Lifestyles Ideas Management - To the bitter end

It is a brand new day today of the new year 2008. I woke up late and what a rush! but it will be another year of living life one day at a time and taking one step at a time.

The title - To the bitter end is not about bitter life, it is about the bitter end of cucumber.

Hope you will enjoy reading this!

I always been puzzled by the bitter end of cucumber, and I always cut the huge chunk of the top end off and rub the cut bits against each other to prevent the cucumber from tasting bitter. Rubbing the cut cucumber ends to remove bitterness is virtually a worldwide practice. However, it is an old wives’ tale, as you can see by tasting the white froth formed at the cut, and then the cucumber –neither is bitterer than the other. The rubbing technique may date back to Victorian notions of toxic elements in cucumber juice. Cucumber bitterness varies from plant to plant, fruit to fruit (they are fruits) and season to season. It is not certain exactly what makes some fruit bitterer than others, though growing climate probably plays a part.

If a cucumber is bitter at all, it will almost certainly be bitterer at the stem end, which can be identified by the indented scar where the stem broker off. Also, the bitter compounds (called cucurbitacins) only accumulate just under the skin and around the seeds, not in the flesh, and so the bitterness can easily be removed by peeling and deseeding the fruit. The Japanese species of cucumber which is a long and the body with spikes poking out, I do not find these bitter at the end. Choose those with body with spikes which is the test of freshness.