The conundrum with carrots

Carrots seem so simple but I’m having a hard time cooking them. They come out mushy and limp. They taste bad. They look bad. It’s all bad.

I’ve learned a few things in my effort to cook this most simple side dish.

First, you do in fact need to peel your carrots, because it’s the skin that gives carrots a bitter flavor. Don’t worry about losing nutrients, there are plenty of them and they pervade the entire carrot. 

And as an important aside, carrots are among the vegetables that are more nutritious when cooked than when raw. When you heat them up, you do kill some of the delicate vitamin C; but mainly what we hope to get from carrots is beta carotene. 

I learned from the online carrot museum (I am not kidding, it’s at www.carrotmuseum.co.uk) that “The antioxidant value of carrots increases by about 34 percent when cooked.”

The reason why: “Raw carrots have tough cellular walls” that impede the body’s ability to convert and absorb the beta carotene. 

“Cooking partially dissolves the cellulose-thickened cell walls, freeing up the nutrients,” according to the museum website, which also recommends that the carrots be cooked with some kind of fat (that would include olive oil) because the fat also helps the body absorb the  nutrients.

Vegetable juice isn’t so much my thing, but the website says that juicing also makes those nutrients very available to your body.

Now we’ve resolved that carrots are nutritious and that they need to be peeled and cooked. Next question: How should they be cooked so that they look and taste wonderful?

First of course, your cooked carrots are only as good as your raw carrots. I found a lot of really limp, tired carrots as I was working on this story. I am making a special point of saying that because the holidays are coming up and it’s likely that a) you’re cooking for a large crowd and b) you don’t have any more carrots from your garden.

So, if you’re just cooking a few carrots, I think you’re probably going to be fine traveling to a store with a good produce department and spending a little extra money to get a beautiful bundle of carrots. Chop off the greens but leave an inch or two of stem at the top (because it’s prettier). 

My friend Anne Young of the www.annefood.com blog (who is also quoted in this week’s article on cooking turkey) suggested that for a small amount of carrots, it’s nice to roast them. 

Make sure you pat them dry after you peel them and before you put them in the oven, so you are truly roasting them and not steaming them. Put them in a heavy cooking vessel such as a large cast iron pan. Make sure there is some space between each carrot (again, so they don’t steam). 

Put a little olive oil and maybe a pat of butter on them. Cook them between 375 and 400 degrees for about 20 minutes, so that the interior cooks through but the exterior doesn’t overcook. If you want to add honey, add it toward the end of the cooking time. 

Anne and I also did an experiment with cooking sliced carrots on the stovetop. They came out really nicely. Confession: I didn’t feel like peeling a lot of carrots, so I bought baby carrots. Baby carrots are not in fact baby carrots; they are big carrots that have been cut and shaped into 2-inch logs. 

Yes, they do clean them at the factory in a solution that includes a small amount of chlorine but that isn’t going to cause cancer (I say this with confidence because I’m a swimmer and have ingested a lot of chlorine in my life). And the carrots are sold in a plastic bag with a little water to keep them hydrated, so yes do rinse the carrots before you cook them.

If you want them to look a little nicer, cut each carrot on the bias (lengthwise and diagonally).  Cook them in a little olive oil and a little water or broth, stirring them so they get nicely browned on all sides and nicely tender on the inside.

To make them really pretty, sprinkle some parsley on top before you serve.