Submitted by Priyanka Grover

We all are aware of organic farming, organic food and the reasons to choose it over other food. However, we still buy regular groceries, and life goes on without realizing what we are missing. I recently had a chance to try organic vegetables, and I’d like to share my culinary experience with organic food, differentiating it from regular food. And they came from a personal farm, which is not a rocket-science (and I mention it here to encourage people to take it up)!

1. Vegetable: The eggplant, aubergine, melongene, brinjal or guinea squash
I have cooked this vegetable in various ways- bharta, thin slices fried with potatoes and fried slices with curd-curry leaves mix. The biggest differentiator is the number and quality of seeds inside the brinjal. In the organic variety there were just a few seeds, and these were very fine and soft. Also the taste so sweet and soft; it’s the taste of what a brinjal should be. The texture is very smooth and blends well to give out its natural juice.


2. Vegetable: bottle gourd, opo squash or long melon
This vegetable, if fresh, is definitely soft to poke with your nails and has a light green color.
The physical differentiator is of course, the seeds - which are soft and sweet to eat- even in raw form. The white part of the gourd seems fresher is extremely fleshy. The organic variety will cook faster with more water oozing out of it and in two-three pressure cooker whistles it cooks as soft as a mousse. The taste differentiator is the sweetness in gourd and the soft texture.


3. Vegetable: Garlic
We had grown this vegetable in a very small part of the farm for one season only, but the quality and produce it gave was sufficient for four families for a year! The early harvested green garlic was so strongly fragrant that even a small slice gives out a wonderful aroma to the food. We dried and saved some for the year, and the regular garlic from the market could never match up with this quality. The differentiator here is the aroma and strong flavour; if you cut the organic garlic with your bare hands, the smell lingers on longer; each pod is really fleshy and most importantly the aroma is much stronger. The taste is much more flavourful and you realise that even by just adding a small quantity of it in your food.


4. Vegetable: Capsicum, bell pepper, chilli-pepper
The organic form of this vegetable was very different in size from the regular market one. The physical differentiator is that the organic version is smaller in size with more contours on the skin. The capsicum was very fleshy with less seeds in it. The taste differentiator was its strong and fleshy taste. The skin of pepper was neither too hard, nor too shrunk. Even after cooking it retained its structure, even though it was well cooked, and gave out its juices in each bite.


5. Vegetable: Potato
I have never paid much attention to potato because I used to think they taste good only when mixed with some other vegetable or with fried with oil/ghee. But the organic potatoes are different, they do have a taste and they also did not grow large in size, except for a couple of them, mostly grew in the size of about a table-tennis ball. I did everything to them - boil, fry, pressure cook, roast, bake etc., especially because we had a good harvest of it weekly :) The texture again is much smoother and though I cannot explain in words, the taste of it but for those who would know, it tasted pretty close to the red-potato variety available in USA.