The Kindest Cut

Preparing various dishes recently has brought home how the way vegetables are cut affects their taste.

That's something most cooks will be aware of as regards garlic - whole it gives a mild and deep flavour, sliced thinly it is somehow sharper, smashed beneath a blade it's pungent and fiery.

But it applies to certain other foodstuffs too, for example raw beetroot: grated it seems sweeter by far than when it is cut into the old pound-coin slices which emphasize its earthy side, and made into tiny matchsticks (I have a device like a peeler with teeth that is a faff, but safer than a mandoline) the flavour is halfway between those two.

I am not sure if this is some chemical effect, like what happens with the crushing of the garlic, or perception, or how surface area to weight influences what we taste (grated you maximize the surface area). Something to bear in mind when making up salads though. My wife this morning took to work something on the sweet side, grated beetroot and apple, a boiled egg cut up, and walnuts, dressed with Helmann's.

The apple beet and egg were all home grown, sadly not the walnuts, though one day... We planted a tree here when we arrived in 2000, and it is at the very start of giving nuts now. One last year (one) and two this, all nicked by squirrels, the bastards. They didn't get our cobnuts this year though, I tried one this morning - sweet as a etc. Some of them will be in another salad tomorrow, cut into small pieces and mixed with cheese, diced apple and the thinnest slices of raw courgette. Diced apple is apple-ier than the supersweet grated flesh, sliced courgette is nutty, to blend with the cobnuts.

I think about food too much.