The Art of the Pick: A Chef's Guide to the Produce Aisle (Special Seasonal Edition - The Anatomy of a Pumpkin, Carving Safety & Scratch Kitchen Mastery)
Every October, I stand near the giant cardboard bins outside the grocery store and watch grown adults commit the exact same crime against botany. Someone walks up to a mountain of pumpkins, grabs a twenty-pound gourd directly by the stem like they’re picking up a bowling ball or a briefcase, yanks it out of the pile, hears a sickening snap , looks at the detached stem in their hand, shrugs, and tosses the broken pumpkin into their cart anyway. Then—to really double down on the madness—they buy that massive, hollow, watery field pumpkin thinking they’re going to carve half of it and bake a pie out of the other half. Stop grabbing pumpkins by the stem. And please, for the love of good food, stop trying to cook with a twenty-pound front-porch jack-o'-lantern. A pumpkin stem is not a luggage handle. It is the literal vascular seal keeping bacteria, mold spores, and oxygen from rotting the fruit from the inside out. The second you snap that stem off, you’ve pulled the pin on a biologica...