Discover the power of carrots!

July 5, 2005 4:18 PM

Discover the power of carrots! Includes carrot fine art, carrot history, and purple carrots?
posted by Mwongozi (20 comments total)

This site is probably about carrots; but, I do not know for sure because it has the bandwidth of... A CARROT!
posted by found missing at 4:32 PM on July 5, 2005

With that site down, consider, instead, this recent blog entry extolling the virtues of carrots, with some absolutely fascinating bits of information about them.

Never fear, Waldo to the rescue!
posted by waldo at 4:35 PM on July 5, 2005

It's working now (for me), and I'm impressed by the Carrot Queen's collection of carrotabilia. It says somewhere that I can stay in the Carrot room at her cottage in Newport, but either doesn't have enough room for a bed or maybe it's a kitchen.
posted by PY at 4:53 PM on July 5, 2005

Carrots turn you orange!
posted by interrobang at 4:54 PM on July 5, 2005

Let the rabbits wear glasses?
posted by pmbuko at 5:00 PM on July 5, 2005

The story on "baby carrots".

Grimmway's Cal Organic farm produces Bunny Luv carrots. Bunny Luv (pdf) carrots are the best commercial carrots in the world, I swear to you. Try them and love them.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:17 PM on July 5, 2005

Snap.
posted by tellurian at 5:36 PM on July 5, 2005

Site's down...but if you save carrot seed and re-plant it, you get many color variations, from pale white (the wild type), through orange, to red/purple. Big, juicy orange ones seem to be selected against, in nature at least.
posted by primdehuit at 6:30 PM on July 5, 2005

I like crazy carrots, as I mentioned in a 01/05/2005 Mefi thread on The Museum of Food Anomalies. The best carrot from there:


posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 6:42 PM on July 5, 2005

five fresh fish: great article on "baby carrots". I wanted to mention that such "babies" are really derived from a French technique of carving root vegatibles into little football shapes. However I can't remember the French term and Google searches for things like "turned potatoes" give too much noise. Does anybody know the right term?

Anyway here are some summary quotes from that article:

["baby carrots"] now make up a third of sales of fresh carrots
...
Culls are carrots that are too twisted, knobby, bent or broken to sell. In some loads, as many as 70% of carrots were tossed. And there are only so many discarded carrots you can feed to a pig or a steer, says Yurosek, now 82 and retired. "After that, their fat turns orange"
...
Stores paid 10 cents a bag for whole carrots and sold them for 17 cents. They paid 50 cents for a 1-pound package of baby carrots and sold them for $1.
...
Minis — what they're called in the industry
...
"Prior to baby carrots, the ideal length for a carrot was somewhere between 6 and 7 inches," Simon says. Now they're typically 8 inches long, a "three-cut" that can make three 2-inch babies. And breeders are edging toward fields of even longer carrots. "You make it a four-cut, and you've got a 33% yield increase,"

posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 7:27 PM on July 5, 2005

French technique of carving root vegetables into little football shapes..."turned potatoes"

Most of the commercial ones I see look like they have been tumbled in something like a gem polisher, but with a grater as the tumbling surface. I am sure that the juice is sold as juice, and the gratings I am guessing become part of veggie burgers.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:48 PM on July 5, 2005

I'm frankly outraged at the paltry attention paid to the Flaming Carrot at the Carrot Museum. For shame.
posted by davelog at 7:49 PM on July 5, 2005

MonkeySaltedNuts, I think you might be thinking of tourne.
posted by tellurian at 8:01 PM on July 5, 2005

And let us not forget that red-headed arseyipper "comedian", He Who Will Not Be Named.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:11 PM on July 5, 2005

Discussion on turned vegetables. I learned this technique at catering college and use it on special occasions to impress and keep my hand in.
posted by tellurian at 8:14 PM on July 5, 2005

Wow. That's one helluva discussion about nothing much at all. Peel carrot: sautee carrot: end of story. The better the shape, the better it will sautee. Bingobangodone.

It's kind of like a veggie version of MeFi.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:45 PM on July 5, 2005

I love purple carrots. They're a much better texture, and really mellow carroty taste, sweeter than normal carrots.

Except they make everything else purple..
posted by Lord_Pall at 5:23 AM on July 6, 2005

This is neat.
To be honest, this is the first I have heard of purple carrots. What a confusing concept! I have a hard time accepting it as a carrot because my mental construct of a carrot is them orangy things. Funny how our minds work.

I'll have to give them a try. Thanks.
posted by dios at 7:37 AM on July 6, 2005

i'm actually allergic to carrotts, a rare and inconvenient problem. damn things are in everything.
posted by TrinityB5 at 11:06 PM on July 6, 2005

"everything"? Surprise me -- where are you finding carrots where one might not expect to find them?
posted by five fresh fish at 10:12 AM on July 7, 2005