HARVESTING IN THE MARKET
(Page 2 of 3)
January/February 1988
By Ruth Troetschler
A bright red apple skin may hide insipid flesh. Ignore the color, and keep sampling until you learn which apple cultivars taste best to you. For optimum enjoyment, vary your choices seasonally. Summer-maturing apples such as Gravenstein and Grimes Golden are best soon after they ripen. Purchase your favorite storage apples — Golden Delicious, Pippin, Jonathan, McIntosh, Granny Smith, Red Delicious — at other seasons.
RELATED CONTENT
Here are 5 recipes that help you get enough servings of fruit and vegetables each day....
To cut down on plastic bags in the landfill and blowing around on streets, make your own lightweigh...
Ford has started production of its new EcoBoost engine, and General Motors and Honda are readying p...
Learn about canning and preserving food without refrigeration....
Preparing and preserving the fall harvest, with recipes for caponata, eggplant and tahini spread, G...
If you raise keeping apples, they can be stored for many months at 32°F in "zippered" plastic bags (the natural sugars prevent freezing at this temperature). Their respiration will use up the oxygen and release quality-protecting carbon dioxide and moisture into the bag.
Conversely, to hasten the ripening of climacteric fruits — including apples and those annoyingly hard avocados — place them in a covered fruit bowl at room temperature, and add a ripe apple to generate ripeness-inducing ethylene gas.
Most shoppers know that store-bought green bananas will turn yellow within a few days. But watch out. Lightly touch dark green bananas. Unless they give slightly they won't likely ripen.
Warmly colored though firm papayas, persimmons and mangoes will be reliably sweet after you hold them at room temperature for a few days. If you plan to make chutney, however, green mangoes are often specified. Always peel mangoes before using — their skins contain small quantities of the same allergen that causes poison ivy and poison oak. (If your skin is especially sensitive, you might want to wear rubber gloves while skinning the fruit.) To avoid a bitter taste, the American persimmon should be squishy-ripe before eating, while the flat, crisp Oriental persimmons can be eaten out of hand like an apple.
Pears are an ideal market fruit because they must be picked green. To ripen, hold previously refrigerated pears at room temperature until they soften slightly, then keep cold for use within a few days. Bartlett, the favorite summer pear, is choice only in July, August and September. (In October, Bartletts ripen with brown centers or mealy flesh.) The winter pears — D'Anjou, Bosc and Comice — are in season from October through the winter, but they too may deteriorate toward the end of the season.
Though pricey, those fuzzy, brown kiwi fruits are delicious. Firm ones keep a long time in the cold, but they get sweeter and softer after a few days at room temperature. Kiwis should be peeled before eating.
Surprisingly, nonclimacteric fruits of excellent quality are easy to find, possibly because most cannot tolerate long-term storage. All strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, figs and grapes will be tasty if they look fresh and ripe. But remember, they won't get any sweeter after you bring them home.
