How to check if a vegetable is bitter without eating it I want to know if my cucumber or ridge gourd is bitter before cooking, but for some reason, I can't eat or smell a slice of it to check. Is there any other way to check its bitterness?
(I'm hoping that there will be another way, for how else would factories that produce bulk food products use cucumbers or ridge gourds unless they have an army of workers whose job is to eat slices of each cucumber :-))
For cucumbers in particular, it's quite interesting.
Commercial growers use F1 hybrid varieties that produce only female flowers, and grow them in green houses or polytunnels, or under netting.
The reason for this is that in many cucumber varieties, the fruit from pollinated flowers is bitter; from unpollinated flowers it isn't. Picking reasonably early and ensuring even watering also helps.
When growing traditional and outdoor varieties you can remove the male flowers (identifiable by the stalk behind them) to avoid pollination, or buy all-female F1 varieties - but neither approach will help if there are male flowers growing nearby.