Baby carrots. Fresh from the garden, you've got to love them. But bought frozen they have a peculiar texture and lack of sweetness about them. Ever wondered why?
On the face of it, a frozen baby carrot looks like just that. But unless you buy them fresh with a visible 'shoulder' on them, the likelihood is that they're actually carved out of a full-sized market-reject carrot using an industrial peeler, a process invented in the late 1980's by Mike Yurosek, a Californian farmer. There's nothing wrong with them apart from the fact that they're not baby carrots. They're big carrots cut small, and sometimes have the end dipped in green dye to make it look as if there was once some growth there. Call me naive, but that came as a bit of a surprise to me.
So folks, if you want real baby carrots with a startling crunch and a superb flavour then you've got two choices: buy specially-grown varieties like Amsterdam Forcing or Thumbelina, with the tops still visible; or grow your own.
Well, that's my manky old storage carrots dealt with. Now, I wonder what I can make out of this soggy old parsnip? Answer; parsnip bread. More anon.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Shock of the Day
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7 comments:
or parsnip soup, parsnip wine, parsnip mash, parsnip fritters...parsnip models...
oh no, sorry, the last one was my fevered brain working overtime!
Will be eating baby carrots next week from the PT, if the pesky cats don't get in and kip on the bed again...(grrr)
I must be naive too, I had no idea...
As to parsnips my current favourite recipe is cream of curried parsnip soup. Yum!
I always envision old men and women siiting in chairs in front of giant pencil sharpeners in the middle of a field, baskets of carrots by their side. They pop the carrots in, sharpen them to a point and toss them into a basket on the other side of them.
As for your parsnip, bread? Really. Sounds interesting.
Mmmm... parsnips...
Parsnip bread? Do tell.
I always wondered why those peeled baby carrots never looked quite right.
Yes Naive too, never know that, but in some way I find it reassuring that idiots who don't buy "real" carrots because they are "dirty" and not straight, are getting them served up in a different form. Nice to know food isn't going to waste, well apart from the pencil sharpenings.
Another scam is when the supermarkets sell plastic-lined "paper" bags of "farm-fresh" carrots, complete with tops and authentic soil. Except that the soil is actually sterilised dirt sprayed on the cleaned carrots...
Wow. Is there any deception they rule out?
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