Tips for Determining Produce Quality

[Chris Amirault]

You found it!

The harvest doesn’t stop them. Even cut off from their roots, the asparagus spears keep growing at the tip. If they’re stored lying down, the tips rise away from the pull of gravity, and can bend 60 degrees or more from the stalk before they run out of energy.

This seems to imply that the bent tips only indicate the orientation of the asparagus during storage. I believe Alton Brown agrees with this. See "The Age Of Asparagus," S14E03. Of course, it's possible that asparagus stored on its side has been deprived of water, but it's not water deprivation that causes the curved tips.

My source was definitely that McGee article, so I added the water bit as an assumption. Thanks.

At the store yesterday, I realized that I have no way to tell whether cherries, blueberries, raspberries, and a lot of other fruit are good without eating them. Which I do, regularly.

[emannths]

You can use the nibble method to check the sweetness of corn too. While you're checking the kernels at the tip, just snap one off and taste it. If it's sweet, you're good to go!

[Chris Amirault]

Well that's just genius.

[weinoo]

You can use the nibble method to check the sweetness of corn too. While you're checking the kernels at the tip, just snap one off and taste it. If it's sweet, you're good to go!

I used to do the poking of a kernel with a fingernail while no one was looking. It works especially well to test for starchiness.

But with the sweetness and general all-around freshly picked nature of corn at farmer's market, now I just feel to see if the ear is nicely filled out and at the stalk end, which shouldn't look all dried out.

[ray goud]

Asparagus with bent tips (curled?) simply encountered an obstruction while pushing up through the soil. If the tips are truly dried, don't buy.

What's your source on this information?

Personal observation; we used to grow it when we first moved to our house and decided to have an "everything" garden. Later learned that not everything grows where one wants it. A neighbor who grows it sees the same thing. The asparagus ideally should be in very loose, "fluffy" soil. He tills very early each year but still gets bent spears, because this IS New England, after all.

Ray

[Chris Amirault]

Artichokes - squeeze and if they squeak, they're good to go.

I thought that they were supposed to be firm?

[weinoo]

Artichokes - squeeze and if they squeak, they're good to go.

I thought that they were supposed to be firm?

Indeed. A nice, fresh artichoke will be firm and will give off a squeak when you squeeze it. It will also feel heavy in the hand. Frost burned tips are not a problem (and probably not a worry in the summer) as they are thought to make for an especially tasty artichoke.

As Russ Parsons says in the aforementioned How To Pick A Peach:

You can tell really fresh artichokes because their leaves will squeak when you rub them together.

But, you already knew that .

[ChickenStu]

I was told that for watermelons, look for the bug scars, because that means its sweet. The scars im referring to are the rough brown patches.

I dont know if this is true or not...but its still what I use.

[nakji]

The spot on the watermelon should be yellow like Doodad says. In addition to that little sign, I've almost always had good luck with the tapping method. If it feels heavy for its size, and sounds nice and hollow, it's usually ripe.

I buy my fruit from a fruit stand on my street. The owner thinks I'm ill-equipped to pick out my own fruit, based on the first two or three times I visited - since I was raised with supermarket fruit, I just picked my choices by size and relative clarity of skin. He was appalled; so now he always does it for me. I'm learning a lot from him; maybe next year I'll be checked out to pick out my own. For watermelons, he does exactly as Shamanjoe says; he gives all the melons in the flat a light thwacking, until he finds one with a hollow thump. Then the challenge is to get it home without cracking it at all. Invariably, it only needs the lightest tap of the knife on the rind to have it split under its own juice. Unfortunately, it's the kind of melon that can only be eaten while standing over a sink.

[Chris Amirault]

That's a nice problem to have.

[heidih]

I think smelling and touching are valuable tools so I was a bit dismayed to see a sign at the farmstand complete with hand drawn illustrations that said "no touching or smelling"...

[Chris Amirault]

No way. No smelling??

[heidih]

No way. No smelling??

Yup - they drew a picture of a nose with wavy lines and wrote no smelling. A germ fear I guess? And truth be told I have seen people in terms of touching who squeeze like they are squeezing a chubby baby cheek. If you know what to do, it is a very subtle thing both in the sniffing and touching, but its the minority who throw the wrench in the works maybe?

[Chris Amirault]

Could you point? Or even look? Or were they like Nigel in Spinal Tap with his guitars?

[sparrowgrass]

Another thing to remember when choosing produce is that some things will continue to ripen after picking, and some don't. Peaches, cantaloupes and tomatoes all have the potential, if they weren't ripped from the plant too early, to ripen and soften on the counter. Pineapples, strawberries and other berries cannot ripen after picking--what you see is what you get.

Finding a ready to eat cantaloupe is a miracle, but 2 or 3 days on the counter can really sweeten one up.

[Doodad]

Remember the old lady in Tampopo ruining the asian pears in the grocery store?

[Kat Tanaka Okopnik]

Remember the old lady in Tampopo ruining the asian pears in the grocery store?

I'm pretty sure that was individually wrapped Japanese peaches. They're huge and blush pink on the skin, white on the inside. Asian pears don't bruise like that. (I am, alas, separated from my hard-won DVD of Tampopo.)

I encountered a streetside fruit vendor who refused to let me sniff the produce, too. I don't remember where that was. It was on the East Coast in a major city somewhere. I told him I don't buy pigs in a poke.

[Chris Amirault]

I bought a few bell peppers today, and I realized that I selected them for the opposite reasons mentioned above: I go for lighter weight, not heavier weight, because I don't want to pay for the ribs and seeds inside. Since I always dice or mince them, I also look for long, straight bells as opposed to ones with lots of curves.

[scubadoo97]

I also look for long, straight bells as opposed to ones with lots of curves

I do the same as Chris does. I'm looking for the best yield when dicing.

[Chris Amirault]

Is there any way to tell whether or not celery has that weird salty taste?

[Fat Guy]

Isn't that just the taste of celery? What does it taste like minus that taste?

[percival]

Celery tastes salty? Maybe you're associating it with celery salt. I never use/can't stand the stuff (like Old Bay). I think the older it is, the sweeter it tastes. Younger celery, less green celery, has a "greener," cleaner taste.

When I buy things like mangos or plums, I pick the hardest ones. I always buy under ripened ones cos they're just yuuuuuuuuuuuck when over ripened. Then again, I prefer to eat them under ripe anyway. Mushy mealy sweet, no thank you.

How do you pick a ripe cantaloupe or honeydew? I never buy them -- she does. But her miss rate is too high, and she just throws an entire bad one away. (Can you ripen already cut melon?)

[Chris Amirault]

I'm able to distinguish celery salt from fresh celery, as it turns out. My question concerns the difference between celery that has a slightly salty yet fresh taste and celery that is dominantly salty and somewhat bitter.

[percival]

I'm sure you can distinguish the difference, no doubt. =) I mean when you eat celery, you associate it with the memory of saltiness... Again, not sure where you're coming from. I've never found celery salty, either slightly or dominantly.

[Snadra]

The comments about checking pineapples are interesting. A few years ago we visited The Big Pineapple (yeah yeah yeah Australia is full of big stuff - I think the giant prawn is the scariest) and one of the things we were told was that the decision about when to pick is made by sampling mature fruit for sweetness, then picking that growth cohort. They also said that pulling bits of the crown off is not a good way to determine ripeness/sweetness, but that all pineapples are essentially picked at their peak, as far as the growers are able to tell. So now when I look at pineapples, I no longer try to work out which might be the sweetest/ripest, because my assumption is that I won't be able to tell. Instead, I look for what I think is the freshest fruit: no wrinkles or soft spots, but it smells good, feels heavy for its size (there's that again) and has nice plump eyes.

This page has more info from a grower.