Baby Vegetables Pass Grown-ups’ Taste Test

Don’t be afraid to buck popular opinion by admitting an affinity for vegetables, those healthy things that made you gag as a child. In this state where living is defined by the latest trend, baby carrots are in.

Conventional vegetables haven’t lost their flavor; the babies just have that much more, grower Craig Underwood says.

“It’s sort of like comparing veal to beef,” Underwood said in his office in this Ventura County town. “Part of it is what your eyes tell you and part of it is what your nose and mouth tell you.”

Although Underwood maintains that baby carrots are the hottest of the little vegetables, he’s not averse to raising baby Japanese eggplant, baby gold turnips or baby red pear tomatoes, among others.

California growers have been raising specialty crops only within the last 10 years or so in the face of increased foreign and domestic competition with conventional fruits and vegetables.

Specialty crops are unusual fruits and vegetables, such as a cherimoya, baby kohlrabi or fuyu fruit, items which haven’t been produced and sold in mass quantities. The crops require intensive hand labor and shrewd marketing skills, Underwood said.

Underwood’s family has been farming in Ventura County since the late 1800s. In his great-grandfather’s time, farming was a romantic avocation. Today it’s big business.

“It isn’t enough to till the soil anymore,” Underwood said. “You have to know how and where you’re going to sell your crops.”

Before Underwood entered the baby vegetable business three years ago, he tested the market in the microcosm of the family produce stand.

On a given day, locals have their pick of purple and pink Easter egg radishes, baby French carrots, baby leeks, and baby white Japanese turnips piled high in baskets at the roadside stand.

“They saw baby vegetables have really good flavor and really good looks, and it wasn’t something you could find in normal channels,” Underwood said.

The 36 commodities since developed by the ranch are sold most often in metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Washington, New Orleans and Montreal.

Restaurants are the biggest buyers of baby vegetables, although supermarket chains have picked up on the trend, said Jefferson Lowe, Underwood’s marketing director.

Metropolitan residents are more likely than those who live elsewhere in the country to cook with baby vegetables, but the majority of shoppers would have no idea what to do with a baby kohlrabi if they saw one, Lowe said. (A baby kohlrabi is a small cabbage that looks like a turnip.)

“Everyone looks at a baby turnip and they think it’s from outer space,” he said. “Curiosity will take you only so far, then you have to figure out what to do with it.”

Lowe has tried to interest stores in supplying recipes at baby vegetable displays. The company has promoted baby vegetables as snacks, salads or hors d’oeuvres, such as baby Easter egg radishes garnished with black and golden caviar.

Underwood often fills custom orders, hand-picked at the buyer’s request.

Lowe won’t reveal any of the company’s growing techniques, calling them trade secrets.

“It’s like going to a defense contractor and asking how to build an F-16,” he said.

Some growers plant baby vegetables close together, which forces them to compete for nutrients, and they grow smaller as a result, said Ron Voss, director of the cooperative extension program at the University of California, Davis.

Growers also plant seeds that produce smaller vegetables and tend to harvest them before they’re fully grown, he said.