Cooking With Carrots

Carrots are a common root vegetable that has a wide variety of climates in which it can be grown, and a broad range of cooking uses. It can be eaten moments after picking or put into storage, and is equally edible in raw or cooked form.

The modern carrot is known for being bright orange. That's the root part, which grows underground, and comes topped with a spray of thin, leafy foliage. For eating, the tops are cut off and discarded, the ends of the root are trimmed and the skin is most often peeled.

Carrots have a nice mix of vitamins, providing good amounts of vitamins A, B6 and C, along with niacin, thiamin and potassium. They are rich in dietary fiber, and low in fat and cholesterol. For those watching your sugars, you may want to limit your carrot consumption as most of their caloric load is sugar-based.

Carrots will keep best in your refrigerator if they are kept very cool and have a high humidity. Sliced and kept in a container with water that is changed regularly, you can often keep carrots for several weeks. A sign that you need to eat your carrots right now is that they will start to become flexible or rubbery in texture. If you are growing your own carrots, they can often be best stored by keeping them in the ground and mulching over them in the winter.

When shopping for carrots, you want to check their appearance and their texture. Cracks and blemishes are signs of a poor carrot, as is a rubbery or bendy texture.

You want to buy carrots that are firm and rigid, which is the signs they are still fresh. They take the tops off at supermarkets to save on space, but that also helps hide how old the carrots are. You want to get carrots where the green tops are still bright green and feathery, and then top them as soon as you get home, as that helps them stay fresh in storage.

They will last longer with high humidity, and some people even like to wash and cut up their carrots and store them in water in the fridge. If you want to give that a try, make sure to change the water every 3-4 days.

If you do find yourself with a few rubbery carrots, you don't have too many options. If it's just a little bit, you can try soaking them in ice water and see if that refreshes them at all, and if so, eat them right away. But most often my rubbery carrots get a trip right out to the compost pile.

It turns out that human cultivation is what really gave the carrot its well-known orange appearance. (The Dutch bred them to honor the Duke of Orange) Wild carrots were either white or purple. If you'd like to think outside the orange box, there are a whole variety of carrots that will taste almost the same but add a totally different look to your cooking.

White - some of the juiciest carrots I've ever eaten where a variety called "white satin." They also has the longest life of any carrot I've put into my refrigerator.

Yellow - carrots can run from pale cream to lemon bright.

Purple - some purple carrots are solid purple, but my favorites are purple on the outside with a bright orange core down the center. Sliced into rounds, this is a showstopper when added to a summer salad.

Red - prized as an addition or garnish in sushi-making, these carrots often come from stock or seeds developed in Asia.

If you are a gardener with really limited space, or if you have very hard soil, you might like trying to grow these ball-shaped carrots. They don't need the depth of the more conventional carrot, but taste the same.

Carrots can be as beautiful as they are edible. In raw form, they are often best eaten when cut into slim sticks. For salads, cutting them into rounds or shredding with a grater are good options.

If you are going to cook your carrots, you can steam or boil them easily, but be sure to not overcook them. The best cooked carrots are still quite firm. Heated too long and they become mushy. While that is a nice way of making baby food, it's often a complaint voiced by adults who find their carrots collapse as soon as a fork touches them.

The bright color and firm texture of a carrot makes them good candidates for crafting fanciful food garnishes.

Curls - use a vegetable peeler to make paper-thin strips of carrot. Roll up into curls and secure with toothpicks, then plunge into ice water to set the shape. Remove toothpicks before using.

Simple Stars - cut thin wedges or grooves down the length of a thick carrot and remove. When you slice the carrot into rounds, the shapes will be flower-like.

Roses - If you cut very long paper-thin strips of carrots, and you curl them around themselves, you will wind up with what resembles a rose. Sometimes more than one strip of carrot is needed, and you just overlap the ends to add more length.