And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.
Cucumbers. I think cucumbers will dissociate into cucumber atoms if you cook them.
Ah, that’s one of the very few vegetables I don’t like (cooked or raw), so I can’t speak to that.
Celery is a weird case. Raw celery has lots of texture, but almost no flavor. Cooked celery has lots of flavor, but almost no texture. Both are indispensable, but in completely different applications (can you imagine chicken soup without celery?). They’re best treated as two different foodstuffs.
Really fresh asparagus, like, cut it and immediately convey it to your mouth, is very nice raw, imho.
And just how long have you been waiting to use that, huh?
(Well played)
I’ll nominate strawberries. While they are just fine as jam, they don’t seem to do well cooked otherwise, like on a fruit tart. A good batch of strawberries is best eaten raw.
Fresh strawberries are surprisingly effective in savory applications, like a spinach salad with thin sliced beef and bleu cheese and a balsamic vinaigrette. Plus walnuts for texture.
I guess that’s funny.
You are right 98% of the time. Believe it or not, I’ve had flavorful dragonfruit, on exceeding rare occasion. (It helps to live in tropical places where you can always get it, so I’ve had it more than most people.)
One of life’s memorably disappointing moments is tasting dragonfruit for the first time.
I love grilled peaches as a dessert. I buy very unripe peaches intentionally because I can grill the heck out of them and they become intensely sweet.
I also like baked apples. We have apple bakers; just core the apple and stuff it with peanut butter/brown sugar/raisins/honey/pecans/whatever.
Starfruit is similarly disappointing. It has some flavor, but about as much as the least-flavorful apple you’ve ever eaten.
And an “apple baker” is just a piece of aluminum foil and a campfire.
Peaches are great no matter what you do to them. Maybe apricots, too, but I haven’t had apricot pie, yet.
Their only point in existing is to look good in slices on long drinks. But don’t eat the slice, the drink is better.
Heh, ours are beautiful ceramic(?) pieces made by an artisan with a pottery shop in Smicksburg, PA (a largely Amish community).
Our friend Richard and his wife Lourdes run a restaurant called Gutside near Friar’s Bay in St Martin. Every meal comes with a slice of starfruit as a garnish. It is delicious when picked perfectly ripe. Richard has several trees on his land and is extremely careful to pick only the ripe fruit. He believes starfruit has medicinal properties.
This the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread.
I’m the opposite. Raw apples upset my stomach. I only like cooked apples, and I like them quite a bit.
Green beans do well with a long stew. Like I like them cooked for an hour plus in a tomato sauce. (Or in a slow cooker for like 4-6 hours.) I’m not a big fan of green beans raw nor lightly cooked, but stewed into sweet softness they are absolutely delectable. Here’s a similar recipe to what I use, though this one is only for 45 minutes. I tend to go 1-1.5 hrs.
Lima beans never want to come out of the pot - the longer they stew (hopefully, with a big chunk of ham thrown in there), the better they got. <— truly pathetic rhyme.
In my opinion, the common white mushroom Agaricus bisporus, the crimini/cremini/baby bella mushroom (same species but brown because of exposure to light) and the portobello/portobella mushroom (same species but allowed to grow larger) all have better flavor and texture raw than cooked. I’ll still eat them if they’re lightly cooked but it’s very easy to overcook and ruin them. There are several other mushroom species are better cooked than raw.
Cabbage.