By Jack Ruttle I think I know what put George Bush off his broccoli. The same thing almost happened to me and carrots. "Eat your nice carrots," I can still hear my parents plead. But I always resisted the spoonful of orange mush with the strangely bitter taste. Things didn't get much better after baby food, either. Peas and carrots, sliced buttered carrots, beef stew with carrots - canned, frozen, store-bought or homegrown - it didn't matter. Cooked carrots in any form were low on my list of edibles. But about two years ago, in the middle of a meal of chicken roasted with potatoes, carrots and onions, I had a change of heart. Those carrots were really sweet! I started cooking up all sorts of recipes with carrots. And I chalked up the experience to a maturing attitude toward vegetables of all sorts. Turns out there was more to it than that, though. It's not just that I've changed my thinking. The carrots available today are noticeably better than what was coming to market even five years ago. The reason is that carrot breeding begun in the 1950s is now transforming the American carrot trade. Twice As Sweet Leonard Pike, a plant breeder at Texas A&M University in College Station, was involved in some of that fundamental improvement, and he judges that carrots today are twice as sweet as they were 20 years ago. "When I started as a graduate student with Dr. Clint Peterson at Michigan State in the mid-'60s, all our carrots were down around 5% or 6% sugar. Now we've got some up to 10, 11, 12%. And total sugars are only part of the sweetness story. To get a good-tasting carrot you've got to select away from that soapy, bitter flavor that comes from terpenoids. High levels of terpenoids can completely mask a respectable sugar content." Terpenoids are a large and complicated group of volatile compounds, and a great many plants contain some of them. Pine sap (and so turpentine), the mint family, hops and orange peels are a few things that can get a bitter taste from terpenoids. A carrot too rich in terpenoids will leave a harsh, burning taste in the back of your mouth. But they are also responsible for the characteristic "good carrot" taste. With no terpenoids, carrots would be bland. Clinton Peterson is the person who first realized how ripe carrots were for improvement both in eating and nutritional qualities. Low bitter- ness and high sugar were really secondary benefits of his work. Increasing the level of vitamin A and the deeper orange color that goes with it were his number one concerns. Varieties like A-Plus, which came out of his breeding program, have twice the vitamin A of carrot varieties of 20 years ago. Peterson died about three years ago, but Pike and a number of other former Peterson graduate students, who have gone on to careers with the USDA and private seed companies, continue to release better carrots. Deep orange, high-vitamin A carrots with sweeter, milder flavor have become the norm in the carrot industry. Virtually all new commercial carrot varieties contain at least a little of Peterson's work in their background. Only a handful of Peterson's carrots have made it into garden see catalogs, though. A-Plus is the one you'll see most often, but there are a few others, like Orlando Gold and Savory. The majority of the new high-A, sweeter carrots are Imperator types, those elegant long roots grown to perfection in California. But that situation is changing with the introduction of Texas Goldspike, one of Leonard Pike's creations that attempts to marry the high quality of the classic European Nantes carrot with the nutritious American improvements. Fancy Nantes It's hard to find a carrot expert who will recommend an Imperator-type carrot for home gardeners. The reason isn't so much that their prodigious length demands deeper soil preparation. It's that as good as some of the newer ones are, there are other classes of carrots that are better eating. You've seen the illustration on the carrot page of seed catalogs - a se- ries of different silhouettes of perfect carrot roots side by side. Carrots are classified by the size and shape of their roots, and there are usually four or five kinds. Imperators are eight to 10 inches long, and slender. Because food shoppers choose with their eyes, Imperators are the only carrots com- mercial growers can be sure of selling. If it's in a plastic bag and grown in the U.S., you can bet it's an Imperator, and these days it's probably going to be pretty good. Slightly shorter, but with straight sides that end in a blunt tip are the Nantes type. Chantenay carrots are about as long as Nantes - five inches or so - and they have the most severe taper: broad at the top, skinny at the bottom. The Danver's carrot is intermediate; not as severely tapered as the Chantenay but not as straight as the Nantes. Finally, there are the short carrots popular in Europe to force under glass for the very earliest harvests. They are usually called Oxheart or Paris Market types. They are stubby and often nearly round. In Europe, bagged carrots are invariably the straight-sided, blunt- tipped Nantes types. A large Nantes is about the size of a hot dog. These carrots are extremely tender and crisp with a mild, sweet flavor. American carrot breeders and seedsmen serving home gardeners agree that these are the very best kinds for fresh eating. Bob Becker is a vegetable specialist at the Geneva Experiment Station in New York. He has run carrot variety evaluations regularly for nearly 30 years and he grows his own carrots at home. He has this to say about the Nantes types: "I don't think you can beat the quality of some of the various strains of Nantes from Europe, and there are a lot of them. They have a high sugar con- tent and are a very succulent item. The tops are small and weak with fewer leaves. That makes them harder to harvest mechanically, but it's no problem for home gardeners." Nearly all the Nantes varieties offered in American seed catalogs come from Europe. The classic Scarlet Nantes is still the standard for quality, but some newer varieties from the Dutch and French breeders get very high ratings for flavor and the true, crunchy Nantes texture. Touchon, Nandor and Rondino are among the very finest. Leonard Pike says, "For gardeners, a Nantes carrot should definitely be on the seed list. They are really crisp. You bite into one and it just shatters. They have a nice sweet taste and no soapy flavor at all. But the tops are so tiny you wonder how you ever are going to get a carrot under them at all." That points to another reason why Nantes types aren't grown commer- cially: low yields. Pike is working on that. "Right now there are just too many minuses to grow Nantes commercially. You've got to have enough root under ground for the farmer to make some money. But a true Nantes is a weak little carrot, only about five inches long and as big around as your finger. What I'm trying to do is get a big Nantes that won't crack when you take it out of the ground. It's not as easy as it might sound. When you start lengthening those carrots, you end up diluting the genetic makeup of the true Nantes. But if I ever accomplish that, you'll probably see my name in the history books somewhere!" Winter Carrots The old-fashioned Chantenay carrots get high marks for flavor too, from both Pike and Becker. But Chantenays are completely isolated from the commercial mainstream. To supermarket buyers, their broad tops tapering into skinny tails look heavy and coarse. Their deltoid profile also make them inconvenient to bag for market or slice for canning or freezing. As a result, they get no attention from breeders and are grown only by gardeners. Chantenays have a safe spot in garden catalogs, though, because besides tasting good, they keep well - an advantage over the tender, crack-prone Nantes. Carrots are a cool-weather crop, and wherever the ground never freezes, you can be harvesting Nantes all season. Everywhere else, a patch of a Chantenay type is your best bet for carrots during the cold season. In my Pennsylvania garden I've kept Chantenays in the ground under mulch for five months, November through March, in absolutely perfect condition. A section of bed two to three feet long by four feet wide is plenty of space to keep a family of four in carrots all winter. An alternative is to dig the carrots before the ground freezes, wash them and store them in buckets of sawdust or peat in a cool room or root cellar. In-ground storage is much less work, though. I cover the carrot patch with hay bales or dry, bagged leaves. The ground beneath has never frozen through subzero weather, and I dig carrots every two or three weeks as we need them. With 30-some years of intense activity among carrot breeders around the world, it's inevitable that some new carrots won't easily fit into any of the traditional and somewhat arbitrary classification of carrots by shape. In Japan, people like a carrot with a tapered look that is both soft fleshed and sweet. Breeders there have crossed Chantenay types with Nantes to get these traits. The shape is hard to sell here, so you won't find many in our seed catalogs. Kinko is one that Johnny's Selected Seeds in Albion, Maine, has offered continuously since the company was founded in 1973. Ingot is the result of the efforts of American seedsman Alf Christensen in Washington state, who worked to improve both the seed producing potential and the eating quality of the highly nutritious A-Plus, which has tapered sides. Ingot, however, is heavily infused with Nantes genes and is blunt-tipped like a true Nantes. It is sweet and tender with vitamin A levels on par with A- Plus. Don't let the fuzzification of carrot categories stymie you. Read the seed catalogs carefully and keep a close watch for the new varieties. Everyone agrees we are in a golden age of carrot development right now, and even better stuff is coming. Digging Deeper In matters of soil, water and fertility, carrots fall squarely in the middle of the vegetable realm. With the same care you give the rest of your vegetables, they'll grow to perfection in the average garden. There are just two special concerns. Avoid using fresh manure to fertilize. (Manure-fed carrots cover themselves with fine roots and take on a hairy look. Sometimes they even become branched or forked.) And prepare the ground deeply. The length of a carrot is determined very early in life. Within the first month the root grows to its full length. After that all it does is enlarge in diameter. If you want to grow full-sized, perfect-looking carrots, you should work the ground thoroughly, at least a foot deep. Remove small stones if at all possible, as stony soil can interfere with both germination and root development. The ideal is to grow the carrots in raised beds. If you double-dig the bed, loosening it to a depth of two spade blades, you'll get even bigger carrots. Carrot seeds are small, and the tiny seedlings are too weak to break through crusted soil. And since carrots should be planted shallowly - never deeper than 1/4 inch - the seedlings can dry out quickly and die before they ever emerge. Make sure the soil is thoroughly moist before you plant. Sow the seed in shallow furrows, covering it with just a little soil. Then top the soil with a light, granular material to prevent crusting. Coarse sawdust from a sawmill is good, as is sand. If you must water after sowing, cover the furrows with boards so water droplets don't compact the soil directly over the seeds. Remove the boards when the first seedlings emerge. Be sure to keep the carrot bed well watered until the plants have developed two or three true leaves. Carrots don't like really hot weather. They're sweetest if they mature when nights are cool. So where the season is long, it's better to make two plantings than to try to hold the spring planting in the ground through summer's heat. Spring-planted carrots can tolerate very light frosts, but they do better if they're protected. For very early crops, cover the young plants with cloches or spunbonded polyester row covers when frost threatens. Competition from weeds or neighboring carrot plants can reduce yields drastically. In beds, keep your carrot rows as close together as pos- sible: two to four inches apart is ideal. As they grow, the carrots will cover the whole bed with their leaves and shade out weeds. Begin weeding and thinning when the plants develop three or four true leaves. A light mulch of grass clippings or weed-free compost applied then will accelerate growth and eliminate future weeding. Large-rooted Chantenays should be thinned to two inches apart. Other carrots will develop well at one-inch spacing. Nantes types tend to develop roots that protrude slightly above ground. If the shoulders start to turn green a thicker mulch will help them remain orange and sweet. You can start eating carrots as soon as they are big enough to make cleaning them worthwhile. But carrots don't begin to develop full flavor and sweetness until they reach maturity. As that time approaches, pull the largest roots first. Those that remain will size up faster as they gain more room. The days when you could settle on a favorite carrot and stay with it faithfully from season to season are long past. Everyone who loves carrots, it seems, should plant at least an early and a late variety of Nantes. For overwintering, you'll need a good keeper, too. And the improvements are likely to continue. The word is that Dutch and French breeders, with their firm lock on the Nantes class, have some high- sugar, high-vitamin A material in their fields. The results that are sure to come can only mean better eating yet. Beware Of Bogus Babies Honest-to-God baby carrots aren't even close to what they're cracked up to be. Cleaning immature carrot thinnings is a tedious job, and when you are finished, the flavor just isn't there. Prompted by the en- thusiasm of gourmet food writers, I've cleaned enough to know. Market gardeners understand that mature carrots are the ones that taste best. What they sell as baby carrots really are miniature varieties, mostly from the Nantes group, that never get big no matter how long you leave them in the ground. If you should see bags of undersized carrots in the market, products with names like "baby-like" carrots, they are something altogether different. These are actually Imperator carrots that have been cut into sections, then mechanically rounded to duplicate the blunt Nantes shape. To get the true Nantes flavor, in either full or "baby" size, you are best off growing your own. Carrot Timeline Garden carrots often grow only a few feet away from their wild counter- parts, Queen Anne's lace, which goes by the identical botanical name, Daucus carota. Carrots originated in the vicinity of Afghanistan and spread through central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Early varieties were white, yellow and reddish purple as well as orange. You can still find these colors in a handful of heirloom varieties. Some storage types produced large, heavy roots that were used as winter feed for livestock. Europeans favored orange roots, and the middle of the last century, most varieties were a pleasing golden orange. The cores, though, were often a paler yellow. The deep orange carrots of today are a very recent development. The first dark orange carrot was Waltham Hicolor, a 1955 introduction from the experiment station in Waltham, Massachusetts. In the Middle East today, carrots are still a staple vegetable. But most of the carrots grown there are a pale lemon yellow, low in vitamin A and not very flavorful. It was Peterson's hope that by radically improving the nutritional value of carrots, he could have an impact on malnutrition in the Third World. His efforts are beginning to pay off as some of the new high-nutrition carrots are finding their way back home.
Provided by NGA
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