I want to breed a cooking carrot, or perhaps two types of it. The motivation came from a chef colleague who asked me: Malte, can you get carrots that have more taste and are not just sweet? He found most carrots are too dull.
I wonder whether this is because of the general trend in plant breeding to focus on sweetness, not have so many other nutrients (flavor) and of course also breed for volume and productivity (sometimes equals high water content). My assumption is many carrots have been developed to also be used as raw, snack carrots. Good snack carrot donât necessarily make good cooking carrots.
Taste: Highly aromatic, lots of carrot flavor and also other notes. Can be sweet, but not just sweet, and some bitterness is okay, if it makes the flavor more interesting.
As for shape, it might make sense to divide it into two different types:
Blanching carrot. These are the types you would serve whole or halved. Shapes can be all kinds - long, thin, conical, blocky etc. (think Danvers, Chantenay, Nantaise types).
2023
I grew an assortment of named varieties. We did a taste selection with the students and I picked out the best ones to grow for seed the next year.
I grew a carrot grex from @Logan together with various named varieties again. My seed from the carrot in 2023 also came to seed. That grex I mixed with Viviâs grex as well as another colleagueâs own grex, all of them about 7 different varieties each crossed, into a supergrex which we distributed at Future Heirloom.
I am now distributing this grex within the Danish seed saver association, which is otherwise mostly focused on inbred heirlooms. I picked a name for the grex, because names are an important boundary in those communities. The association has a few members that have grown more diverse varieties through the years, among them some of Josephâs landraces, and I think of these members as crucial bridges.You can read about the supergrex here in the database of the association (in Danish).
At that event we also did a carrot tasting with those carrot grexes as well as some carrots from various participants (people were invited to bring with them good carrots). I saved the best scoring roots to grow to seed.
Here are some images from the pumpkin tasting that same day:
The roots I grew this year was mostly seeded from the Future Heirloom Supergrex. I grew 60 m2 in a nutrient poor, sandy loam soil. I could use a sprinkler for germination and drip irrigation during the drought in summer. I didnât fertilize the soil, which was already pretty poor in nutrients. We weeded once in the beginning of germination and a selective weeding after weeds started competing more. Otherwise, the carrot would have to fend for themselves.
I dug up around 200 carrots and made the students do a visual selection first (size, damage from carrot fly, uniform taproot). We got that down to 40 roots. Here are some of them:
The roots that made it had an overweight of conical shapes, which Iâm happy with as they can be developed both into the âHuge cooking carrotsâ as well as the more varied âBlanching carrotâ.
From the 40 roots, I cut thin slices and steamed those for 5 minutes. Put them on trays and then we did a tasting. Here are some of the tasting tables.
The students score each root 1-10 and possibly note down taste, consistency, overall impression. I use those qualitative data to get an idea of what they like and sometimes new ideas pop up when we have conversation about the results.
I love reading your breeding stories, Malte! The kitchen being as important as the garden.
Looking at your last few photos, are you replanting those carrot stumps for seed? I thought they had to be much longer. Do you mind explaining your process for replanting the selected carrots? (Storage, timing, etc)
So far, Iâve only been selecting mine visually, storing them in the fridge and replanting in the spring but Iâd like to find a better way.
Looking at your last few photos, are you replanting those carrot stumps for seed? I thought they had to be much longer. Do you mind explaining your process for replanting the selected carrots? (Storage, timing, etc)
Yes, Iâll replant those stumps for going to seed. Obviously, the larger storage organ you have, the more energy for producing a big umbellifer with lots of flowers. If I was tasting alone or only with a few people, I could shave off less of the root. It will be enough to get the plant going and it will also make new fibrous roots to power the flower shoot, so enough to get seed.
My process after the tasting is normally to just plant the roots where they will grow next year. Most winters here are mild enough that most carrots seem to survive. Perhaps a few will die, but generally, I havenât had any problems as long as the soil is free-draining.
Last year I stored them in buckets filled with sand in a shed that is frost-free. I place the roots correct way down so I allow the root to set a top shoot early in the season if it wants to. I will do the same this year too, so I can decide where to have my seed bed in the spring. When I get the time in early spring, I then plant them out.
I was today years old when I learned this top cutting re-rooting/growing carrot trick! <insert cosmic brain expanding and bursting into luminescent stars gif here>. Like whuuuuu? I used to do that all the time planting piña in the tropics - I never thought to do this with rooting crops like carrots! I imagine celeriac may also prove worthy to this end? Beets? Are there others?!? Errrr merrr gerrrrd. I only just began to earnestly plant carrots (my daughter, it turns out loves them boiled and then with sea salt and butter). My world just got quite a bit better and quite a bit more interesting. Thank you for sharing!
Yes, most root crops in my climate can be taste sampled and replanted. With umbellifers, they usually have a taproot and can be treated like carrots. Celeriac should be obvious also (cut at the root end and save the top end). Beets are the same. Sunchokes many people know root from fragments. Potatoes are commonly divided to make more clones (and usually you have more than one tuber!).
Perhaps itâs already in the named varieties you trialled, but from what Iâve read the variety âRodelikaâ should be especially tasty and very orange (carotenes!). I want to try it myself as well next year. It does have a lower yield (in KG/hectare) than most modern commercial carrot varieties, however in research from the Louis Bolk institute in the Netherlands it was found to have a much higher dry matter content (16,8%) and when compensated for that scores the same in dry matter/hectare then commercial ones. But then with a much better taste!
This not only genetics, but also (maybe even mostly in most cases) about care and conditions that make them grow more watery than under normal cultivation. I also suspect some varieties might respond better grown this way, but under more normal conditions might make similar dry matter content as some âbetter tastingâ varieties. There must be some relation to size of the variety, but that might not be huge overall.
I believe this paradox is not applicable to all species. The same article I read that had the info about the Rodelika carrot also states that for example zucchini and parsnips will combine high yield with great taste and high dry matter content all together. But with carrots and indeed pumpkins this doesnât seem the case.
But as Jesse accurately states, care and growing conditions also matter. Take the same variety of a species and grow it in different fields and the nutritional value can differ quite a lot. Iâve seen examples of things like copper or zinc content being more than double or even quadruple the amount just by be grown by a different organic farmer. So taking good care of your soil and plants is perhaps equally or even more important then genetics alone. But for the best quality food you will need both of course.
I had an idea for a name today. In Danish, we have an expression. âSpille Kong gulerodâ (Play King carrot) is something you can say to someone that is coming across as having a bit too high self-regard and arrogance. Usually said in a joking and teasing way. I think âKong gulerodâ (King carrot) could be a fun name for a huge cooking carrot. And I do not mind the negative associations. It will keep me accountable that the carrot would need to be really tasty so as not to become object of the obvious ridicule that it is just trying to impress but actually is just hot air. I like contradictions like that. Most of all it is just an old expression worthy of receiving.
Harvested about 500 roots and saved the best, about 60-70 roots, from visual criteria. Forgot to take picture of the ones we saved. Weâll use those for a tasting at an event where up to 200 guests will come and at the entrance will be met with a long line of carrots to taste and score. Looking forward to select the winners from that day!
Here are two boxes of the ones we visually selected against. The students like to use these cute baby roots.
