Last week’s YOUR PRODUCE MAN’S PRODUCE PUZZZZLE still dealt with Spring fruits and vegetables: What makes a “New Potato?” Most people consider a “New Potato” to be a Red or White Potato. For the most part, that’s true. However, a “new potato” is any potato that is “newly” dug. New Potatoes are potatoes that go straight from being dug to being packed and sold. That refers to Reds and Whites. They are not known as a “storage” potato like the Russet. You see, the Russets will all be harvested in August and September and then stored for sale through the Fall, Winter, Spring and into the Summer. For Reds and Whites, you find them grown and harvested throughout the year. You won’t find them “stored” as long as the Russet, making them “New Potatoes.” This week's YOUR PRODUCE MAN’S PRODUCE PUZZZZLE deals with Spring fruits and vegetables: What Spring Mushroom has a larger crop following a forest fire? See next week's "Fresh Tips" for the answer.

Horseradish Root, used as one of the Bitter Herbs during Passover.

GRANNY SMITH APPLES, HORSERADISH (Monday, April 25): Yesterday, Passover began. And for many, that means a special menu and diet for the next week. There are many ingredients to the proper Passover celebration. Taking place the first 2 nights of the 8-day holiday, the Seder is the most important event of the Passover celebration. Usually gathering the whole family and friends together, the Seder is steeped in long held traditions and customs. Leading up to the first night of the Passover, the home is cleansed and cleared of all yeast foods, called “hametz.” All hametz is either eaten before Passover begins or “sold” to non-Jewish neighbors and friends. Only foods that are “Kosher for Passover” are allowed for the celebration. No leavened foods or grains are eaten. This is to commemorate the Israelites who fled quickly into the desert with no time for their breads to rise and were forced to bake the dough into hard crackers in the desert sun. All foods prohibited during Passover must be disposed of the morning of the first night of Passover. The heart of the Passover table is the Seder plate. It holds the symbolic foods eaten during this ritual meal, which tells the story of the Jews' exodus from slavery to freedom. The Seder plate contains the 5 foods that remind Jews of the struggle of the Israelites in their quest and journey to freedom. The Seder plate includes Haroseth, Parsley dipped in salt water, Roasted Egg, Shank Bone and Bitter Herbs. The Bitter Herbs, a symbol of the bitterness of slavery, usually consist of grated Horseradish. The word "horse" (as applied in "horseradish") is believed to denote large size and coarseness. "Radish" comes from the Latin “radix” meaning root. Horseradish, a member of the mustard family, is native to eastern Europe, and it may have originated in Asia, Germany, or the Mediterranean area. It has been used for so long, that no one knows for sure when and where it originated. The ancient Greeks used it, so did the Jews in their exodus from Egypt in 1500 BC. It is one of the 5 bitter herbs of the Jewish Passover. It was originally used for medicinal purposes. Horseradish was used to produce Horseradish ale in the 17th century. The bite and aroma of the horseradish root are almost absent until it is grated or ground. During this process, as the root cells are crushed, volatile oils known as isothiocyanate are released. Vinegar stops this reaction and stabilizes the flavor. For milder horseradish, vinegar is added immediately. An estimated 24 million pounds of horseradish roots are processed annually in the U.S. to produce 6 million gallons of prepared horseradish. Horseradish has also been known as 'redcole' and 'stingnose.' The bite and aroma of the horseradish root are almost absent until it is grated or ground. During this process, as the root cells are crushed, volatile oils known as isothiocyanate are released. Vinegar stops this reaction and stabilizes the flavor. For milder horseradish, vinegar is added immediately. Horseradish roots are available year round but are plentiful during the fall and early spring. Buy roots that are hard avoiding sprouting, greenish tinges, blemishes, and shriveling. Store these roots in plastic bags and refrigerate up to a week or freeze grated root in an airtight container for several months. Scrub the root and peel the brown skin. Finely grate or food process the root. There are some great uses of Horseradish. Use horseradish as you would ground black pepper. Grate fresh horseradish on your vegetable side dishes, seafood, and meats. Stir grated horseradish into your favorite mashed root vegetables. Add this root to spice up your soups and stews.

Symbolic of the mortar and bricks that the enslaved Jews used to build the pharaoh’s cities, this sweet food is delicious.

A Seder plate, used during the Passover celebration

To relish the full flavor of processed horseradish, it must be fresh and of high quality. Color varies from white to creamy beige. As processed horseradish ages, it browns and loses potency. Replace with a fresh jar for full flavor enjoyment. Varieties of prepared horseradish include Cream Style Prepared Horseradish, Horseradish Sauce, Beet Horseradish and Dehydrated Horseradish. Distinguishing characteristics may be ingredients or texture -- fine or coarse ground. The true horseradish enthusiast has several favorites, depending on the end use. Cocktail sauce with prepared horseradish is another winner, and has many uses beyond its usual role, as a flavorful accompaniment for seafood. Mustard with prepared horseradish also adds a rich and spicy zing to cold cuts or hot entrees. Each May, horseradish is feted at the International Horseradish Festival in Collinsville, Illinois. Events include a root toss, a horseradish-eating contest and a horseradish recipe contest. Begun in 1988, the festival was designed to create national awareness for the herb and the area where most of the world’s supply is grown, according to festival organizers. Collinsville and the surrounding area is part of what is known as the American bottoms, a Mississippi river basin area adjacent to St. Louis. Carved-out by the glaciers from the ice age, the soil is rich in potash, a nutrient on which the horseradish thrives. The area grows 60 percent of the world’s supply. German immigrants to the area began growing horseradish in the late 1800s and passed their growing methods from generation to generation. The area’s cold winters provide the required root dormancy and the long summers provide excellent growing conditions. To savor horseradish at its best, here are a couple of tips. First, buy only the amount you will use in a reasonable time. Keep in tightly covered jar in the refrigerator to protect freshness. Serve the desired amount of horseradish in a glass or ceramic bowl (horseradish will tarnish silver). Return unused Horseradish to the tightly closed jar and refrigerate immediately. Horseradish that remains unrefrigerated gradually loses flavor. Now, on to the Haroseth. It’s a mixture of chopped walnuts, wine, cinnamon and apples. The mixture represents the mortar. The chopped apples and nuts look like the clay used by the Jewish slaves in Egypt to make the bricks used in building Pharaoh’s cities. Granny Smith apples are a good apple variety to use for the Haroseth. That’s because the Granny Smith does not discolor or oxidize as quickly as other apple varieties do. You still need to toss the chopped apples with some lemon juice to help minimize oxidation.

Get out the butter! Summer Sweet Corn is here.

In California’s desert, growers harvest their sweet corn at night, before the sun comes up.

CORN (Tuesday, April 26): It’s 8 am in the cornfields of the Coachella Valley. Most corn harvesters have begun their way back to the barn. That’s right. Back to the barn. The Sweet Corn harvest is done for the day. Most Spring corn grown in the Coachella Valley in Southern California, is harvested at night, when temperatures are still quite mild. That means better sugar content. When the sun comes up in the morning, temperatures quickly rise into the 90s and 100s. Hot temperatures turn sugars into starch. New crop corn from the Coachella Valley will be sweet, but also…smaller. In the middle of the summer, ears of corn reach to around 8” in length. Early sweet corn is around 6” in length. Get out the butter! Many years, this Spring crop of Sweet Corn is some of the sweetest corn of the entire year. In fact, my Mom used to stock up on this early Spring corn and freeze it. For the past few months, we have also had sweet corn coming in from Florida, but the California sweet corn means the start of the summer sweet corn season in states around the country. During the winter and spring months, most of America’s sweet corn comes from Florida or Mexico. In Florida, several main growing regions include Sarasota County. For fresh sweet corn, there are actually three different types. There is sweet corn, enhanced sweet corn and supersweet corn. What is the difference? Whatever the sweet corn, the best way is to use it quickly. For every day you don’t eat the corn, more sugars in the corn have turned to starch. You want to literally watch corn grow? One Iowa farmer has set up CornCam so you can do just that. More than just boil, there is a world of corn recipes available.

April is Florida Tomato Month.

TOMATOES (Thursday, April 28): April is Florida Tomato Month. This time of year, our tomatoes will be coming from one of two main growing regions: Florida and Mexico. This has been a very unusual year, however. Florida tomatoes started very late, about a month late, because of August and September hurricanes. Now, at the end of the season, Mexico is having trouble. During their winter season, most of Mexico’s growing region had very unseasonable cold and wet weather. That has led to a very quick end to the Mexican season. In fact, their season is ending about 3 – 4 weeks earlier than normal. The last harvest of the Mexican crop is also seeing some quality issues and yield issues. The rains produce more plant disease and increases insect populations, which also damage crops. We have seen some internal and external discoloration of Mexican fruit. We are also seeing some solidity problems with the Roma crop. Most of that rain in Mexico also swept into California, which caused delays in planting the desert Spring crop. In normal years, California crops can begin as early as the end of April or the first of May. This year, domestic supplies from California, because of the late planting, will have a late start in harvest, almost 2 – 4 weeks later than normal, pushing the crop back to mid-to-late May. Expect more up and down supplies and quality through the Spring. Remember to store your tomatoes with the stem end up. And never in a million years should you refrigerate your unripe tomato.

Cold kills flavor. It stops the ripening process. Once a tomato is FULLY ripened, you can then refrigerate it, but really not more than just a few days. Also, the chemicals in a tomato that make up its flavor, will dissipate within 15 minutes when you cut into the tomato. Therefore, slice your tomato just before you use them. This time of year can make you see red concerning tomatoes, but this year seems to be even more magnified in quality and supply issues. And don't expect the picture to improve much until mid-to-late May. March and April tend to be tougher months anyway for tomatoes, particularly with vine-ripe tomatoes. But because of weather problems at the wrong time, little problems have become big ones, and it's affecting supplies and quality. Right now, Florida tomato production is in Southeastern Florida, but is moving into the Immokolee region. Growers there are telling us they are at least two weeks behind schedule, and their first set of fruit was much lighter than normal. Florida, this time of year, supplies about 50% of the nation's tomatoes, mostly to the mid-west and east coast. Unseasonable rain is affecting the quality of fruit being harvested right now in Mexico, causing some pitting, discoloration and blotchiness to the tomato. By early-to-mid May, Baja growers should be in harvest of vine-ripes, followed in June by Southern California growers in Oceanside, Irvine and San Clemente. Until then, be sure to store your tomatoes correctly, and that means NOT in your refrigerator. Tomato is not your ordinary vegetable. In fact, it is a fruit, a subtropical fruit at that. Cold kills ripening and kills flavor. Cold temperatures from your refrigerator will break down the molecular structure of the tomato, causing it to soften, and it destroys the chemical reaction of the 23 volatile chemicals, which make up the tomato's flavor. And kills the flavor. You can refrigerate a fully ripened tomato, but for no more than a few days. Tomatoes are versatile, used in many styles of recipes and in cooking methods. And they are being recognized for their health benefits. Don't lose heart, just be creative to get the most out of your tomatoes. Throughout the 1980's and early 90's, Tomatoes have been seen more as a disease fighter. Most of the attention concerned carotenoids as cancer-fighters centered around beta-carotene. The results were promising at first, but gradually it became clear that with the more than 500 carotenoids found in plants, the picture was much more complex. Just as the role of beta-carotene in cancer fighting was called into serious question; the carotenoid lycopene became the rising star. Lycopene, one of nature's most powerful antioxidants, is found almost exclusively in tomatoes. Following is a summary of the promising lycopene research conducted during the past few years. Lycopene entered the spotlight in 1995 with published studies from Harvard University identifying a positive association between intake of tomatoes and tomato-based foods and diminished risk of prostate cancer in a group of 48,000 health professionals followed over a six-year period. Their findings suggested that the antioxidant lycopene, present in high concentration in tomatoes, was a protection against prostate cancer. Furthermore, they found that other dietary antioxidants, including beta-carotene, were unrelated to prostate cancer risk reduction. In a similar observational study in Italy, where tomatoes are a mainstay of the diet, it was found that tomatoes had been consumed in significantly lower quantities b a group of subjects suffering from colorectal and other digestive tract cancers than by the healthy control group. Laboratory studies in Israel suggest that lycopene may protect against additional types of cancer. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel found significantly fewer mammary tumors in rats receiving a tomato-based, lycopene-enriched supplement, whereas those receiving additional beta-carotene showed no protection against the development of mammary cancer. In addition, in vitro (test tube) studies showed that lycopene significantly inhibited the growth of human endometrial, mammary and lung cancer cells. Lycopene was also found to suppress in vitro the effects of cancer-causing agents found in broiled or grilled meats. There may also be an association between heart health and tomatoes. In a study conducted by University of North Carolina scientists, the fat samples drawn from both heart attack sufferers and healthy controls were analyzed for lycopene and other carotenoids. They found significantly more lycopene in the fat of the controls than the heart patients. Not surprisingly, the diet of the control group was also higher in tomato products leading the researchers to conclude that a lycopene-rich diet may have protected them against heart disease. A second study is underway to determine whether lycopene might also protect against oxidative damage to lung tissue that leads to cancer. The method of preparing tomatoes seems to have an affect on lycopene absorption. In a study in Dusseldorf, Germany, researchers found that the lycopene blood levels were higher in subjects after ingestion of a heat-processed tomato product than when uncooked tomatoes were consumed. Apparently the heat disrupts the cell structure of the tomato, making lycopene more readily available. Adding a small amount of fat during the preparation of a tomato dish seems also to be beneficial. The fat "dissolves" lycopene, allowing more of it to be absorbed into the bloodstream. This supports the findings of the Harvard studies where consumption of heated tomato products seemed to correlate better with reduced risk of prostate cancer than did uncooked tomatoes and tomato juice. At a recent symposium on lycopenes in New York City, several speakers cautioned against extracting lycopene or any other compound from tomatoes and administering it separately to obtain the benefits. Tomatoes are also a rich source of vitamins, mineral, carotenoids, and other phytochemicals that are most likely working together to help protect against cancer and other degenerative diseases.

We’re transitioning from southern growing regions of Yuma, to northern regions in Salinas.

LETTUCE (Friday, April 29): Three years ago, America was still paying near record prices for lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and celery. That was a result of two months of much colder than normal temperatures in the desert growing regions around Yuma, Arizona. Cold temperatures greatly slowed growth and reduced harvest times by about 40%. This winter, the Arizona growing region had a lot more rain than normal. In fact, they had about 60 days of rain…about 59 days more than normal. That caused quite a bit of growing and harvesting problems, but growers were able to keep fairly steady supplies. However, this time of year, we are transitioning from those southern growing regions, to more northern growing regions in California, from Oxnard to Salinas. This winter, January and February rains brought a lot of water to these northern growing regions. And that delayed the planting of our Spring crops. When fields are wet, you can’t get tractors in to level the fields and plant the crops. This delayed planting, and whenever you delay the planting cycle, you also disrupt the harvest cycle. We are going to see “pot holes” of supplies throughout the Spring. The “pot holes” are created by the rain pattern in January and February. It would rain a couple of days, keeping farmers out of the fields. A few clear days would get planting activity going again. Then more rains would halt the planting. This cycle throughout the winter will now mean “holes” or gaps in supply. They won’t be huge, but they be a nuisance, just like pot holes in the road. There will be some ups and downs in supply and quality as we move fully into harvests in Salinas. We’ve talked with many growers who say they are seeing a lot more “brown” in the valley, an indication that not all fields got planted for the Spring crop. We’re not expecting huge supply gaps, but they will be problematic right through May. Growers in Salinas are also concerned about an early explosion of insect populations. You see, the heavy rains caused grasses to grow taller surrounding the Salinas Valley. Those tall grasses breed larger populations of insects. As warm weather hits, those tall grasses will quickly wither and brown. The insects will then look for greener pastures, and they will find them in the lettuce fields of Salinas.

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