vegetables

It started with a century-old carrot soup I wouldn’t eat. It ended with three sauces. In between: how beta-carotene is locked inside carrot cells, why oil alone doesn’t unlock it, and why there’s no single healthiest way to cook carrots. Plus three sauces where nutrition and flavor meet.

I was hunting for a quick alternative to sauerkraut for a sandwich class when something possessed me to stew red cabbage in pineapple juice. What came out wasn't just a magical flavor — it was an unexpectedly vivid violet, almost ultramarine. Not pink, which is what the textbook chemistry predicts. So I brought the mystery to Claude, and we went digging together: through copigmentation, pectin, and two follow-up experiments that taught me the color was never really the point.