You may have heard Chef Daniel Orr say it before -- that 90 percent of being a good chef is being a good shopper, and 10 percent not screwing up what you bought. Here are his tips for picking out carrots:
If you find some nice organic carrots, you want to have them with the greens very vibrant looking. That's the way you can tell that they haven't been around for too long. Then the first thing you want to do when you bring these home is cut off the greens, because these will continue to feed off the roots. They will actually suck moisture and nutritional value out of the carrot. Now, that doesn't meant that you want to throw these away. You wash them very well and you can add them to salads. You can use them for garnishing like you would parsley. I even deep fry them and use them as a fried garnish. And you can chop them up and use them as an herb.
Or how about a carrot greens pesto? Chef Arlyn Llewellyn had never prepared carrot greens, but then she placed an order with one of her farmers, Jim Baughman of Freedom Valley Farm.
"We were talking to him about carrots, and he said, ‘Do you want to do anything with the tops because I've got a bunch of those.' I looked at him and he was like, ‘They make a great pesto.' Turns out, that's a whole thing, but I didn't know anything about that," she said.
Today, we make pesto with Llewellyn and a Carrot Orange Salad with Orr.
Stories On This Episode
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