Hilman's Secret Kitchen : How to Select a Carrot

Carrot is an important thing in our kitchen. We usually use carrot for seasoning. Mostly vegetarian dish and snack need carrot as ingredients. For the examples are cap cay, soup, carrot pancake and pastel. However, many peoples use carrot as their ingredients without understanding its flavour. In Europe or Korea, peoples often consume it in raw with dip, roast them to tender perfection, or quickly sauté them for dinner. But in Indonesia we could done something better. We have different carrot, our carrot is better in flavour compared with the other country. Based on my experience, Indonesia carrot gives several kind of taste : parsley flavored, sugary, and woody. 

As we know that some carrot varieties are more sugary, others are more parsley flavored, and others naturally woody in taste. Commonly sweet-flavoured carrots are preferred for eating out of hand. All carrots when cooked will be sweeter flavoured than when eaten in raw; that’s because cooking weakens a carrot’s cell walls and releases the sugars inside. The fact is the longer carrot planted, the sweeter it will be.

Here are some tips to select a carrot :

1. Determine what kind of flavour that you want for your dish

2. Pick fresh carrot, not contamined with another smell like onion or radish smell

3. Select carrot in a good shape, never choose cracked carrot

4. Select a long slimmer carrot if you want the sweetest one

5. Choose medium-sized carrots that taper off at the end.