We all are aware of organic farming, organic food and the reasons to choose it over other food. However, we still go and buy regular groceries and life goes on without realizing what we are missing in life. So to share with you all, I would like to highlight some of the major experiences my tastebuds had with organic food and how differentiating it was from regular food in the market. And we grow them at a personal farm, which is not a rocket-science (and I mention it here to encourage people to take it up)
1. Vegetable: The eggplant, aubergine, melongene, brinjal or guinea squash
I have cooked this vegetable in various ways- bharta, thin slices fried with potatoes and fried slices with curd-curry leaves mix. The biggest differentiator is the number and quality of seeds inside the brinjal. In an organic variety you will find very fine and soft seeds which are extremely less in number. Also the texture of the vegetable is so sweet and soft that it gives you the taste of what a brinjal should be. It is neither tasteless nor rough and blends well to give out its natural juice.
2. Vegetable: bottle gourd, opo squash or long melon
This vegetable, if fresh, is definitely soft to poke with your nails and has a light green color. The physical differentiator is of-course the seeds inside the gourd, which are softer and sweet to eat even in raw form. The white part of the gourd is more in a fresher variety and it is extremely fleshy. Upon cooking this, the organic variety will cook faster with more water oozing out of it and in two-three pressure cooker whistles it cooks as soft as a mousse. The taste differentiator is the sweetness in gourd and the soft texture.
3. Vegetable: Garlic
We had grown this vegetable in a very small part of the farm for one season only, but the quality and produce it gave was sufficient for the garlic requirements of almost four families. The green early harvested varieties are so strongly fragrant and even a small slice of it gives out wonderful aroma to the food. We even dried and saved some for the year but the market’s regular garlic could never match up with this quality. The differentiator here in organic variety is if you cut with your bare hands, the smell lingers on longer, each pod is much more fleshy and most importantly the aroma is much more stronger in this case. Also, the taste it gives to the food is a lot more tastier by just adding a small quantity of it.
4. Vegetable: Capsicum, bell pepper, chilli-pepper
The organic form of this vegetable was a lot different in size from the regular market one. It is smaller in size with more contours on the skin. The capsicum was very fleshy with less seeds in it. The taste differentiator in chinese, as well as regular indian recipes, was that strong and fleshy taste of capsicum. This taste was more pronounced when cooked with garlic and onions together. Also the skin of pepper was neither too hard, nor too shrunk. Even after cooking it retained its structure, even though it was well cooked, and gave out its juices in each bite.
5. Vegetable: Potato
I have never paid much attention to potato because I used to think they taste good only when mixed with some other vegetable or with fried with oil/ghee. But the organic potatoes are different, they do have a taste and they also did not grow large in size, except for a couple of them, mostly grew in the size of about a table-tennis ball. I tried cooking them in boiled, fried, pressure cooked, roasted, baked etc. all different ways, especially cause we had a good harvest of it weekly 
The texture again is much smoother and though I cannot explain in words, the taste of it but for those who would know, it tasted pretty close to the red-potato variety I tasted in USA.
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Tags: brinjal, cooking, food, garlic, organic, potato, tomato
