In the past five years I’ve profiled bushels of fruits and vegetables in my bi-weekly Fresh Bites for the Toronto Star, from familiar favorites to the weird and wonderful.
Whenever I come across something “new”, say pink muscat grapes from Chile, a new season for kent mangos or yellow dragonfruit from Colombia, I secretly wish a produce manager would send a note to me and other food writers so we could get our readers excited and drive them to your store.
Of course, some produce is downright weird when you haven’t grown up with it. Take the eddo, beloved by Asian and Caribbean cooks. After cooking the egg-shaped tropical root, I felt obliged to warn unsuspecting readers that: “This hairy black potato has a rough skin that may irritate your skin, with flesh that may turn gray when cooked and with a texture that may include a hint of slime.”
Fresh horseradish, which made the cashier blush with its phallic shape, should also come with a warning, namely don’t inhale deeply while grating the cream-coloured root as the sudden blast of heat may leave you momentarily blind and sear your sinuses.
I spend my best research days talking to immigrants about produce from their homeland. Standing beside a bin of fresh okra at No Frills with a group of shoppers, I asked the Caribbean woman beside me how to choose the best ones. I came home with recipes and advice from four different countries. The day I brought a clamshell of guavas to the checkout, the clerk sighed and told me how guavas grow on huge trees all over her village in the Philippines.
To balance the expensive, hard-to-find items, I’ll often profile more mainstream produce. That’s when I discover items I think are old news, like purple potatoes, can be a revelation to others, like my cousin the retired teacher. When I asked Rick Alcocer recently how to make celery sound interesting, the senior VP of fresh vegetable sales for Oviedo, Fla.-based Duda Farm Fresh Foods was full of news.
Turns out the world’s biggest celery grower has been listening carefully to customer complaints that the stalks are too big for their crisper and they never finish the whole bunch, which decays quickly and ends up in the garbage. So Duda began chopping up celery into snack-size sticks, cutting them with a water jet instead of a blade for a perfect edge, cleaning them in an organic wash and packing nearly two stalks of celery into a 20-ounce resealable bag.
“The growth has averaged 20% to 25% over the last three to four years,” said Alcocer. “The celery is washed and ready to eat, everything in the bag is edible and there’s no more mess.” With a higher ring, the fresh-cut bags also bring more dollars into the category.
Duda also hired two PhDs to develop sweeter celery with embedded strings so consumers don’t feel like we’re eating dental floss. Eager for another challenge, the experts bred stunning red celery with neon green leaves. Alcocer said the first batch arrived in Canada five years ago, to the delight of retailers, but the red color soon began to fade in the fields and the experiment was put on ice, temporarily.
The company has now figured out how to grow a more resilient red, he said, along with a creamy-textured white celery, which he said is how celery looked before WWII, when European growers painstakingly covered the crop to keep it white. Both varieties are a good two years from commercial distribution, he said, and they may be sold as a limited edition crop around Valentine’s Day.
Duda has even produced celery that tastes exactly like carrots, Alcocer said, but I’m not sure messing with kids’ taste buds is a good idea. And one wouldn’t want it to go the way of kalettes, last year’s kale/Brussels sprouts cross that launched with great fanfare but has since gone quiet.
“Kalettes was an awesome item,” said Ben Alviano, Canadian manager for Salinas, Calif.-based Mann Packing, “but it was incredibly difficult to harvest. Although we spent a lot of time and money developing it, we ultimately decided to get out of it.”
Alviano said there are still a few growers around, and the frilly but tough little vegetable may return one day. “Maybe the timing wasn’t right,” he said.
Now, I’m on the hunt for celtuce, a Chinese lettuce cultivar grown since 600 AD and known for its thick white, nutty-tasting stems with a smoky aftertaste. After five years, I suspect Fresh Bites readers are ready for a celtuce stir-fry. PR