nutrients from this fruit come into effect only if the fruit is ripe. Besides, the measure is important. Excessive use papaya can be harmful.

What to cook with papaya

Papaya with ham

Needed: papaya (1); lemon juice (1/2); ham (100 g); pepper to taste (can be replaced with dried papaya seeds); hard cheese(quantity optional); walnuts(taste).

Cooking: peel and cut the papaya into thin slices, sprinkle each with lemon juice and season with pepper. Put a thin piece of ham on top of each slice. The cheese can be sliced ​​very thinly and can also be placed on top, or served separately as shavings. Walnuts are also served nearby. In fact, there can be a lot of cooking variations. The main thing here is exquisite combination products that complement each other perfectly.

Papaya dessert

You need: papaya (600 g); cream cheese(like Philadelphia, 3 tablespoons); lime (1/2); honey (3 tablespoons).

Cooking: Peel and cut the papaya. Place it in a blender and puree it. Add all the remaining products, beat thoroughly.

You can eat it like a cream, you can freeze it. Put in the freezer for 1 hour. Then you take it out and beat it, remove it again. An hour later, do the same. It is better to repeat the procedure 3-4 times, this will make the dessert more tender, homogeneous in consistency.

It turns out that this is not such a simple fruit, since you can eat papaya in any form.

The fruits of the papaya, or Melon tree, are tropical berries, pear-shaped, or rounded. The weight of the papaya fruit reaches 0.5 kg; in mature form, its peel has a yellow color with a smooth surface. There are other varieties of papaya that cannot be found on sale in our stores. Their fruits are oblong in shape with a less pronounced taste, but their weight reaches 6 kg and such varieties of papayas are cooked and eaten as vegetables.

Papaya resembles a melon, has a similar texture and juiciness of the pulp. If you cut it in half, you will find an orange pulp with a cavity in the middle, filled with small black seeds. The seeds have spicy taste, similar in taste to black pepper. Papaya seeds are used as a condiment and eaten with salads.

The papaya pulp is 3/4 of the mass of the fruit. Its taste can be compared to that of a melon. When ripe, the pulp is quite soft and has the aroma of overripe raspberries. Unripe papaya is hard and contains latex in the form of juice, which should not be eaten.

If you cut the unripe papaya, let the juice drain from it, then it can be cooked like a vegetable, such as a vegetable marrow. It can be boiled, fried, baked, etc. Papaya plucked from a tree unripe, i.e. with green patches on the peel, will never acquire the proper taste and aroma.

Ripe sweet, flavorful papayas are eaten raw, like a melon. Cut the fruit in half, scoop out the seeds with a spoon and make a few slices. You can eat papaya in any other way you like. Papaya can be added to fruit salad, jams and various desserts are made from it.

Papaya can be eaten by roasting on a fire, which is accompanied by pleasant smell fresh bread. Papaya juice is very popular and useful - one of the most inexpensive ways taste the taste of this tropical plant. In India, the young leaves of the papaya tree are cooked and eaten like spinach.

Keep fresh papaya in the refrigerator. Long storage, over two weeks, will result in loss taste and the subsequent spoilage of the berry. It is advisable to eat papaya immediately after purchase, without exposing it to additional storage after a long transportation, which it has to experience during transportation from warm countries.

Tell your friends about it.

Papaya - exotic product for our country. These berries are the fruits of tropical trees. They are consumed by millions of people from different countries... The papaya is shaped like a pear. Mature fruits of cultivars weigh from 1 to 3 kilograms. They have a dense green rind that turns bright yellow when ripe. There is a "nest" inside the fruit, which contains a large number of seeds. Papaya seeds are edible too. They are tart and pungent in taste, somewhat reminiscent of black pepper. V culinary recipes some countries use ground papaya seeds as an alternative hot pepper... In most cases, orange pulp is eaten. It tastes like a cross between melon and peach. In their own way chemical composition papaya is closer to melon. These trees are also called "melon" trees.

Increasingly, papaya fruit can be found in city supermarkets and vegetable markets. But not everyone is familiar with useful properties of this product and not everyone knows how to eat papaya. Not everyone knows that papayas are healing dietary products... Their most important property is to improve digestion. It is known that the pulp of papaya fruit contains enzymes in their biological composition, reminiscent of gastric juice. Therefore, papaya dishes will be indispensable for stomach ulcers. These berries also contain B vitamins, such as B2, B1, B5, vitamin D and C. Of the trace elements, papaya boasts calcium, iron, potassium and phosphorus, as well as sodium. This is a good composition of substances and one should give preference to papaya as a product that should be in the arsenal of every good housewife.

There are a lot of videos on how to eat papaya on the Internet. Buying this exotic berry, you need to pay attention to the color of the peel - it should be yellow. The green color of the peel indicates that the papayas were removed from the trees unripe. You can try to hold them with room temperature, but the fact that the berry will ripen is not a fact. Therefore, it is better not to take risks and buy ripe fruits with a firm skin, no dents or external damage. Cut the papaya in half and peel the seeds out of the center. Next step there will be a release of the pulp from the peel, you can peel it with a knife, like peeling, for example, potatoes. Now how to eat papaya - the pulp is cut into cubes in a salad. Interesting and unusual taste will have a salad where papaya is combined with other fruits from the tropics such as passion fruit and mango. Dressing for such a dish is lime juice.

There is one more surprisingly useful and tasty dish with papaya - salsa. Peeled as described above, the papaya pulp is finely chopped and combined with the diced kiwi. The highlight of this recipe is red Yalta onions, which are chopped and added to salsa. Ready dish need to sprinkle ground coriander... To use the properties of papaya to improve stomach function, you need to eat the fruit 30 minutes before meals. This will stimulate the production of gastric juice. Papaya is eaten and baked. It is known how to eat papaya as part of a side dish for fish dishes... Chopped fruit pulp is baked in the oven along with beans, mushrooms, broccoli and carrots. Fish fillet can be prepared separately, or can be placed on top of a fruit and vegetable garnish and baked in parchment paper.

It is not necessary to cook some kind of dish from papaya. Since papaya is eaten raw, the question of how to eat papaya correctly can be answered - how is watermelon eaten. The fruit is cut lengthwise, the seeds are taken out with a spoon and that's it, you can taste an exotic product. Cutting the berry into slices, it is eaten like a watermelon or melon. You can not cut, but directly from the resulting "boats" eat the pulp with a spoon. Papaya is quite soft and juicy fruit. For a more festive meal of papaya, there is another way to serve it to the table. You need to - remove the peel, cut the slices into even triangles, stick a skewer into each of them. If you put a kiwi circle on top of a slice of papaya, you can make more cute canapes. Such a simple and easy-to-prepare dessert will decorate " sweet table", for example, for a children's birthday.

It turns out well papaya baked over a fire. You can string pieces of pulp on wooden skewers. Surprisingly, the exotic kebab smells fresh bread... You can also make mashed potatoes from papaya, ripe pulp kneads easily. Papaya juice is also used for cooking vitamin cocktails... Here is one of the recipes: the pulp of one papaya and one kiwi is placed in a blender, you also need to add a little coriander, honey, a teaspoon, and a few ice cubes. All should be mixed until smooth. V ready mix add a glass of milk. Such a cocktail cannot stand, it must be drunk immediately. You can add papaya to multifruit fresh juice, combined with apple, carrot, melon and celery. It is important to remember that unripe papaya can cause allergies, so it is best not to use these fruits.

Don't throw out the papaya seeds either. They need to be rinsed, dried and used in place of black pepper. These seeds are much healthier than their spicy counterpart. Highly delicious desserts with the addition of papaya. You need to take 600 grams of papaya, cream cheese, preferably "Philadelphia" and honey in 3 tablespoons. Make mashed papaya with the rest of the ingredients. Beat everything in a blender, then add lemon juice, about half a lemon. Dessert is eaten like a cream. You can freeze it in freezer refrigerator for an hour. Then take out and beat again in a blender. Repeating the procedure with freezing and beating several times, it will turn out the most delicate dessert... Papaya can be consumed in any form, without spending a lot of work, it is easy to prepare delicious and healthy dishes from it.

The papaya tree resembles a cross between a small palm tree and an ordinary tree. She is originally from Central America and therefore feels great in tropical climates, with excess heat, sun and moisture.

The papaya fruit is round and looks like a medium yellow melon. In diameter they reach 20-30 centimeters and can weigh up to 9 kilograms. The fruit has a thin green and shiny rind and turns yellow when ripe. The inside of the fruit contains numerous small black seeds that taste bitter. One of the most useful qualities papaya is deservedly considered for its antioxidant properties. The extract from this fruit is a component of many elixirs of youth and anti-aging products.

How to choose the right papaya

It is very important to learn how to correctly determine the degree of ripeness of the fruit. It should not be green or overripe. The peel of the fruit will tell you about this. A well-ripe fruit has a beautiful uniform yellow... If the peel is green in most places, this means that the papaya is not yet ready to eat and it is better to put it in paper bag in a dark cool place for ripening. This will most likely take 2-3 days. The firmness of the fruit also speaks of the maturity of the fruit. Soft to the touch, it is ready to eat.

Avoid buying too soft fruit with dark spots. This suggests that she is overripe. But in any case, it is better to keep the papaya fruit in the refrigerator and eat it within 2-3 days.

How can you make papaya

1. Choose a ripe fruit.
2. Cut the papaya in half, remove the seeds. The seeds can be thrown away or dried on a baking sheet for later use as hot seasoning in salads or meat. Use a knife to peel off the peel. Cut the flesh into slices and place in a nice bowl. Eat fruit with or without lemon juice.
3. Take advantage of big spoon in order to remove the core of the papaya along with all its seeds. Fill the resulting cavity with the chopped fruit salad. You can use bananas, kiwis, oranges and berries of your choice. Add honey, yogurt, or cream.
4. Take a large papaya fruit and cut into several pieces. Insert a wooden ice cream stick into each of them. Refrigerate for several hours. You will succeed great delicacy for hot summer weather.
5. Add finely chopped pieces of fruit to your favorite chicken, tuna, or shrimp lard. She will exquisitely sweeten it and add exoticism not only in taste, but also in appearance.
6. You can grill the papaya by cutting it into thin strips. Determine the readiness by the ruddy stripes that appear. Turn the pieces over and heat on the other side. This makes a great, healthy, low-calorie snack.

The constituents

Fresh fruit contains significant amounts of water with a very low calorie content (about 25-30 kcal / 100 g), low fat content (0.1 / 100 g), low protein content (0.6 g / 100 g) and consist of about 10 percent carbohydrates. Papaya is very rich in minerals such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium. Vitamins of group A, C and beta carotene. It is important to note that papaya contains more vitamin C than lemon, orange, and kiwi. The fruit is also rich in carotenoids. The value ranges from 3.2 mg / 100 g to 4.2 / 100 g.

Antioxidant properties

Papaya has a high content of molecules with antioxidant activity. This is very important property for human body in the fight against many chronic diseases associated with oxidative processes (Alzheimer's disease, cancer, heart attack, etc.). Also, papaya provides the amount of beta-carotene, flavonoids, papain, niacin necessary for a person.

Unripe papaya fruit contains a large amount of latex. This substance is removed by extraction made
from a cut of an unripe fruit. Then the contents are dried, cleaned and sold in local markets the very next day.

Papin, as he is called, increases digestive activity, and also has high antimicrobial properties. It is thought to be very similar in composition to pepsin, an enzyme produced by the human stomach to digest protein. Papain is also used in the treatment of ulcers, against edema, for fever, and also in the prevention of sintered process after surgery. Dad is also widely used in cooking, textile industry, cosmetics and household chemicals... It is important to remember that during pregnancy, the use of drugs with a high content of daddy can lead to miscarriage.

For over 20 years, using a complex technological process biofermentation fresh fruit papaya. The substance obtained in this way is rich in valuable amino acids, has a low content of oligosaccharides, vitamin B6 and beta-carotene. The drug is widely used in pharmacology as it is very effective in the fight against various diseases.

• In order to maximize its benefits, it is advisable to eat the fruit with a meal, not after it. This is because it is perfectly absorbed in combination with fats.
• If you use fermented papaya, then you should do it half an hour before or an hour after a meal.

So, papaya fruits improve digestion, remove toxins from the body, and speed up metabolism. They also increase vitality and stimulate nervous system, reduce the risk of tumors and prevent premature aging. A large number of vitamin C helps the immune system fight stress. The fruits are also delicious.